What is content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is a sub-discipline of marketing

Marketing functions practicing content marketing create resources like blog posts, reports, magazines, whitepapers and videos to share their expertise with and inspire prospects and customers.

For context and comparison, other disciplines include email marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, PR, website, and app design.

The point of content marketing

The idea with content marketing is that by helping your audience solve particular pain points relevant to your business’s offering you build brand trust, likability and respect, nurturing prospects or customers towards a particular goal.

Thought leadership, industry research, opinion pieces, and non-product related how-to content all fall into this discipline and should be steered by your content marketing strategy.

Defining the bigger picture

The content marketing strategy is the bigger picture behind your efforts – the how and the why. It defines the specific objectives, target audience and pain points to be targeted by a content marketing program, as well as the types of content to be created. It outlines the distribution plan for what’s created, and the metrics used to measure the success of activities.

Your content marketing strategy document steers the ship, keeping the many spinning plates of a content program focused and aligned.