A content strategy framework is a plan that covers your content goals, target audience, and tactics for creating and distributing your content. In two 2020 reports, the Content Marketing Institute found that successful B2C and B2B companies had a documented content marketing strategy—53% of B2C companies and 69% of B2B companies.

So how can a content strategy framework benefit you and how can you create one? We’ll walk you through the ins and outs of a content framework, plus how to use a content production tool like GatherContent to help you improve your content’s engagement and efficiency

What is a content strategy framework?

A content strategy framework is an outline that tells you:

• Why you’re creating content
• How you’re creating content
• Who you’re creating content for
• Who completes which tasks to create content
• What editorial process, key performance indicators (KPIs), distribution channels, and other aspects are part of your content marketing

This should be a repeatable process that helps you set guidelines and craft content in a consistent manner. The goal of a good content strategy framework is to create high-quality pieces of content time after time.

Why do you need a content strategy framework?

Without a content strategy framework, you lose the roadmap that tells you what to do in order to reach and engage your target audience throughout your inbound marketing funnel. A lack of strategy also leads to inefficient content production, metrics tracking, and distribution.

A content strategy framework helps you consistently deliver engaging content to your audience. It also adds consistency to your internal production, since you can use a successful content strategy framework over and over again. If you need to create content for a different audience, simply take your framework and adjust it for their needs and pain points.

Along with consistently delivering engaging, high-quality content to your audience, your content framework also makes it much easier to train team members. A documented framework is easier for teammates to reference if they have a question, especially if they provide coverage for a co-worker on vacation.

How to create a content strategy framework

1. Set goals

Your content goals help set the tone for the rest of your content strategy framework. These should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Common goals content marketers focus on include the following:

• Establishing brand awareness
• Generating leads and conversions
• Attracting SEO traffic
• Educating your audience
• Gathering subscribers
• Building customer loyalty

Whatever goals you choose, ensure they contribute toward your overarching business goals. And be sure to go over your goals with your team often so everyone understands how their role contributes to the department’s success.

2. Identify your target audience and personas

Getting to know your target audience and crafting buyer personas is another key element of your content strategy framework. You’ll want to consider both demographics and behaviors when piecing together your personas, and these can include:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Employment status
• Location
• Interests
• What problems they need help solving

You can then group your target audience into different segments based on their interests, subculture, or even how close they are to making a purchase decision.

3. Create your editorial style guide

Developing a brand style guide ensures your content is consistently focused on meeting your audience’s needs. Along with notes on specific grammar and spelling rules, your style guide should cover:

• Voice and tone
• How to format internal and external links
• Optimal size and dimensions for images and videos
• How to cite sources

Once you’ve perfected your style guide, be sure to share it with everyone involved in content production. You should also save it in a well-known spot for easy future access. Adding a link to your style guide in your copy brief template and onboarding documents is a good place to start.

You can also use a content production tool as a single source of truth to keep all your important strategy documents, including your content style guide, in one place.

4. Map out your internal workflow

Your content strategy framework should also detail your internal workflow, or the steps required to complete a content project. Typically, a content creation workflow includes steps such as:

1. Brainstorming
2. Writing a copy brief
3. Creating the first draft
4. Editing
5. Revisions
6. Proofing and fact-checking
7. Building in the CMS
8. QA check
9. Publishing

But while these steps cover most written needs, don’t forget that you may need to involve other people and departments. These could include a designer who creates infographics, social media account managers who need to schedule a post, email marketers who need to build the newsletter, and subject matter experts who need to contribute quotes and ensure information is accurate.

One way to organize your team is to use a roles and responsibilities chart. This helps you pinpoint who needs to be involved in doing what and at what stage of the production process. A content production tool like GatherContent can also help you manage project assignees and ensure everyone knows what they’re accountable for.

5. Audit your content

If this isn’t your first content rodeo, chances are you already have marketing assets published and distributed. If so, it’s important to audit your existing content to determine whether it’s helping you meet your goals—and if not, why.

You should also assess whether your existing content meets your target audience’s needs and whether new types of content could do a better job of helping you hit your goals.

Sometimes it’s more helpful to get outside eyes on your content to help you understand whether it’s successful or not. It’s natural for us to get attached to our work, so a focus group can help you keep your qualitative analysis of your existing efforts unbiased.

A content audit is a key part of a content strategy framework. It tells you:

- If current content meets customer needs

- If you need different types of content

- If your content offers good user experience

What do you look for in your content audits?

6. Implement your content framework

Brainstorm topics and headlines

Use your content goals and target audience’s buyer personas to uncover new topics and headlines that provide solutions to their needs, pain points, and interests.

It also helps to provide a way for your team to regularly contribute new content ideas. Setting up a simple Google Form to collect ideas can help empower even junior members of the team.

Assign content team roles

Remember your internal workflow and roles and responsibilities chart? It’s time to put them to use. With the start of each new project, ensure each person involved understands not only the tasks they’re expected to complete but also what success looks like.

By highlighting what it looks like for your editors, writers, designers, and other roles to succeed, you can help each team member better understand their responsibilities.

You should also encourage transparent collaboration. Rather than slipping a draft into a manila envelope and sending it to their editor via the office version of snail mail, enable your writers to easily collaborate with their editors.

Collaboration within a content management tool like GatherContent can also improve communication between stakeholders who need to sign off on a project, subject matter experts, and even compliance specialists.

Create your content

It’s time to put that internal style guide to work—but don’t wait to use it at the first draft stage. You should also use your style guide to influence your copy brief. (And your buyer personas can provide invaluable information for your copy brief as well.)

Be sure your writers and other team members have access to the style guide and know what they can find there. If edits need to be made, reference the area of the style guide where they can find guidance on that particular issue so they know where to look in the future.

Content templates are another important part of your copy brief and help ensure you publish effective content as well. Implement your style guide directly into templates to ensure there are no miscommunications about expectations or rules. You can also use audience information to tailor your templates specifically for your target personas.

Publish and promote

Once your content’s final draft is approved, it’s time to push it live. This could mean building it in a CMS or posting it to social media. It could also mean uploading it to YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Or it could mean publishing it on all of these channels.

What channels you do decide to publish on likely depends on two things:

1. What channels your audience is active on
2. Whether the format of your content works on that channel

But just because your content may not be ideal to publish on a certain channel doesn’t mean you can’t promote it there. In fact, multi-channel marketing, or promoting your content across multiple channels, has several benefits:

• Reaching more audience members
• Improve the success of retargeting campaigns
• Enable your customers to make a purchase
• Spark more interest in your brand

You should also take your publishing cadence into consideration. You may want to post more on certain platforms than others if the algorithm likes to see more activity. It’s a good idea to plan out your content promotion in an editorial calendar so you can keep an eye on the cadence as well.

Optimize your process

As with any process, you’ll need to constantly reassess your content framework to make sure it’s still optimized for your needs. Content teams grow, goals change, and target audiences develop new characteristics. So it’s key that your content strategy framework evolves with them.

A fully documented content framework helps you make updates as needed. Better yet, a content workflow platform makes it even easier to update your content framework and related documents and processes. (Remember the style guide and internal workflow you created?)

3 Examples of content strategy frameworks

Okay, but where do you start when it comes to crafting your content strategy framework? If you’re still feeling a little lost, try one or more of these examples on for size.

1. Evergreen SEO

With this framework, you’ll want to:

1. Create timeless content that builds links back to your domain.
2. Create content intended to organically rank in search results.
3. Add internal links to help share your domain’s value across multiple pages.

This framework helps boost your website’s domain authority, which can also help your content rank higher in the search engine results. But as with any organic SEO strategy, it takes time and effort.

2. Community building

This framework focuses on engagement, which is built by doing the following:

1. Tailor content to specific channels and audience segments.
2. Respond to and engage with your audience on those channels.
3. Focus on long-term relationships with your audience rather than quick wins like driving sales or capturing leads.

3. McKinsey’s strategic horizons

While the strategic horizons framework was originally created for companies as they mature, it can work for content too. Here’s how we customized the strategic horizons framework for content teams:

• Horizon one: Core topics. These are the topics you’ve already seen success in, and they likely influence your goals and profits.
• Horizon two: Emerging opportunities. Based on competitor research and industry knowledge, what new topics could your content cover that also appeal to your audience?
• Horizon three: Moonshots. Does your team have content ideas that are just out there? What would happen if you got to test one out? You could potentially see huge success, so why not include these moonshot ideas in your content strategy framework to help your team innovate and grow?

GatherContent makes implementing your content framework easy

There’s a lot to juggle when it comes to your content strategy framework, and your first pass at it certainly won’t be your last.

Instead of jumping between Google Docs, spreadsheets, email, and other tools, GatherContent lets you manage each part of your content strategy framework in one single place:

• Your style guide, along with your buyer personas, can easily be referenced right along with your content templates.
• Your workflow is easily assigned out and project statuses are readily visible to anyone on the team—stakeholders included.
• Your content calendar makes it clear which projects are due and when.
• Your content is organized in folders, so auditing doesn’t feel like walking up a mountain.
• Your team can easily collaborate on content as it’s created, ensuring it remains consistent and effective.

Why not take GatherContent for a spin and see how it can boost your team’s productivity (and morale!)?