Even if you already have a content marketing strategy in place, it’s a good idea to revisit it regularly. You need to ensure it still reaches your customers and potential new clients with engaging and helpful content—or update it accordingly if it’s no longer effective.

Once the workflow is in place, you’re probably thinking about how to accelerate your content creation. Download these key insights on how to avoid common content creation challenges as you invest more into your content operations.

Keep reading to learn proven strategies for researching your content creation framework, including a step-by-step guide for putting everything together into a cohesive workflow and plan.

Why do you need a content creation strategy?

Without a content creation framework, hitting your marketing goals becomes an uphill battle.

The benefits of a content creation strategy are proven: 78% of content marketers who believe their content was successful in 2021 had a documented strategy in place. This strategy helps you plan what audio, visual, and written content you’ll use to reach your goals. And a good content strategy appeals to your target audience and keeps them engaged throughout your entire relationship with them.

Along with a clear roadmap for reaching your goals, a content creation strategy helps you:

• Define your target audience. To create content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand who they are and their needs.
  
  
• Know what content to create next. With a strategy in place, you know what content to focus on first to meet your goals. This content should include topics and questions that resonate with your audience.
  
  
• Outline what success means and how to measure it. Your content creation strategy gives you goals to aim for. When you don't hit those goals, you know it's time to optimize your content.
  
  
• Set your content apart. With tons of online content already available—not to mention the growth of AI writing tools—it's more important than ever to give your content a clear and unique voice. Your content strategy sets the tone for your brand personality and ensures you use your most engaging voice in every piece of content.
  
  
• Choose where you’ll publish your content. Your content creation strategy also covers which distribution channels to target in order to reach your audience. This helps you narrow your focus rather than trying to waste energy publishing content in too many places at once.

Your content creation strategy offers these benefits that ultimately help you create valuable, relevant, and consistent content.

6 ways to research your content creation strategy

Ready to create your own content creation strategy or update an existing one? You’ll want to make sure you’ve got your brand and audience research in hand before you do.

Here are some easy research tactics you can use to clarify who your audience is and how your brand is defined.

1. Do keyword research

Keywords can give you a better idea of your audience’s needs. Keywords related to your main topic can point you to important subtopics and questions for your customers.

Along with paid keyword research tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, you can also do some free keyword research with these tools:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• SparkToro
• AnswerThePublic
  

2. Know your audience

Before you create content for your audience, you need to know who they are. Gather demographics data on your target audience’s needs, questions they need answered, behavior, and interests. It also helps to pinpoint which online channels they’re drawn to so you can focus on publishing content in those places.

All of this information can be used to create a buyer persona that helps you attract and engage your ideal customer. Here are a few ways you can find this data:

Use analytics

Social media and website analytics tools can provide important information about your audience too. For example, Google Analytics can tell you whether most of your visitors use their cell phone or a desktop computer, as well as general age ranges and interests.

Perhaps most importantly, analytics can also add insights about how your audience got to your social post or website, as well as where they went next. This can give you a better idea of their interests and possibly surface competitors.

Post social media polls

Why not ask your audience directly about what interests them or what questions they have?

Social media polls are a quick way to vet ideas or get clarity on which direction your content should take next. You can also ask for more details in the comments—some audience members are more than happy to dish out extra details about their needs.

Survey your audience

Add a prompt for a survey to your next email newsletter or as a pop-up on your website. Use this survey to gather more data about your audience, verify whether newly brainstormed ideas are on the right track, or get feedback about how well your content serves your audience currently.

3. Listen for trends, questions, and needs

It’s a good idea to set up Google alerts and monitor social hashtags and mentions. This helps you keep tabs on conversations about your brand or products, which could help you gauge audience sentiment, questions, or even shoutouts and appreciation.

Staying on top of trends may feel like extra work, but it’s worth it. You might uncover new developments in your industry that are worth creating content for, or you might be able to create shareable content based on current events. Those events don’t even need to be tied directly to your industry—just check out Semrush’s LinkedIn post about The Tinder Swindler, a show on Netflix.

4. Check blog and social media comments

Blog and social comments are like freebie nuggets of info. Many readers will comment with follow-up questions or share altogether new problems. We’ve even seen audience members share tips that we included in future content optimizations. (With credit, of course.)

5. Decide on your unique value proposition

What sets your product, service, or brand apart from others? Is there a quality that helps your content stand out from the rest? Identifying these unique traits in your content strategy ensures each piece of content aims to include that differentiating feature.

Brand positioning, or the unique way you present your business, talk about who you serve, and your products, also helps your audience remember you. It can build trust with your audience, which leads to referrals and repeat customers.

6. Complete competitor research

It helps to know what your competitors are already doing—and what they’re doing well—so you can identify any areas where your target audience may feel unfulfilled. This could be a need for different types of content or answers to questions that competitors don’t cover.

Competitor research may also help you brainstorm new content ideas you hadn’t considered before.

9 tips for developing your content creation framework

1. Define your business goals

What do you want to achieve with your content? Improving brand awareness, sending traffic to your website, or creating new leads are a few goals that a content marketing strategy can help with.

You may also create content to help other departments with their initiatives, which could include lead generation for sales or generating organic traffic for the marketing team.

Just remember to keep your content goals SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant or realistic
• Time-bound

It’s also a good idea to regularly check metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that contribute to your goals so you can adjust your content marketing efforts if progress is off track.

2. Create your buyer persona

Getting to know your audience is a big step toward creating a buyer persona, or a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Other items you should consider when creating a buyer persona include:

• Who or what your ideal customer trusts
• Their pain points and needs
• What motivates them
• The language(s) they speak as well as how they describe their needs
• What marketing channels they prefer to use
• How they make purchasing decisions

By identifying these traits and piecing together a buyer persona, you can focus your content on more relevant topics, channels, and calls to action (CTAs).

3. Complete a content audit

A content audit involves analyzing the content that already exists on your blog or website. This can reveal your top-performing articles and pages as well as underperforming content.

This not only helps you adjust your content creation strategy to optimize content that doesn’t serve your customers’ needs as well as brainstorm ways to distribute your top-performing content across other channels.

4. Pick your content creation tools

You can’t publish your content and get it in front of your customers’ eyes without a reliable content management system (CMS). A good CMS helps you create and manage your content with ease—even if you don’t know how to code in HTML or JavaScript. It should also offer adequate security features to keep you and your customers safe.

Pro tip: A CMS provides content management tools and advanced customization compared to website builders. But a website builder allows you to quickly build a website to serve your customers with content. It’s a good idea to invest in the one that fits your long-term goals.

Some of the most popular CMS platforms and website builders include:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Shopify
• Webflow
• Drupal

But a CMS can’t do it all. You’ll also want to consider investing in content production tools. GatherContent, for example, is a content creation hub where your editorial team and stakeholders can easily create, track, manage, approve, and comment on content.

Other tools give you access to image and video libraries, provide editing assistance, or help you schedule social media posts. Some of the best content production tools include:

• GatherContent
• Buffer
• Unsplash
• Canva
• Grammarly

5. Brainstorm new content ideas

Brainstorming content ideas is possibly one of the most fun steps in a content creation framework. It’s a great chance to get your team together—including members of other teams who collaborate or rely on your content. (Even better if those team members are customer-facing.)

Along with gathering ideas from your team and company, you can look for inspiration with help from these tools:

• Google Trends
• Exploding Topics
• BuzzSumo
• Quora
• Reddit
  

6. Map out a content calendar

A content calendar not only keeps you publishing on a regular schedule, but it also keeps your editorial team focused and your content creation processes running smoothly.

Consistent publishing may seem overrated at first, but your audience will come to expect content from you on a regular basis. You may not need to publish on the same day every week, but you’ll keep your customers engaged by at least posting weekly—Marketing Insider Group found that publishing two to four times a week earned the best results for traffic and conversions.

An editorial calendar lets you get strategic about what content you post when (and how often). You could plan your calendar by year, quarter, month, or even in two-week sprints. You can also create more than one content calendar based on your needs. For example, you may build a content marketing plan and calendar for an influencer program and a separate plan and calendar for your in-house content team.

Find the planning pace that works best for your team, then build your content calendar in three easy steps.

7. Choose your content distribution channels and content types

Where will you publish your content? If you’re a small team, it helps to focus on one or two distribution channels where your audience already engages. For larger businesses, you may need to juggle multiple areas of distribution—including multiple formats such as podcasts, videos, case studies, white papers, and more.

Another thing to consider: where in the buyer’s journey is your customer right now? Depending on what stage they’re at, certain types of content and distribution channels may be more relevant to them. For example, you may find potential customers in the awareness stage engage more with Tweets, while those ready to make a decision are visiting your blog.

8. Craft content templates

Along with choosing the most effective content formats for each distribution channel, you should craft content templates to ensure each article, ad, email, video, or social media post is high-quality and matches your brand voice.

Producing high-quality content doesn’t happen in the dark. Ensure your writers have a template that defines where in the customer journey the audience is, goals of the content piece, any SEO keywords, and important elements such as CTAs, meta descriptions, and tables.

9. Optimize and publish your content

While it’s one of the last steps of your content marketing strategy, optimization isn’t to be skipped over. Optimizing your message for your audience improves the chances it will reach and resonate with them. This step can include a variety of tactics depending on how you want to connect with your customers.

For example, you may hope to attract customers to your blog content through search engine optimization (SEO). But if you’re posting ads on LinkedIn, your headline and CTA are likely more important than including SEO keywords.

Here are some tips and tricks for optimizing your content based on your end goals.

SEO

• Target keywords that match your audience’s interests and needs.
• Add related keywords to expand your content into a comprehensive article.
• Make sure your content uses your primary keyword in the title and secondary keywords in headings—but make sure you naturally weave them in and don’t engage in keyword stuffing.
• Include internal links to related content on your site that readers might find value in.
• Include a meta description that summarizes what your article is about and entices the reader to click. Your meta description should be ~160 characters long.
• Keep content updated regularly—especially if its a top-performing post.

User experience (UX)

• Place the most important information toward the top of the post, similar to journalism’s inverted pyramid style.
• Use short paragraphs (even one-sentence-paragraphs are fine) along with bulleted and numbered lists to allow readers to scan your content.
• Add tables for easy comparisons between two products or services.
• Focus on benefits rather than just features when you talk about your product or service.
• Ensure your design color choices are accessible.
• Add visuals to help explain complex topics—infographics are an excellent shareable resource.

Headlines and CTAs

• Use headlines that define who the target audience is and what they’ll get from reading your post.
• Clearly call out benefits, but don’t overpromise in your CTAs or headlines.
• Strengthen your headlines and CTAs with powerful words, curiosity, and emotion.
• Use a headline analyzer, like the one from CoSchedule, to check length, skimmability, clarity, and other key factors.
• Numbers and well-known names can draw the eyes of customers.
• Don’t be afraid to test different headlines and CTAs. It also helps to brainstorm more than one headline and CTA per ad, email, video, or article.

While it continues to get harder to capture (and hold) your audience’s attention, a well-thought-out content creation strategy can get you leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.

By outlining your target audience, content creation goals, distribution channels, and editorial calendar, you can ensure your team produces high-quality content that resonates with your audience. In turn, this helps you achieve your business goals.

Remember, you don’t have to do all of this content planning alone. Content production tools can help streamline your process while continuing to focus on quality. GatherContent’s free content strategy roadmap gives you a head start on defining a successful content strategy.