content strategy presentation example

An ebook here might dive deeper into a particular problem and solution options and include templates or calculators.

[Lastly,] ebooks further down the funnel should become more personalized and offer more sales content. Comparison guides or an ebook of case studies are beneficial for prospects at this stage."

Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process . After reading a blog post, visitors might want more information.

This is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come into play, directing people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their business.

In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

Featured Tool: 18 Free Ebook Templates

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What is Content Strategy? (With Examples)

A content strategy is a strategic approach to creating, managing, and distributing content. It involves planning and executing a roadmap for content creation, distribution, and optimization. A content strategy provides a framework to create valuable and purposeful content by focusing on the needs of the audience.

If you’re reading this, you likely are involved with content creation. The purpose of this article is to round out your knowledge of a content strategy through examples, so that you can take a more strategic role within your organization.  

A content strategy may fall under the purview of marketing (namely, content marketing) or it may be elevated to a wide-spanning corporate role. While the approaches to content and content strategy will differ for B2C marketers and B2B marketers, a baseline understanding of what we mean when we talk about content strategy is industry-agnostic.

What is Content?

Before we dive into content strategy, it’s worth noting that the meaning of content is elusive. 

Content is anything to do with awareness and education and might take the form of technical white papers, in-depth blog posts, TikTok videos, infographics, even newsletters. 

What about the writing on a landing page: is that content — or copywriting? Some say, since its aim is to convert, landing pages aren’t content. The great news is, when you create your strategy, you can decide if conversion pages, emails, documentation, or community notes are content — or something else.

“Content” is a single word loaded with different connotations and meanings that depend on its context.

In the realm of content marketing, content encompasses four core elements:

• Information – What are the actual contents of your message? It can be factual, practical, entertaining, or some combination. 
• Context – What is the content supposed to help you and the reader accomplish? Who is the target audience for this content? Why is it being published?
• Medium – What channel are you publishing the content on, and how does that influence the overall message?

Format – Is the content text, graphic, audio, video, interactive, virtual/augmented reality, etc.?

C ontent is information that is relevant in a given context and has a form shaped by the medium through which it’s transmitted. 

Many definitions of content focus too much on the information and not on the rest of the elements. Information without context is just noise. Information that isn’t presented with the form and medium in mind risks being lost on the recipient. For example, you could write out the steps of changing a tire, but including images would make it a lot clearer.

Likewise, the material you include in a piece of content has to reflect the medium and form – you wouldn’t publish an in-depth guide to a complex topic in a Twitter thread. It also has to make sense in the context of the target audience you want to reach. For example, at MarketMuse, we want to reach content teams, SEO teams, and digital marketers. 

Even though social media memes are content, we don’t address social media marketing because it doesn’t align with the use of our product. Anything we post on that topic would quickly lose relevance for our audience, even if it is sound. Any definition of “quality content” has to take this into account.

According to a report by 6sense for the Association of National Advertisers , 84% of  people opt to self-educate before contacting sales. Content is vital in providing that education. Optimized correctly, great content can pull in potential customers without relying on traditional “push” digital marketing techniques. And of course, you can’t have paid campaigns without having an arsenal of well-crafted content. So paid or organic, digital content allows potential customers to discover and engage with you. 

Effective content pulls people through the sales funnel as it helps people learn something new, solve their problems, do better work, and ultimately find the solutions they need. But to propel prospects forward, you need to be showing expertise and awareness by addressing all the questions your target audience might have. And that all is a mighty big challenge for a lot of content teams. Who in the organization can fortify you with that knowledge and expertise?

What is Content Strategy?

As noted, a content strategy is an organization-wide approach to content creation. It shouldn’t live in isolation, buried in marketing. It’s dictated by organizational goals, objectives, and resources. The right content for the wrong purpose won’t drive consistent results. Further, a strategy should incorporate a service level agreement (SLA) across departments. To succeed, you need to have ‌buy-in from different groups and subject matter experts across the organization.

Every other facet of a content strategy – your content audit, ideation, content governance, a content plan, content production, editorial calendar, etc. – starts once you have a clear idea of how content will solve your business objectives. Sample business goals might be to 

• Increase Brand Awareness 
• Lower the cost of customer acquisition
• Reduce Customer Churn
• Increase velocity through the sales funnel
• Reduce questions for your support team 
• Reduce friction with peripheral members of buying group (SaaS providers might need something that addresses security concerns) 

Content strategy is the ongoing process of translating business objectives and goals into a plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals . 

Once you’ve established your core objectives, the “how” of your content strategy is honed by asking simple, yet vital questions. 

• What do you want your content to accomplish in pursuit of business goals?
• How will content be measured? Remember, content is not a coupon — so it is unlikely someone will read a blog post and say, yes, I want to buy! Again, this should be an agreement as to what constitutes success.
• What content type is best suited to produce? Maybe your content team can put together great blog content but lacks the skills to create high-quality videos. If so, you know where you’ll be more likely to stand out. 
• Do certain target audiences require a content type? (B2B often has 8-12 people in the buying group – all of them need content).
• What does a content audit of your site say about the existing content you have and your gaps?
• How will you source content ideas? How will we ensure they align with your brand voice, goals, and audiences?
• How will you ensure you have a documented strategy and governance, rather than relying on ad hoc requests for content?
• How will you distribute content? How can you ensure your email, influencer outreach, and social media content strategy supports your overall content marketing effort?

Any content marketing strategy must align with your broader brand strategy, marketing goals, and business objectives. For that, you’ll want to develop a roadmap .

Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

Kristina Halvorson

Founder and CEO, Brain Traffic

If your content strategy doesn’t start with a business objective, it’s not a content strategy. It’s just content. 

Content Strategy Deliverables

Since your content strategy is a blueprint for execution that can be handed to content creators, you will want to include information that addresses the following. Use as much detail as necessary to ensure the creation of good quality content. Some of these content strategy deliverables include:

• Brand Voice
• Product Messaging
• Persona (Audience)
• Competitive Analysis
• Ideation Process
• Content Cadence / Content Calendar
• Content Distribution /(Content Promotion Plan) 
• Benchmarks – Goals 
• Operations Process
• Recommended Content Types (based on performance metrics) 
• Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Influencers
• Keyword Research

Your deliverables may become more granular as you develop strategies to address different business goals.

Why Is It Important to Have a Content Strategy?

As stated, a content strategy shouldn’t be created in a vacuum. By creating one, you effectively have an understanding across your company on what you’ll create and projected outcomes. This helps keep you and all the stakeholders focused.

The fact is that the content lifecycle needs to start somewhere. Here’s what that looks like.

This image represents the cycle of content strategy and execution. 

Strategy leads to execution – or the beginning of the content lifecycle. Create your editorial calendar based on seasonality, product releases, and campaigns. After an audit, create your SEO topic clusters, and decide if you need net-new or to refresh existing content. Take out the guesswork by having a documented governance and operations process – from ideation through editorial review to content production.   Encourage executives to have SLAs with SMEs that might exist throughout the company. 

By knowing what your end goals are, you can work backward in the process to figure out where to prioritize. As you make your way through the content lifecycle, you’ll learn what content types resonate with your audience best. 

Feedback from customers, prospects, partners, and the public about your content that can help you refine your overall strategy. 

Remember, this is not something you deliberate on once a year or once a quarter. You’re constantly collecting learnings, adapting, and finding new ways to move through the content lifecycle a little smarter than the last time. 

But again, it all starts with knowing what your strategy is. There’s no other way to measure your content marketing ROI. 

Following are examples of business outcome-driven content strategies.

Content Strategy for SEO

Content strategy and SEO often work hand-in-hand, and rightfully so. Most of the businesses we work with at MarketMuse are looking to increase organic traffic and leads generated via content while lowering their Customer Acquisition Costs . 

So how can a content strategy serve this goal?

As search engines like Google and Bing evolve, they put increased emphasis on serving audiences quality content that satisfies their search intent ion. Of course, technical issues, well-formatted HTML, back links, and site performance all play a role. But the onus is creating comprehensive, credible, high-quality content.

This is how small domains can punch above their weight with authoritative content clusters that rank highly for competitive terms. 

A content cluster, or topic cluster, is a way of organizing content on a website into topically related ‘clusters.’

The first step is to identify and produce an authoritative page, the pillar page, on a core topic. You also need to create multiple content pages (cluster pages) related to that topic. The pillar page should link to the cluster pages and vice versa. A content cluster should cover a topic across all phases of the buyer’s/user’s journey — by persona .

As the diagram below shows, it starts at the top, driving awareness of your business through content that targets audiences doing keyword search who want answers to questions or to solve problems. 

As they begin to identify your product/service as a possible solution, they will want content that educates and answers questions to help them decide whether or not to purchase. 

Remember, some people will enter your funnel already solution-aware and just want to know more about your solution. Others may not have the slightest clue they need a solution at all and are searching for answers to a problem or question they have. A successful content strategy for SEO accounts for the buyer’s journey and includes content for searchers in all of these phases. 

One example of a successful content clustering strategy is from ISSA , a provider of personal trainer, nutritionist, and fitness instructor certifications. 

For its personal training certification track, ISSA produces content that anticipates possible questions and search intents its target audience might have about certification. Here’s a small sampling on how its content marketing team has covered the topic.

Consideration

With a robust internal linking strategy to go along with all of this content, ISSA makes it easy for users to get the information they need and take a clear next step. Their SEO gains and organic traffic growth has been steady and continues to climb even in a highly competitive space.

Vertical-specific guides on content strategy and SEO

Content Strategy for Healthcare Content Strategy for Professional Services Content Strategy for Startups

Content Strategy for Customer Success and Support

If your business goal is to reduce customer churn, reduce customer calls, increase customer satisfaction and/or increase customer retention, then don’t ignore content creation for the “Post-Purchase” phase. 

Content isn’t just for SEO and attracting prospects; Post-purchase content is one of the best ways to solve the business issue of too many inbound customer support requests. A customer support strategy can measure success along the lines of reducing support tickets and, ultimately, retention.

A robust library of self-serve support content, once built out, can reduce the need to hire additional headcount for those purposes. It also allows your support teams to focus their attention on high-value clients and more significant issues that content alone can’t solve.

Content can be an effective tool to educate, train, and teach customers. aircall

Aircall.io is a customer communication and engagement platform and successfully uses content to support and retain customers. In addition to a blog with useful VoIP, sales, and customer success tactics and tips, Aircall has a robust Knowledge Base that customers can use to search for answers to specific questions about the software and phone systems.

If you find that your support teams are inundated with the same issues and questions regularly, make some room in your content calendar to produce content that helps your customers learn how to use your product themselves. 

Content Strategy for Sales Enablement

Sales enablement content is content that a sales team can use to educate prospects and help them build a case for purchasing your product or service. The prime business goal is to increase pipeline velocity and close deals.

Your content strategy ‌should consider common questions and objections your salespeople hear. 

For example, one of the most common questions our sales team at MarketMuse gets from prospects is how they can use MarketMuse with their existing marketing technology stack. That’s why we produced content like‌ this:

• How to Get the Most out of Ahrefs With MarketMuse
• How to Get the Most out of SEMRush With MarketMuse

Our sales team can send these marketing materials to prospects who want to understand how to make sure MarketMuse fits into processes built with other tools. This content can be shared beyond the buying team, so other budget makers can understand the impact.

Building a Content Strategy

Now that you understand what content strategy is and what it needs to accomplish, you’re probably wondering how to put it into practice. 

This is where a content strategist can help.

If you’re starting from scratch, the best place to start learning how to build a solid content strategy is our Content Strategy Crash Course . 

Once you’ve got a strong foundation, a great next step is to watch some of our content strategy, SEO, and AI-focused webinars to get some tactical tips. 

Anyone can join our community and start asking and answering questions. So if you have something specific you want to discuss, that’s the place to do it!

What you should do now

When you’re ready… here are 3 ways we can help you publish better content, faster:

• If you’d like to learn how to create better content faster, visit our blog . It’s full of resources to help scale content.
• If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Camden Gaspar

Camden is the Content Marketing Manager at MarketMuse. You can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter .

Diane Burley

Diane Burley has three decades experience creating high-impact content at scale. As a published author and seasoned technologist, she translates complex concepts into clear, engaging messaging that connects with audiences. She can help you build a content factory that drives results.

The 8 Best Content Strategy Presentations of 2012

Here are our favorite content strategy presentations and slide decks of 2012:

A Content Strategy Roadmap

by Kristina Halvorson ( @halvorson ) of Brain Traffic . Presented at UX London.

Highlights:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content. Not just What… but, What, Why, How, When, For Whom, With What, Where, When, How Often, & What Next.

Description:

How to make a website: discover, define, design, develop, deploy. It’s a familiar framework for most of our project processes. Now along comes this content strategy thing. Sure, it sounds like a great idea, but how does it fit in with what we’re already doing? Walk through a a typical website project to find out how content strategy fits (and why it will make you so happy!)

Getting Unstuck: Content Strategy for the Future

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher ( @sara_ann_marie ). Presented at Web Directions South.

We can’t make more content for every device and channel. It’s time we make our content do more .

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a web that’s more flexible, future-friendly, and ready for unknowns. There’s only one little flaw: our content is stuck in the past. Locked into inflexible pages and documents, our content is far from ready for today’s world of apps, APIs, read-later services, and responsive sites—much less for the coming one, where the web is embedded in everything from autos to appliances. We can’t keep creating more content for each of these new devices and channels. We’d go nuts trying to manage and maintain all of it. Instead, we need content that does more for us: Content that can travel and shift while keeping its meaning and message intact. Content that’s trim, focused, and clear—for mobile users and for everyone else, too. Content that matters, wherever it’s being consumed.

The Strategic Side of Content Marketing

by Rand Fishkin ( @randfish ). Presented at MozCon 2012 .

Content Strategy ≠  a list of viral content you think will get you links. Content Strategy ≠ a list of influencers/publications you want mentioning your brand. So what IS a “Content Marketing Strategy,” and what does the process look like to develop one?

An in-depth look at the structure of great content marketing campaigns including how to set up your site, content, and team for success.

How to Build SEO Into Content Strategy

by Jonathon Colman ( @jcolman ). Presented at 2012 Content Strategy Forum .

Bottom Line: Bad SEO is a disaster. Good SEO is very helpful. So let’s build a bridge: Between content strategy over here… ...and SEO over here.

Let’s be honest: for most content strategists and other people working with online content, SEO is The Worst Part Of The Job. It’s hugely technical, it’s shrouded in mystery, it seems to be focused on robots instead of people, there are unspoken rules, everything can turn on a dime, and it never, ever seems to end. But SEO doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to begin a conversation between these two disciplines – they’re far more alike than you might think. And when they work together on behalf of users and customers, amazing things can happen that will drive your organisation forward. I can’t promise to change your mind about SEO, but you’ll leave this session understanding how to build the essentials into your work in ways that are simple, make sense, and are pain-free. You’ll see what business impacts and wins for the customer SEO and Content Strategy have had at REI, a major retailer in the US. And you’ll have the vocabulary, understanding and tools that you need to talk with your SEO… or to take it for yourself. Drive traffic, amaze your visitors, and Win the Internet — with SEO and Content Strategy working together.

What’s Your Perception Strategy? (Why It’s NOT All About Content)

by Stephen P. Anderson ( @stephenanderson ). Presented at IAS 2012 .

Your brain constructs (an experience of) reality. Perception is not a process of active absorption but of active construction, based on prior experiences and memories. So, in terms of an experience, it is not all about content. External and internal context affect user perception. Brain scans confirm that people don’t just think the more expensive (but identical) wine tasted better – it actually really did taste better…

If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content. Picking up from the session Stephen P. Anderson gave last year on “The Stories We Construct” (a biological look at the narratives that influence behavior), this session focuses on how we come to perceive—and respond to— information. From phantom limbs to magicians fooling our senses, Stephen proposes a model that makes sense of how we truly experience information. Practical? You’ll leave with a deep understanding of everything UX is about and an awareness of common practices that don’t account for this knowledge.

Content Strategy: What, Why, Why Should You Care?

by Margot Bloomstein ( @mbloomstein ) of Appropriate, Inc . Presented at IA Konferenz 2012.

Deliverables are merely punctuation in the conversation. Don’t let them replace the conversation. Why Content Strategy? Because we all want the same thing, but content keeps getting in the way. If you don’t know WHAT you need to communicate, how will you know HOW, or if you succeed?

Are you ready to add content strategy to your resume? We’ll gain some practical, hands-on experience together. Let’s put a few sample organizations through the paces of “typical” process in a website redesign engagement. First, we’ll discuss how to prioritize communication goals and develop a message architecture with a hands-on exercise—ideal whether you’re designing for the web, a mobile app, social media, or an offline experience. Then we’ll discuss how you can use this foundation to conduct a content audit, and work together to do it. Finally, we’ll ask “so what?” We’ll uncover the implications of a content audit through a gap analysis that points to content needs and next steps for our sample organizations. You’ll leave with the confidence and savvy to bring content strategy techniques and thinking back to your own organization.

A Blog Is Not A Content Strategy

by John F. Doherty ( @dohertyjf ). Presentation reformatted from original post .

Content Marketing vs + Content Strategy = WIN. A blog cannot meet all user needs.

Blogging has the following purposes, in my opinion:

• It shows your thought leadership;
• It can be used to consistently educate your readers;
• Depending on your niche, it can drive conversions and business inquiries.

But a blog isn’t the only way to do this, and many times a blog does not fit a specific vertical. If you’re just blogging to blog, you’re wasting your time. The brands winning online are not just blogging anymore.

Content Strategy for Mobile: The Workshop

by Karen McGrane ( @karenmcgrane ) of Bond Art + Science .

4 Content Truths: Content matters on mobile. Strive for content parity. It’s not a strategy if you can’t maintain it. You don’t get to decide what device people use. They do.

You don’t get to decide which platform or device your customers use to access your content: they do. Mobile isn’t just smartphones, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you are on the move. It’s a proliferation of devices, platforms, and screensizes — from the tiniest “dumb” phones to the desktop web. How can you be sure that your content will work everywhere, all the time?

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Kane Jamison

Kane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing platform that helps you build better content briefs. Schedule a demo to chat with him personally about your team's content workflow.

Website: https://www.kanejamison.com

Twitter: @kanejamison

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Jump to Content

• Build your content strategy

How to create a content strategy

What you’ll learn

• A content strategy helps organize and streamline content creation and posting
• Defining a personal mission statement helps you scope what content you want to create and who you’re creating it for
• Use a content strategy to unify and plan across different content channels
• A content strategy prevents you from getting lost or distracted
• Look at past successes and failures to shape the direction of your content strategy

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy outlines how you plan, create, and deliver your content. There’s no one size fits all, one creator's content strategy will look completely different from the next. Even the one you build for yourself will change and morph over time as you grow.

Building a content strategy might sound like work about work, but the benefits highly outweigh the costs. A content strategy will help you:

• Organize your content creation process.
• Schedule when and where you post content.
• Scope potential topics and unify your voice.Measure content success.
• Measure content success.

Start building your content strategy

While no two content strategies are the same, there are unifying principles every creator can follow to start building theirs. Keep in mind that this strategy is for you! So, try to build it with tools you like and plan with your strengths and weaknesses in mind.

Define your personal mission statement

Your content strategy is designed to help you as a creator. The first step to creating one is to identify who you are, your brand, and then turning that into a personal mission statement. A personal mission statement might look something like this:

“I am Kimberly, an environmental activist who creates content about the local wildlife to encourage residents in my area to act sustainably.”

Try writing your own by filling in the blanks of our mission statement template:

“I am ___, who creates content about ____, for my audience _____.”

Organize content type and platform

Now that you know who you are, the topics you’ll cover, and the audience you want to reach, it’s time to think about the types of content you can create and what platforms to publish it to. While big key moments and events should be planned weeks or months in advance, a regular cadence may require more flexibility.

Let’s use Kimberly, our environmental activist, as an example. We can begin to brainstorm ideas she’ll make content about. Let’s start with three topics:

• A local frog species was recently classified as endangered
• Attending a sustainability conference
• Weekly volunteering at a wildlife sanctuary

Then, we’ll list the content delivery platforms Kimberly uses and how often she likes to post to them:

• 1 post per month
• 1 live broadcast per week
• 3 to 5 posts per week

Take a moment to identify the primary purpose of each platform you post to. This will help you figure out how much effort and how often you can and should be posting.

Next, we’ll think about the types of content we can create from each topic and what platform we can post it to:

• Blog post: details about the frog, what it means to be classified as endangered, how residents can help
• Instagram: photos of the frog with a caption explaining it’s endangered
• TikTok: videos of frog in the wild
• Blog post: breakdown of learnings after attending
• Instagram: Live updates while attending conference
• TikTok: Videos of sustainability tips and tricks learned from the conference
• Blog post: How to get started volunteering with wildlife
• Instagram: Live broadcast feeding cute baby animals
• TikTok: Videos of animals at sanctuary with fun facts

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it starts to paint a picture of how we can use the same topic across different platforms and the types of assets we’ll need for each kind of content.

Map your content creation and publishing cadence

Now that you’ve identified the types of content and where you’ll post it, you need to create it! When it comes to posting content and keeping your audience engaged, consistency is key. This step of your content strategy is about aligning follower expectations with your content creation process and abilities.

This is the stage where you turn content ideas into actionable steps.

Planning your content on a monthly basis gives you a good amount of foresight into what’s coming, but still gives you the flexibility to adapt as things change or unexpected things pop up. But, how far in advance you plan and schedule your content creation process and publishing cadence will vary depending on your platforms and goals.

A beginner’s approach to mapping your content to a calendar might look something like this:

• Kimberly has her weekly volunteer shift that includes a live broadcast. She immediately adds that to her calendar.
• Kimberly knows how often she creates content for each platform. She adds in tentative publishing dates.
• A local frog species recently classified as endangered is news, and Kimberly could potentially be the first to inform her followers of this update. She schedules time for research and writing her blog to ensure she posts it on time.
• Kimberly’s blog is her creator hub and she wants to drive traffic to it, so she’ll use some of her social media posts to promote her post when it’s published.
• Kimberly also knows when she’s going live each week. She’ll include posting reminders for her followers in her calendar.
• Kimberly likes to let users know what animals she’ll be featuring on her weekly broadcasts by posting a photo or video of them. She makes sure to schedule time to take and edit new ones, since she tries to avoid using assets she’s already posted.
• Kimberly gave priority to her established schedule and ideal posting cadence. Identifying the gaps in her schedule should now be easy and obvious.

Try this approach to map your content for the next month

Publish, measure and adjust

Now that you’ve got a content strategy outlined, all you need to do is follow it! Well, sort of. At this stage, you have a plan, but there’s a lot of moving parts. By tracking and measuring the success of your content you can better tailor the topics and types of posts.

For example, if Kimberly checks her blog analytics and sees a huge spike in traffic to her blog after going live on instagram, she may adjust her content strategy to make room for more live content. She could take it a step further and track if going live on TikTok provides more page hits than Instagram and then schedule around that.

Continue learning

• Monthly Blog and Growth Services
• Content Marketing Workshop
• Content Marketing Course
• Case Studies

What Is Content Strategy and Why Is It Important?

Content strategy vs. content marketing, 10 steps to a killer content strategy for your brand, content strategy examples to inspire you, ready to build a content strategy that works, how to develop a content strategy (with examples).

• A content strategy is a holistic approach to delivering information to customers. It is different from content marketing, which is the execution of your strategy.
• Clearly-defined goals and performance metrics are foundational components of your content strategy. They keep your strategy focused and help you measure its success.
• Buyer personas are a valuable tool for defining your target audience prior to launching your content strategy.
• Strong keyword research is essential to successful SEO for your content strategy.
• Amplifying your content on your own platforms and making it shareable for users will increase your brand visibility and reach.

1. Set your goals

2. Define buyer personas

• Content your target customers use
• Topics they are interested in
• Types or formats of content they prefer
• Channels they use
• Stage of the buyer journey
• Keywords they use to search and
• Questions they ask

3. Determine content pillars and types

4. establish your brand voice, 5. conduct keyword research and develop your seo strategy.

6. Brainstorm content ideas

7. create a content calendar, 8. outline key metrics.

• Traffic – Traffic is the one metric you must measure. If no one is landing on your website, no one is reading your content, and your strategy will not be successful.
• Conversions – Conversions measure the rate at which your web visitors are taking action (such as subscribing to your newsletter or making an ecommerce purchase) after interacting with your content.
• Engagement – You can track engagement by looking at data points such as time spent on your site and number of pages visited per session
• SEO Performance – Track SERP rankings and how they are changing over time.
• Authority – High authority drives better SEO and more traffic. Authority is not quite as cut-and-dry as the other metrics, but you can use this guide from Moz to help you determine yours.

9. Create awesome content

10. amplify your content, hubspot’s inbound marketing strategy.

Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” videos

John Deere’s The Furrow publication

American express’s open forum.

Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series

Patagonia’s focus on shareability

Red Bull’s experiential content

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About the Author - Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of " Mean People Suck " and " The Content Formula ", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group . Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.

Content Strategy Best Practices (Steps and Examples)

Learn how to create a web content strategy with real examples. Grow your traffic, improve your authority, and get more customers.

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What Is A Content Strategy?

Why is a content strategy important, how to develop a content strategy, content strategy examples, key learnings.

A solid content strategy can produce amazing results for your business, like increased targeted traffic, more influence in your field, and increased revenue.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to create a content strategy framework. By implementing everything you’re about to learn, you’ll grow your search engine traffic, improve your authority, and bring more customers to your door.

This is our exact strategy when creating successful content marketing campaigns for our website and clients.

Content strategy refers to creating and managing digital media to achieve specific business goals. This can include written, audio, and even video content.

Overall, your content creation strategy aims to bring your company measurable results, whether related to more visitors, greater brand awareness, or more customers in your sales pipeline.

A content strategy isn’t just SEO  or content marketing , either. But it encompasses both of these channels.

It can be defined as the set of guidelines to help plan, create, and manage your content.

Without a content development strategy, achieving any business goals you’ve decided upon will be hard.

Instead of working from a detailed plan, you’ll follow the publish-and-pray approach of writing random articles and hoping they move the needle.

On the other hand, a documented content marketing plan can help with the following:

• Make you way more effective at content marketing
• Make you less stressed and frazzled (you have a detailed map you’re following)
• Have more time for content promotion and other aspects of your digital marketing strategy
• Able to dedicate more time, energy, and money to your content efforts

Here are a few reasons you’ll want a content strategy in place:

It supports your larger business goals.

With an overarching content marketing strategy in place, you’ll be able to see how your content efforts support larger goals.

Even goals that seem more ethereal, like improving brand awareness and growing website authority . A robust content creation strategy can even attract high-level employees into your world.

Without a content strategy, your onsite and offsite content creation efforts don’t fit the puzzle, and you’ll be wasting your time and money.

You can see what’s working.

Even the best-laid-out website content strategy won’t always deliver the results you anticipated. Predicting what will succeed is difficult, and this is doubly true if it’s your first time executing a content creation strategy.

To succeed, you’ll need to test, experiment, and refine your strategy continuously. Luckily, there are tools that will give you accurate data and feedback so you can see what your readers and visitors are responding to most.

It helps you publish quality content consistently.

Succeeding with content marketing requires a consistent publishing schedule. You need to have your articles mapped out and a clear direction as to where you’re heading.

Publishing content isn’t about volume alone but covering every topic you want to highlight in-depth. Instead of publishing one-off content pieces whenever you feel like it, you’ll be able to publish a steady flow of content.

This also provides feedback on other goals, such as giving you more data to work with when refining your strategy.

These are the steps to follow to create a content strategy:

• Set your business goals
• Define your target audience
• Research your audience’s content needs
• Identify what’s working for competitors
• Run a website content audit
• Develop a content marketing plan
• Create the best content possible
• Optimize your content for the web
• Publish and promote your content
• Measure the effectiveness of your content strategy

1. Set your business goals

Content marketing can be very effective, but it’ll be hard to generate an ROI if you don’t have goals you can aim towards.

Without creating tangible and achievable goals, it’ll be nearly impossible to determine if your content is hitting the mark.

Here are some common goals that you can model your strategy after:

• Improve brand awareness
• Grow the number of leads
• Improve overall revenue
• Increase organic traffic

We can also take these a step further and tie them to trackable metrics like:

• Get 25 brand mentions/links from websites with a DA of 50+
• Increase email subscribers by 200%
• Grow organic traffic to 100,000 visitors per month in 6 months

2. Define your target audience

Who are you targeting with your content? And no, anyone who has an internet connection isn’t narrow enough.

Your audience will dictate not only what you write about but how you write and promote your content .

Get this step wrong, and you’ll be publishing content to nothing but crickets.

When narrowing down on your audience, you’ll want to define their lifestyle, problems, needs, and concerns.

Depending on your business, you might be speaking to multiple different buyer personas, as well as people who are at different parts of the customer lifecycle.

Keep in mind that your audience isn’t wholly made up of buyers as well. Your audience is simply the overarching group of people who are interested in your topic. This also includes followers, buyers, and advocates who buy and spread the word about your brand.

Here are some questions you can ask to pinpoint your target audience:

• What’s the age, gender, and education level?
• What’s the average income?
• What are their hobbies and interests?
• What problems do they have?
• What are their goals and dreams?
• What websites do they love?
• What social networks do they use the most?
• What books and magazines do they read?
• How do they research before making a purchase?

When creating content, you’ll be writing directly toward these buyer personas.

3. Research your audience content needs

When planning out your content, it can be helpful to research what your audience is already looking for. By creating content that serves their needs, you’ll cut out a ton of guesswork and ensure your readers will be interested in your content.

Here are two ways you can uncover your audience’s desires:

Keyword research

By doing keyword research , you’ll find keywords that can send you relevant traffic, along with hidden gems you can target and rank for quickly.

As you research, you’ll start to notice trends or groups of topics your audience is the most interested in.

Using a tool like SEMRush you can uncover valuable keywords your competitors are targeting, along with keywords worth building your content around.

User intent

This is covered in more detail below, but user intent refers to what your users search for when they type a keyword into Google.

The more you can closely satisfy user intent, the higher your content can rank.

There are three types of searches that keywords will fall under:

• Searchers want more information about a topic
• Searchers are looking for a website
• Searchers are looking to make a purchase

The quickest way to determine user intent is by seeing what kind of content ranks the highest in the search engines. This will help to inform the type of content you should be creating.

4. Identify what’s working for competitors

When crafting your strategy, there’s no reason to go in blind. You can see what your competitors have done successfully and any holes in their strategy you can capitalize on.

When you’re analyzing your competitors, there are a handful of questions you’ll want to keep in mind:

• How much traffic are they getting?
• What sources provide the most traffic?
• What keywords are they ranking for?
• What websites are linking to them?
• How well is their content performing?
• Are there any gaps in their content strategy?

The best tool for this is SEMRush . With SEMRush, all you have to do is input your competitor’s URL, and you’ll get information like:

• The organic keywords that send the most traffic
• The total number of keywords they rank for
• The pages that send the most traffic
• The top organic search competitors

5. Run a website content audit

To create a website content strategy that’ll succeed in 2024 and beyond, you’ll want to take stock of what’s currently working. If you’ve been creating content without a plan, you probably have a lot of dead content that isn’t serving your business.

A content audit will show you what content is serving your business and what’s holding you back.

Here are a few things you’ll want to analyze:

• What content is performing the best
• What content is underperforming
• How often do they publish content
• What keywords you’re currently ranking for
• Which pages/posts have the worst onsite metrics
• Which pages/posts are causing visitors to leave your site

The information you gain here will help you better understand how your site performs and what kinds of content already bring you results.

Once you know what content is underperforming, you can either eliminate it or repurpose it into something more valuable.

Resources to Learn More

• How to perform a content audit – find and fix thin content pages on your website.
• How to perform a website review – how to review your website (besides content)
• Content audit process – how to do a content audit (with template)

6. Develop a content marketing plan

By now, you should have a solid understanding of the following:

• Your existing content, how it performs, and what’s worth keeping
• The exact target audience you’re creating content for
• The goals you’re trying to achieve with your content strategy framework
• The type of content you’re creating and the keywords you’re targeting

Now, it’s time to put all of this into a content marketing plan. Here are some of the elements your content marketing plan will include:

• Who’s responsible for creating the content
• What stage of the sales funnel will each article address
• The format of the content to be published
• When will the content be published
• The steps you’ll take to promote the content
• Content marketing checklist – a comprehensive checklist to follow when developing a content marketing plan
• Content marketing courses – a list of courses to help you understand how to implement content marketing campaigns

7. Create the best content possible

This was mentioned briefly above, but you should always aim to create better content than your competition. As you analyze the search results, take note of how you would improve what’s currently ranking the highest.

This could be several factors like:

• Writing in an easier-to-digest format
• Including more media like pictures and videos
• Adding graphics to create a better user experience
• Creating a longer article that covers every aspect of the topic
• And on and on

Follow E-E-A-T

EAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and is how Google evaluates the credibility of a website on a given topic. Scoring high on these metrics will help you rank higher.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• This means you have a high level of knowledge and expertise on a given topic.
• This means you (or your website) have a solid reputation in your space, whether from users, other websites, or third-party reviews.
• This includes content accuracy, legitimacy, transparency, and contact and business information.

Create pillar pages Pillar pages

seek to be the absolute best piece of content for a given keyword or topic. Generally, these will be much longer than traditional blog posts.

There are two approaches to pillar pages. The first is creating a long, in-depth article covering every topic in detail. Or, it can be a category page that links to other relevant articles you’ve written.

Pillar pages can boost search engine rankings, along with uniting different categories of content across your website.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re creating pillar pages:

• Look for topic clusters (content that can be grouped into a category) within your existing content
• Combine this content into a bigger post, or a category page with links to every relevant article
• Do keyword research to find high-traffic keywords you can target
• Write the absolute best article on your chosen topic/set of keywords

Utilize different content formats

Blog posts aren’t the only type of content you should be creating. Ideally, you’ll create multiple content forms to cater to every audience member.

Some of your visitors will like to read, while others will prefer video, interactive content, or downloadables like PDFs.

Here’s a quick look at some of the different forms of content you can create:

• Studies and data-backed content, written interviews, and more
• Video content like podcasts, how-tos, webinars, and live events
• Visual content like slideshows and infographics
• Interactive content like quizzes and tests
• Downloadable PDFs like eBooks, checklists, tutorials, and white papers

One way to maximize your content creation strategy is to repurpose your content. Once you’ve published an article, you can:

• Transform it into an infographic
• Create a slideshow presentation
• Create shareable social media graphics
• Write a longer eBook from popular articles

8. Optimize your content for the web

Even if you have incredibly well-written content, it will be hard to rank if it’s not optimized correctly.

On-page SEO is usually overshadowed by off-page SEO factors. However, by getting on-page right, you’re laying a solid foundation to make your other SEO efforts much easier.

Here are a few key elements of proper content optimization:

• Make your URLs short and readable; include your target keyword if possible
• Optimize your page titles with your target keyword and a compelling headline
• Include your target keyword within the first 100 words of the body content
• Add relevant and related keywords to your post
• Create content that effectively answers your target keyword (usually over 2000 words)
• Link out to authoritative resources that enhance your content
• Interlink your content to other valuable articles you’ve written

A lot more goes into proper SEO blog writing , but the tips above will help your content rank higher and start moving in the right direction.

9. Publish and promote your content

By now, you’ve accomplished much of the hard work of research, planning, and executing your content strategy.

But your work isn’t done yet. Planning and content creation are only half the battle. Now, it’s time to promote your content .

One great way to do this is strategically mentioning well-known brands within your content. Then, when you publish the post, you can reach out to them via email or social and let them know they’re mentioned in the post.

This is a great way to improve social shares and brand mentions while providing value to influencers and authorities you’d love to connect with.

For example, in this article on the best free SEO courses , I mentioned SEMRush. They shared the post, which resulted in many social shares and likes.

There are a handful of other ways you can promote your content as well, for example:

• Social media. Promote your article on any active social profiles
• Email outreach. Reach out to blog/website owners who have linked or shared similar content in the past
• Paid ads. Run paid ads to your published article (it helps if your article is monetized in some way)
• Syndicate your content. Re-publish your article on relevant platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, or Quora

Each platform you use to promote your content will have its own guidelines and best practices. Over time, you’ll learn which platforms give you the best response and help you achieve your content goals.

10. Measure the effectiveness of your content strategy

The only way to create a content strategy that brings your business results is to analyze how your content is performing. This will help you determine what content/topics connect with your audience and what’s helping you reach your goals.

Here are a few content KPIs to measure:

• User engagement – This refers to how your visitors interact with your content via shares, comments, and mentions from other websites
• User behavior – This includes the number of unique visitors, bounce rate , page views , time on site, etc.
• Organic search traffic – You’re looking for increased organic traffic , the number of keywords you rank for, and more backlinks.
• Conversion rate – This could be more leads, better conversion rates, more email subscribers , or more products purchased.

Remember that content marketing is long-term and requires patience to see results.

There are countless examples of successful content strategies you can draw inspiration from.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Canva is a unicorn startup valued at over $3.2 billion ( link ). Much of that growth has been due to a stellar content strategy and search engine rankings. They get over 7 million visitors per month from organic rankings alone.

A big catalyst for this growth was the focus on using guest blogging to grow authority from day one.

Hotjar is a SaaS company that specializes in heat mapping software for websites.

Even as a smaller SaaS company, its blog has over 100,000 monthly visitors. One of the core reasons is how detailed they go with their content.

For example, they rank for nearly every keyword related to heatmaps and tend to dominate the long-tail rankings.

Creating a content marketing strategy can seem like a ton of time spent upfront, but you’ll reap the rewards from all this planning for years to come. The more effort you put into publishing and promoting quality content, your authority, traffic, and revenue will grow.

Without a content strategy in place, you will have difficulty achieving any results with your content.

Your content strategy is something you refine over time. The more you publish and the more experiments you run, the more data you’ll have to work with, and the better you’ll understand your audience.

Content strategy is a long-term investment.

You can reach your target audience with an effective content strategy while boosting traffic and revenue. Regarding long-term investment, you’ll have difficulty finding something more valuable than a content marketing strategy.

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

August 25, 2020 at 3:07 pm

This is really helpful. I’ve been trying to research guides for my website. Thanks!

December 13, 2021 at 9:57 am

Thanks a lot!

August 26, 2020 at 8:48 am

Sure content planning is key to the growth of your business. Your content is exceedingly valuable to me and my time. I have drawn actionable tips that will take me to another level in my content creation strategy. Very timely.Thank you

Thanks a lot for your nice comment.

All the best Alex

October 21, 2022 at 3:09 pm

Thanks for writing this super helpful guide,

Your content is so useful, it’s the only weekly email that I will save to make sure I read every article!

December 11, 2023 at 12:30 pm

Thanks a lot! Alex

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Free Content Strategy Templates and How to Use Them to Create A Successful Plan

By Joe Weller | October 14, 2017

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Content marketing can help your business break through the noise of traditional marketing channels. Engaging, entertaining, and informative content tells the story of who you are and generates more sales and service for your business. 

In this article, you’ll learn how you can create, build, measure, and grow a content strategy that succeeds, and find the templates you need to get started.

What Is A Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing uses a unique set of channels to promote a product or service. Traditional marketing or advertising relies on commercials, ads, direct mail, billboards, and more to reach customers. Content marketing is different. Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing uses web content, videos, e-books, and other informational digital assets to interact with consumers. Think of traditional marketing as broadcasting to the widest possible audience to get the attention of the people most likely to buy a product. Content marketing makes information available online so the audience can find it.

The strategy for your content is related to the strategy for your content marketing. Content strategy helps you manage all the assets or pieces of content that you generate. The content marketing strategy is the story you want to tell your customers about your product through those pieces of content.

Your company is unique, so your content marketing strategy should be unique, too. The plan should be based on your company’s business goals and resources, including staff. It should have specific, achievable goals and still be flexible so you can build on what works and toss what doesn’t. The good news is that you can follow a tried-and-true process to build your plan. Our templates will take you through each step necessary to identify what matters to you, your organization, and your customers.

The Five Steps to Developing A Successful Plan and the Content Marketing Templates You Need to Achieve It

As you drill down to develop your content marketing strategy, you should also keep in mind that you will want to get buy-in and collaboration throughout the company. An executive summary of your goals will help other teams and company leaders support and share your vision. The bottom line is that anyone in your company should be able to tell the story that your content illustrates. Your company’s goals are your goals.  

The executive summary should include your objectives and how they align with the company’s goals, the staff required, budget, plan for producing and promoting your content, and how you will measure your ROI. The process includes these five steps:

• Identify Resources: Before you can map out where you’re going, you need an inventory of your customers, your culture, your competition, and your existing content. 
• Build Out Strategy: Identify the goal of your content and how it will tell the story of your brand.
• Plan Out Production: Outline the practical details of what content you will create, who will create it, and when you will publish it.  
• Promote: Share your great content in ways that you can schedule and track.
• Measure Your Content: Define how you will know whether you’re successful, and how to keep improving in the content marketplace. 

Use this content marketing template to develop a roadmap:

Download Content Marketing Roadmap

Excel | Smartsheet

Step One: Identify Your Resources

Your strategy starts with an inventory of your current position. What content and staff do you have available? What do your customers say about your brand and product? What are you doing better than your competitors and where do you need to improve? What’s missing?

‌ Download Strategy Research Checklist 

Understanding Your Customers

Before you create a content strategy to reach your audience, you have to clearly identify it. “Audience” may be an inherently friendlier word than “customer,” but you want to make sure your content is welcoming. Take a look through your sales and marketing data, comments on your website, social channels, and more to get to know your customers, what they like about you, and what they need.

You may find it helps to map out a person’s experience with your company or one of your products. How do your customers find you? How do they use you? How do they let you know what they like and don’t like? This information creates a customer journey map that identifies a person’s interaction with your product or brand. Gather this information in collaboration with your sales and marketing staff. They will have valuable insight into your customer’s journey to buying (or choosing not to buy) your product.

And while you’re mapping out your customer’s journey to your product, take some time to describe that product. Identify the specific features, benefits, services, and other relevant details. When you start creating content, this description of what you’re selling and how it meets the needs of your audience will guide what you write. You will know what you want to continue promoting. 

The best way to understand your customers and their journey is to create customer personas. A persona is a detailed description of your typical customer or a collection of customers. These descriptions are more than facts, however. Put a face on these profiles by creating names, and maybe adding photos, bios, and other details that summarize your customer.

Good personas are realistic descriptions that help you understand your audience. Whether you’re selling a product to consumers or a service to a business, every kind of client should have a specific persona that maps their needs to your solutions.

Use our persona worksheet to create as many customer profiles as you need. Be specific about each customer’s demographic data, their business or personal goals, and where they go for information. Once you understand each kind of customer, you will be able to create a strategy for relevant content that successfully reaches them. You can add new personas as you create new products and services.

Download Customer Persona Worksheet

Excel  |  PDF

Once you’ve used the personas to describe your customers and written a good description of your products, you can combine the two to identify which customers are using your product and which products can serve your customers. This map of personas and products can help you visualize what’s working and what type of content can best connect your audience to your business. Base your content marketing strategy on this map between persona and product.

Assess Your Company Culture

You need to know how much support your content marketing efforts have — or will have — in your organization. Interview stakeholders in your organization to find out where you have buy-in for  marketing initiatives and identify potential roadblocks. These interviews will not only highlight challenges, but also serve to help you build collaboration across departments and with the executives who hold the keys to resources, staffing, and support you will need. Here are some of the questions to help you assess your company’s culture:

• What business objectives are most important?
• What are the key marketing objectives?
• How would you measure success in meeting these objectives?
• What marketing initiatives are already succeeding? Why?
• What initiatives are struggling? Why?
• Where is cross-team collaboration successful? Why?
• Where would collaboration help? Why?
• What resources and data does content marketing need to succeed?
• What could hinder the success of content marketing?
• What are the benefits to the company of successful content marketing?

When you understand how your company measures success and how well departments work together, you will be able to include those lessons in your content marketing plan, and also assess the resources you have and what you need to succeed.  

Evaluate Your Competitors

One of the components of your persona analysis is where your customers get their information. Note that some of their sources are from your competitors. Take a little time to learn more about those companies. Remember, you are not simply competing for sales - you are also competing with them for your customers’ attention, especially on the web. You don’t have to do a full SWOT analysis , but you should collect some basic data to find out more about where customers get information about products and services that are similar to yours.

Analyze your competitors by conducting a gap analysis. Enter the keywords (not brands) you use to describe your product into SEMRush or a similar research tool. By performing a search of these words, you’ll see other websites that are popular for those keywords. Look at the competing sites and ask: What content do they offer? How does that address your customers’ wants and needs? How does your content compare? What do they do better than you? How does your content stand out?

Similar to a gap analysis, a brand analysis can highlight how the perception of your company stacks up to your competitors. A gap analysis reveals how your customers see you (and your competitors) online. A brand analysis compares your market position, voice, and values. There are a couple of good sources of information for your brand analysis.

• Your Customers: Consider conducting surveys to get some quantitative data about their experience with your brand and with your competitors’. You can also conduct interviews with customers (or former customers) to get anecdotal feedback.
• Social Channels: Monitor customer conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels to see what people say about you and your competitors.

If you want to dig deeper, consider conducting sentiment analysis. In it, you’ll use an algorithm to evaluate the language that people use to describe your business. Several companies, such as Brandwatch and CallMiner can create the required tracking to create the algorithms and reports that provide insight into how your brand is perceived. 

While you’re looking at your competitors, you will also discover the thought leaders who have built an audience around their content. These experts can become contacts for you as you map out your strategy. You’ll also discover the places, or watering holes, where people go for information. What they publish, and when, can provide powerful insight for your strategy.

You can use this information in creating your content strategy to motivate your team. Seeing what others are doing provides incentives for what they are doing well and where you can improve as a group, and also helps you set content marketing goals.

Evaluate Existing Content

Do you know how much content you already have, where it lives, and its effectiveness? Conduct a content audit of your existing assets to find out what generates the most traffic and converts the most customers. An audit will also identify old or outdated content, which can either be updated or removed from your site. Plus, it will help you avoid publishing duplicate or overlapping content.

A content audit does not need to be a massive time investment in which you manually scrape your site. Several tools can automate this process for you. For example:

• Screaming Frog : This SEO Spider tool runs an analysis of your site.
• Content Analysis Tool from Content Insight: Scrapes your site not only for URLs, but also other assets such as images and video.
• Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics: These tools provide insights into your site’s search performance and conversions.
• MOZ Open Site Explorer and Keyword Explorer: These sites let you do research into your links, giving you data about backlinks, SEO rankings, and search engine visibility.
• SEMRush: The tool shows your search traffic and backlinks.
• Hemingway App : This application analyzes your writing so you can see what content needs editing or rewriting for clarity.
• Ahrefs : Get a list of your competitors’ ranking keywords.
• Buzzsumo : Use this site to see how your content is performing, especially on social channels.
• Buffer for Business : Track your engagement and performance over time.

Use the information you gather to complete this content audit template:

Download Content Audit Worksheet Template

Excel | Smartsheet  

As you create the inventory for your content, you’ll also get a sense of how it’s created, organized, and measured. Use the information from your audit to map out your existing workflow, taxonomy, and metrics. 

• Workflow: Document each step of the content creation process: Where you generate ideas, who writes the pieces, who approves and publishes the content, and how long it takes from idea to publication. 
• Taxonomy: Map out the folders, tags, and categories you use to organize your content. You can identify some of this from the public-facing part of your site through the navigation and sub-navigation (those menus and sub-menus). The metadata on your site contains other kinds of taxonomy terms, including the content types, author, and publication date. 
• Metrics: Identify any key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content, how you evaluate it, and if you’ll update it. If there’s an existing process for creating and evaluating content, note the key players in that process and their roles in your organization.

Step Two: Build Out Your Content Strategy

Now that you’ve identified your content, culture, customers, and competitors, you can answer the key question: What do you want to accomplish with your marketing content strategy? To answer this, ask: What are your business, marketing, and revenue goals? Who do you want to reach and what do you want them to know?

Content marketing provides a unique opportunity to tell the story of your business and your product. It’s where you get to define your story and how you will tell it. Before you start producing a single piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, an infographic, a white paper, or webinar, you need to identify your mission, strategy, and goals.

You can’t have a mission statement for your content without one for your company. It aligns your strategy and goals within the larger framework of the organization.

Once you have a mission statement, identify the goals of your organization. Your content marketing goals will evolve from the larger company goals. Be realistic. Content can’t support every company goal, nor should it. For example, content marketing can’t address some goals regarding your culture (improving staff morale) or costs (reducing overhead by 10 percent). Business goals encompass the entire company. Overall marketing goals support many of the revenue and product goals of the company. Content marketing goals help the company achieve some of the overall marketing goals. Learn more about writing SMART goals in this article . 

Content marketing goals should address specific questions: Why are you creating content? Who is your target audience? What story do you want to tell them?  What is the unique value and approach that your content can provide? What experience will your content offer your customers, and at which stage of their journey?

Your content marketing strategy rests at the intersection of speaking to your customers about their pain points and how your product solves their problem. The approach, tone, and look and feel of your content will be driven by how you want to speak to your customers and potential customers. 

Content strategy, and all content marketing, is a form of storytelling. Think of those fairy tales you heard as a child. There was a problem (a big bad wolf), a conflict (pigs who were trying to protect their homes from the wolf) and a solution (building a brick house to keep the wolf out, at least until he fell down the chimney).

Content strategy can follow a similar outline. The “plot” of your content follows the tried-and-true formula of beginning, middle, and end. Introduce the problem, explain the conflict, and offer a resolution. You’ll also want to consider these storytelling elements to shape your story:

• Characters: Who is having the problem? From personas to testimonials, you can put a face and voice to the situation.
• Setting: Where does the story happen? Is the problem at home, at work, outside, at a desk?
• Motivation: Why would someone want to solve this problem? Or is it simple enough to just walk away and leave the situation unresolved?
• Emotion: Memorable storytelling goes beyond the facts to highlight sorrow and joy.
• Connection: A good story makes the audience feel like they are included in the experience. The story relates to them in a real and personal way.

There’s one more benefit to your content strategy: Once you define your strategy and goals, you can create a culture of content throughout your organization. When everyone understands the value of the story of how your product connects to customers, more internal stakeholders will want to tell that story. The culture of content expands throughout your organization and influences the way you perceive your brand and the way your brand is perceived by your audience.

You can formalize and legitimize support for your content strategy by creating a stakeholder register. Identify the key stakeholders, their titles, and departments. Dig a little deeper by describing their roles in content creation and distribution. Interview the stakeholders to identify their expectations for content strategy, the ways they prefer communication as you move forward, and their influence on your strategy and execution. Read The Definitive Guide to Stakeholder Management for tips on how to develop a plan to keep them engaged in the process. 

Dig deep into the creation of your strategy. Use our project brief template to create an overview of your strategy. It will walk you step-by-step through setting goals, defining your audience, telling your story, allocating your budget, and more.  

Download Project Brief Template

Excel  |  Word  |  PDF

Step Three: Use Content Strategy Templates to Plan Out Production

Once you’ve done your research and identified the story you want to tell about your product, it’s time to plan the specifics of your content and how it will connect to your users. Here’s where you put all the information you’ve gathered into an action plan that generates results. 

‌ Download Content Marketing Strategy Creation Template

Your content strategy roadmap will ensure that every piece of content (blog, video, tweet, post) has a purpose and fits with your story. The roadmap will help you prioritize your efforts and assign resources in a way that keeps you and your team focused and successful. You’ll create a realistic plan that fits the time, staff, and budget of your team. Plus, you’ll be able to prioritize your efforts so your hard work generates the greatest results.

Now’s the time to review what is and isn’t working with your content. Identify what your content needs to succeed. With your content research in hand (from the Content Audit worksheet you’ve completed in step one) you can see what’s been successful and what hasn’t quite hit the mark. What makes a piece of content successful? Consider these elements:

• Social Shares and Comments

These metrics tell you if your content is easy to find, relevant to your audience, and timely. Other factors that can affect your content include how well it aligns with your brand and messaging, and whether it is easy to access across platforms (from smartphone to tablet to computer). Quality also matters. Is your content clear, easy-to-read, and free of grammar and spelling mistakes? Do your graphics have a professional polish to them? How quickly does the video load, and how long does it play? The easiest thing for any customer to do is click to another site. You want to provide an engaging and relevant experience.

You’ve now got guidelines for creating new content and what makes content successful. But what about existing content? Use your guidelines to decide what to keep in its current form, what needs revising to meet your new standards, and what you can delete or retire; then prioritize that long list of content assets. Now that you have a sense of the scope of your content, you can decide whether you want to create new content first, revise existing content, or scrap outdated assets that aren’t relevant to your strategy.

Now everyone in the organization, including all key stakeholders, can be on the same page about the kind of content you want and the story you want to tell. Armed with a shared vocabulary and mission, you continue to build a culture of content.

If you are putting existing content on a new site, you will need to develop a content migration plan. Manually entering all articles, images, infographics, white papers, and other content on a new site is time consuming, so you can work with the IT department and other teams to develop automation tools that import content to a new system.

Migrating Existing Content 

When you identify which content assets you’re revising, plan where you will revise them. Some organizations find it easier to work within an existing platform and then migrate the copy as part of a site-wide plan. Others prefer making the revisions on a new site because it helps their team learn how to use the new system.

By working across departments to build your migration plan, you reinforce the value of content marketing to your entire company. Use a content mapping template to create a plan.

Download Content Mapping Template

The Role of Personas and the Content Journey

Useful content takes your customers on a journey from awareness to action. The personas you created describe your potential customers and their pain points. Your content should guide them along the process of product discovery to the point of purchase. Remember, your content strategy is not a linear journey for many people - they may engage with your content in fits and starts until they are ready to make a purchase. Therefore, you need to map your content to all stages of the journey.

The content journey stages are similar to the traditional marketing funnel: awareness, interest, desire, and action. (Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed the concept in the 1800s. William H. Townsend built on the concept with the “marketing funnel” in 1924.) The stages are:

• Awareness: A person realizes the problem and knows about potential solutions, which you hope includes your product or service.
• Interest: A person is looking for the product or service that will solve the problem.
• Desire: A person is evaluating products to see which one best solves the problem.
• Action: A person decides whether your product is the best solution and buys it — or keeps looking at other options.

Your content map, which coordinates the persona with the stages of decision-making, will guide the tactical messaging for each piece of content you create. 

The Many Forms of Content

Content can take many forms, from blog posts to white papers, e-books, podcasts and more. Text can take many forms: You can even package basic copy as a blog post, a list, a how-to or guide. Regardless of the type of content you create, it should answer your customers’ questions, offer product highlights, and compare your solution to your competitors. Content lives on various pages on your site, including landing pages, feature pages, channel pages that aggregate content by theme or topic, or even microsites dedicated to a specific product or service. Each of those pages have different requirements. Here’s the most common types of content:

• Lists are a quick hit of highlights (think Buzzfeed).
• How-tos introduce a problem and help your reader solve it. Good how-tos offer step-by-step details that walk your reader through the solution.
• Questions and Answers (Q&A) follow a simple formula of asking then answering a question.
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) let you answer a wide range of your customers’ common questions in one place.
• Explainers imagine your customer asking “why,” and use the article to offer all kinds of information about why your product was developed.
• Case studies let your customers explain how your product solves their problem.
• Testimonials and quotes are shorter case studies that tell your story in the words of your customers.
• Interviews expand the voices in your content. Interviews may include your customers’ voices, but also feature thought leaders who can talk about industry trends and other valuable insight.
• Company news gives your customers an inside look at how your company makes decisions and responds to industry needs.
• Reviews provide some expert analysis of products, books, videos, and services that addresses the problem your customers are trying to solve. As a bonus, you can show your authority in the topic by sharing your expertise and recommendations.
• Roundups aggregate and curate what others are writing about the topic. You can offer one-stop shopping for people who are just starting their product journey with this type of content.
• Research illustrates your authority on the topic. Be careful to not get deep in the numbers. Highlight trends and takeaways for your readers.
• Newsletters and email campaigns push the content from your site to your customer’s in-box.
• Guides, e-books, and white papers provide your readers with in-depth coverage of a topic. This long-form content should be the definitive piece of information about a problem and possible solutions.
• Worksheets, checklists, and templates let your customers learn by doing. Turn your insights into action by giving your customers a way to work through their problem and solution.
• Infographics, diagrams, and data visualization help your customers see the solution through compelling graphics that walk them through your product.
• Video , like text, can take many forms, from an interview to a how-to or testimonial. Customers can also share video easily, which helps you grow your audience.
• Podcasts and audiobooks are a highly portable kind of content. People can listen to them on their commute, at the gym, or while working around the house.
• Webinars give your customers the chance to put a face to your product or brand. Use webinars to do everything from demonstrating your product to interviewing thought leaders.

Use this checklist to identify the type of content you want to create and the frequency at which you’ll distribute it:

Download Content Type Checklist

Excel  |  Word   |  PDF

Set a Schedule and Commit to It

Regardless of the format, each piece of content should convey a message that relates to your central theme or story. Not every call to action will be the same, and not all content covers every message (nor should it). But if you’ve created an overarching story that speaks to your mission, strategy and goals, then any piece of content should tell part of that story. As you create content, ask: How does this fit with our story?

Many marketers and advertisers follow a 70:20:10 model for prioritizing their content efforts. Typically, spend 70 percent of your time and money on efforts that already are successful. Spend the next 20 percent on improving or iterating on those efforts to attract a new audience. Finally, spend 10 percent experimenting with new ideas.

In addition to deciding and prioritizing your content, you also need to decide who will produce it, review it, publish it, monitor it and update it — and then make sure everyone knows who’s responsible at each stage. Communication among your team is critical for a smooth content marketing experience.

The content workflow outlines the process from idea to analytics, maps out who is responsible at each point, and estimates how long each step will take. Armed with this knowledge, you can identify the resources you have and the resources you need to execute your strategy. You can set realistic goals about the capacity of your team, and address any gaps that appear.

As you plan your content and workflow, you need a calendar to keep track of all the moving parts. While you may be able to plan a year’s worth of content at a time, you may find that executing on the vision is not practical. The calendar should be detailed enough for you to have a solid understanding of the coming days and weeks, with a longer view of the next quarter or a year at a glance. Calendars are useful tools for mapping out the big pieces at a 30,000-foot-view, and then seeing the details as the days and weeks unfold.

Download Editorial Calendar Template

One more thing: Calendars won’t do you much good if you are the sole keeper of the schedule. Make sure everyone on your team (and other stakeholders as needed) can see, share, and contribute to the calendar to keep them on track and give you a way to measure the work. Learn more about how to plan a marketing calendar in this article .  

Assembling A Content Team 

Armed with all this organized information, you can now identify your staffing plan: Who you will need on your team to create, evaluate, and monitor the work. Remember, a content marketing strategy starts with a vision. Typically, the person driving the content strategy is the company’s CMO. While not a member of your team, this person will set the direction that your efforts supports. The size of your content marketing team will depend on the size (and budget) of your company and the scope of your work. Some of these roles should be filled with staff, but you may consider using freelancers to fill in the gaps.

The head of your content marketing team can go by several titles: chief content officer, content strategist, managing editor. Regardless of the title, this person is responsible for defining the story behind your content, ensuring you deliver a consistent message, and supervising the creation and measurement of the team’s work. The strategist oversees the editorial calendar and serves as project manager who directs the other team members.

The writers and designers who produce your content work with the managing editor, as do those who curate outside content that can be repurposed for your company. Whether your team consists of internal employees, freelancers, or a mix of both, make sure they all have access to the editorial calendar and understand your audience personas. 

Make sure a second set of eyes reviews your content to ensure it meets your storytelling guidelines, follows a logical structure and flow, and avoids grammar and typographical errors. Some organizations hire editors who work with content creators. On some teams, the writers review one another’s work.

You’ll also want a community manager (sometimes called a chief listening officer or even a director of audience) to monitor feedback about your product or service. This is more than customer service: This person follows your content channels and monitors the conversations that will eventually shape future content. If one piece of content gets a lot of traction on social media, with outside influencers or in comments on your site, this person will offer insight into what’s working and why, and suggest ways to create more content that builds on your success. Following conversations about customers’ pain points, this person will be able to identify gaps that your content should fill. Ultimately, a community manager is your in-house expert on what’s resonating with your audience. Depending on your resources, you should consider adding a public relations or promotions person to work with your community manager. This person spends his or her time making connections, especially through social media, and may coordinate the messaging on your social channels.

Add an analytics expert to the team so you know what’s working, what can work better with a little revision, and where you need to change tactics. This can range from the timing of your email or blog posts, to conversion trends or SEO tactics. This is where you measure your work based on your SMART goals.

You’ll also need to tackle the technical aspects of publishing your content. Whether the writers and designers produce their work into your content management system (CMS) or someone else gathers the assets and publishes them, a team member needs to get the work in a form that your audience will find. If your business has other web assets, you may find a way to combine efforts across departments. You’ll also want someone who’s tracking the trends in technology so you can take advantage of the latest production tools, editorial calendars, and analytics services that help you succeed.

If you have the opportunity to choose a CMS, take the time to identify the functions you need. Are you publishing blog content? Do you need an e-commerce engine? Will you wall off some content in a members-only section? Do you need different white-label sections or microsites? Will you publish in multiple languages? Will one CMS handle all your content or should you consider a suite of tools and platforms? Because you’ve already mapped out your content strategy, you know the types of publishing the CMS will have to support. But you don’t need to make the decision alone. Take advantage of the opportunity to work with your IT department, and generate buy-in and support throughout the company for your content strategy.

One more consideration: If you have content in multiple languages (or plan to start creating content in multiple languages) you’ll need to develop standards for localization and translation. Valuable content that engages readers must be more than a blog post that has been translated in another language. First, it must be localized so that the information is culturally and professionally relevant to your audience based on the personas you develop. Once you localize that content, you can translate it for an international audience.

Governance Guidelines

Governance guidelines set the standards for your content and ensure a consistent experience for your audience. These guidelines spell out your brand, design, style, voice, metadata, and more. What do you consider the best practices for writing, design, and SEO? Spell it out for everyone who plays a role in creating and monitoring your content. You can’t effectively promote your product and business if your messaging and content doesn’t speak with one brand and voice. Your governance guidelines should include:

• Branding: These guides help designers, writers, and community managers present a unified look and feel to your audience, especially in terms of graphics and typography. Here are some examples of what a branding guide can include from Berkeley , Medium , and the American Red Cross . 
• Voice and Style: All your content should have the same distinctive tone, no matter who creates it. Imagine if your brand could speak: What words would you use to describe your brand’s presence and promise? Style is part of your brand’s voice. Think about the length of your sentences and paragraphs, tweets, and Facebook posts. Style extends to your internal guidelines around what you capitalize and hyphenate. “Make it easy on your readers,” says Mark Allen, the owner of Mark Allen Editorial and a board member of ACES: The Society for Editing. “Consistency provides clarity and inconsistency affects your credibility. Show readers that you care about what you’re doing.”
• Metadata: This is the “data about your data,” and it describes each piece of your content. Metadata will include the author’s name, the type of content, the date it was created, the size of the file, and so on. It helps readers find your content online. Develop a plan for what metadata you want to include in each asset and be consistent with capturing the information. This will improve your ability to track and report your traffic and audience engagement, so your team can focus on creating more content that resonates with readers.

As part of your governance strategy, you want to establish and stick to best practices for your content. Here are some suggestions for writing for the web.

• Write for the Reader: Use the words, vocabulary, and sentence structure that appeal to your personas. Stay away from jargon or too many abbreviations or acronyms.
• Write in Active Voice: Follow the “who did what” formula. (For example, “The dog bit the boy,” rather than “The boy was bitten by the dog.”)
• Be Relevant: Give readers the information and answers they are researching, and help them solve the problems you identified in your persona research.
• Be Concise: More and more customers are seeing your content on mobile devices and tablets. Don’t make them scroll or swipe too long to get to the point of your article.
• Offer a Call to Action (CTA): Tell your readers what you want them to do: Click a link, fill out a form, download a guide, or even buy your product.

All content marketers want their work to show up quickly when customers search for it. The search engines want users to successfully find what they want. So, search engines like Google and Bing continue to tweak the algorithms that deliver content. That means there are few hard-and-fast rules for search engine optimization. There are, however, guidelines to help your content stay relevant and easy-to-find.

• Write Clear and Consistent Tags and Descriptions: Title tags should include the keywords that your readers might be searching for, and meta descriptions should use those words in a way that readers would enter their query in a search engine. Your own guidelines should include preferences for title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and keyword phrases.
• Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Don’t repeat keywords for the sake of packing them in and trying to rank higher. Search engines are now programmed to devalue that duplication. Use keywords in ways that provide value to your audience without seeming overly spammy. You want readers to stay on your site, not bounce somewhere else.
• Don’t Forget Your Images: Use basic descriptions in your alt text for images, video, and other kinds of visual content. Search engines see these words when they are indexing your site. And this makes your site more accessible for the visually impaired, which helps you reach a larger audience.

Step Four: Plan Your Promotion

Now that you’ve got a plan for creating and publishing your content, you need a plan to promote it beyond your website. You can share or talk about your content through a range of external channels, including social platforms, thought leaders who see the value in your work, and the communities that talk about the problems your products and services solve. Just like you’ve created priorities with your content, you need to set priorities for your promotion. Not every piece of content gets equal promotion on all channels. The value of your content (or product or service) drives the amount of effort you put into promotion. Consider using the following tactics:

• Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+ are great ways to reach your audience and build relationships. Create different versions of your content, mix it with a variety of images, and you’ll reach a wider and more diverse audience.
• Paid Media: This includes paid social and native advertising. Before you commit budget dollars to this, make sure you know what results you expect so you can measure the ROI.
• Influencers: In the research phase of your content strategy, you identified thought leaders and influencers who guide the conversation for your personas. Consider reaching out to them to share or contribute to your content.
• Outreach: Niche communities gather online to talk about the pain points your product addresses. Join in the conversation where they gather.  
• Push Notifications and Short Message Service (SMS): Depending on how your audience likes to consume content, consider getting on the most valuable real estate of your customers: The front of their mobile phones. However, don’t overwhelm with an onslaught of messages.
• Repurpose Content: You can republish a blog post on Medium, turn a slide deck into a shareable presentation using SlideShare, or put your video on YouTube. Make sure to link back to your site so you can measure what audiences you’re reaching on these platforms.

Outline your promotion plan with content distribution checklist.

Download Content Distribution Checklist

Promotion succeeds with planning and tracking. You’ll want a calendar to track your promotional efforts and measure their effectiveness. This process can be part of your overall editorial calendar, but you may find it more effective to keep a separate promotions calendar. A schedule helps you see what you’re sharing, especially on social, and it helps you assign and monitor the workflow.

Consider a couple of workflow approaches, depending on the size of your team. Either the person producing the content can produce the related posts and tweets, or you can devote separate staff to handle promotions. Either way, make sure you have guidelines for the writing and visual look of these efforts. And, of course, you’ll want to track your efforts and tweak your plans based on what’s working — and what’s not.

Step Five: Measure Your Efforts

Don’t rely on your gut or anecdotal evidence to feel successful. Refer to your SMART goals so you can measure the impact of your hard work. Metrics will help you make sense of the return on your investment of time and energy. Just like there are a variety of ways to publish and promote your content, there are a wide range of tools and approaches to measure your work. Prioritize the information that gives you clear takeaways so you can use it to improve your work and grow your success.

Numbers need to be tracked consistently and at intervals that provide context. A jump in 24 hours may not mean much, or it could mean you have killer content. Compare similar time frames to avoid false reporting.

Measure Content Production

Track how your readers touch your content with content scoring. Assign each content type a point value. You can base this on the personas you are trying to attract, the depth of the content, the call to action, or other responses you want to evoke. The efforts you value more should be given higher point totals. Then, combine your analytics with the point totals and see what’s really working. The data will let you compare your assumptions about your audience with their behaviors. You will quickly identify which content you should keep producing.

Measure Content Quality/Consistency and Improve as Needed

Readers value high-quality, consistent content. Some of your governance guidelines will help you maintain those standards when creating content. But you can also review your content later to see if it has the anticipated impact. One way to start that process is to conduct another content audit. Look at the traffic and audience, see how well each article has performed since publication, whether you need to update or delete it, and if there are gaps since the last audit.

Take a look at what’s popular - is it top 10 posts, top categories, top authors, or another content type? Pick a timeframe and a format and see what content gets the highest numbers. Identify the elements that draw traffic. You could add these pointers to your governance guidelines. As a bonus, you can repurpose well-performing top 10 lists into a new post to promote older content.

Use Google Analytics to see your top landing pages and your top exit pages. These metrics will help you identify what content is drawing traffic and, more important, what content drives traffic away.

Measure Engagement and Performance

From traffic to views, links, and shares, a multitude of numbers can provide insight into your content’s performance. Since you’ve established your goals, you can identify the data points that tell the story of your content. Here are some KPIs to consider:

• Awareness: Web traffic, page views, video and slideshow views, social chatter, search results
• Engagement: Time spent on site, heat maps, bounce rate, blog comments, likes/shares/tweets, forwards, inbound links, return traffic
• Lead generation: Form completions, e-book or guide downloads, email or blog subscribers, followers
• Sales: Completed purchases, online sales, offline sales, conversion rates, time to close the sale
• Customer Retention and Loyalty: Percent of content consumed by existing customers, return rates, search queries, customer support
• Upsell and Cross-Sell: Revenue from upsell, sales for new products

Learn more about KPI dashboards by reading All About KPI Dashboards . Get started tracking your KPIs with the free worksheet below.

Download KPI Tracker Worksheet

Excel  |  PDF  

Measure Content ROI

Any successful business focuses on the return on investment (ROI) for every initiative and product line, which includes the overall marketing department as well as content marketing. Before you measure your ROI, understand how your company measures success and how your success is aligned with the overall marketing goals.

You can provide some key numbers because you have created a thoughtful and well researched content marketing strategy. You know how much time it takes from idea to content creation to analytics. You know how effectively you are reaching your goals — not just revenue goals, but engagement and brand awareness. Now it’s a matter of communicating the return on the investment.

Every touch of your contact has a value. You may start with some simple numbers such as Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL). You can calculate the value of a subscriber to your blog or newsletter, and the sales you generate from those leads. If you follow these steps and use the free content strategy templates in this article, you are well on your way to achieving your content marketing goals. 

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The 10-Step Guide for a Successful Strategy Presentation

Discover essential steps and best practices in 'How to Write a Strategy Presentation.' Elevate your approach and effectively communicate your strategic vision with our comprehensive guide.

StrategyPunk

Introduction

Have you ever been trapped in the quicksand of a never-ending strategy presentation?

We've all been there, nodding off while someone drones on.

Now, picture this: a room hanging onto your every word, eyes lit with interest.

Impossible?

Think again. Plunge into our fresh guide, and you'll transform from a presenter to a storyteller.

It’s time for your audience to listen and be utterly captivated.

How to Write a Strategy Presentation: 10 Steps

1. set the stage right.

You wouldn’t host a grand ball without knowing who’s attending, right?

In the same way, before you even think of diving into your content, please know your audience.

Are they tech wizards or old-school board members? Millennials or Baby Boomers?

Customize your talk to resonate with them. Understand their needs, their pain points, and their aspirations.

Connect on a personal level, and half your battle is already won. 🎯

2. Define Your Mission

Imagine embarking on a road trip without a map.

A strategy presentation without a clear mission is almost the same – directionless and meandering.

So, ask yourself: Why are you here? What's the core message?

Once you have that clarity, your path becomes straightforward. Trust me, your audience will thank you for it.

3. Craft an Unforgettable Opening

First impressions?

They’re everything. You have 60 seconds to grab your audience's attention, so make those seconds count.

A quirky quote, a compelling statistic, or even a personal anecdote – choose a relevant and riveting opener. It’s the appetizer to your main course.

Make sure it's tantalizing!

4. Break Down the Core

a. Highlight the Issue:

Every story needs a conflict.

In your strategy presentation, this is the issue or challenge at hand.

Paint a vivid picture. Make them see what’s going awry.

But remember, no doom and gloom—just honest, relatable content.

b. Showcase Your Solution:

Now, for the hero of our story – your solution. Get straight to the point.

How will your idea transform the current scenario?

Make your key the shining beacon. Sell not just the picture but the dream.

c. Unveil the Game Plan:

So, you’ve hooked them with the problem and dazzled them with your solution.

The roadmap: Walk them through the how. Detail the journey, step by step, action by action. Make it tangible. Make it achievable.

5. Elevate with Design

Yes, content is king. But design?

It’s the crown. Incorporate visuals that speak. Charts, infographics, images – let them do the heavy lifting. Remember, a picture's worth a thousand words, but a relevant picture?

That’s gold. And hey, always lean into simplicity. Less is more, especially on slides. 🖼️

6. Weave in Stories

Facts need to be remembered. Stories? They stick.

Weave in anecdotes that resonate. Personal tales, success stories, or even fictional scenarios – a narrative touch can bring your presentation alive. Make it relatable.

Could you make it memorable? After all, who doesn't love a good story?

7. Get Them Talking

No one enjoys a monologue. You can turn your presentation into a dialogue.

Ask questions. Seek opinions. Maybe even throw in a mini poll or quiz. Engage them.

The more involved they are, the more invested they become. It's the difference between passive listeners and active participants.

8. Wrap it Up with Pizzazz

You're nearing the end. This is where you cement all you've shared.

Highlight the key points and end with a zinger. It could be a call to action, a memorable quote, or a challenge.

Leave them thinking, reflecting, and wanting more.

9. Rehearse to Perfection

You've crafted this masterpiece. Now, could you give it the respect it deserves?

Know each slide, each transition, and each pause. Familiarize yourself with the flow. The more comfortable you are with the material, the more confidently you'll deliver.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, captivates an audience more than genuine confidence.

10. After the Applause: Your Next Moves

The applause fades—the room empties.

But your job? It still needs to be done. Show gratitude. A simple thank you can work wonders. Would you be willing to share your presentation or additional resources?

And always, always be open to feedback. It’s the breakfast of champions, after all.

Crafting a killer strategy presentation isn’t about big words or fancy jargon. It’s about connection, clarity, and confidence. You’ve got the palette, brush, and canvas.

Now, could you paint your masterpiece? 🎨

Remember, strategy presentations are not just about informing. It’s about transforming.

So, go ahead and inspire change—illuminate minds. And make a lasting impact.🚀

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Bonus: Your Strategy Presentation Success Checklist

Please ensure that your strategy presentation is top-notch with our concise Success Checklist.

This list will guide you through each crucial step for impactful delivery, from understanding your audience to gathering feedback post-presentation.

Your trusty companion for every presentation!

• Audience insights in place.
• Is the Mission crystal clear? ✔️
• Powerful start rehearsed.
• Core content organized.
• Engaging visuals ready.
• Personal story integrated.
• Interactive segment prepped.
• Strong conclusion framed.
• Feedback channels open.

Xpeng SWOT Analysis: Free PPT Template and In-Depth Insights (free file)

Unlock key insights into Xpeng with our free SWOT analysis PPT template. Dive deep into its business dynamics at no cost.

Strategic Insights 2024: A SWOT Analysis of Nestle (Plus Free PPT)

Explore Nestle's strategic outlook with our SWOT analysis for 2024. This PowerPoint template highlights key areas for growth and challenges.

2024 Business Disruption: Navigating Growth Through Shaping Strategy

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Building Strategy Consulting Slide Decks: The Complete Guide

Table of contents.

There’s something different about slide decks from strategy consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain or BCG . For some reason, they just seem more convincing. But it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes those presentations good.

As a strategy consultant, you very quickly realize there are two important components of a compelling strategy presentation:

• The ‘thinking’. This is the rigorous problem definition, analysis, synthesis, and insight that happens before you open up PowerPoint. Without this, even the most well-crafted strategy presentation lacks impact.
• The presentation.  This is the distinctive, structured, and clear way that strategy consultants build their slide decks. Without this, even the most powerful insights lose their force.

In this guide, we show you how to do both those things. In chapters 1-3, we discuss how to structure your slide deck, define your objective, and craft a compelling argument and storyline.

Then in chapters 4-6, we show you best practices for building your slides and reviewing your slide deck.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have the ability to craft a compelling strategy slide deck with a clear and compelling storyline that leads your audience to your desired conclusion.

Structure your slide deck

Before we get into the detail of building your slide deck, it’s important to understand how to structure your presentation.

There is a common structure that is used for almost all strategy presentations. It’s based on a concept known as the Pyramid Principle , which was popularized by Barbara Minto at McKinsey & Co.

According to Minto, there are three components to a well-constructed slide deck:

• The executive summary: Provides the reader a full summary of the argument and recommendations within your slide deck for readers that are more interested in the ‘so what’ than the detailed analysis.
• The body slides: Illustrates the analysis that supports each claim you make in your slide deck’s argument and thus slide objective.
• Next steps or recommendations slides:  Clearly outlines the key implications or ‘so what’ of your slide deck, as well as any next steps required.

In this guide, we will walk you through how to tackle each of these sections one by one. But first, we start by setting the objective of your slide deck, and crafting your argument and storyline.

Define the objective of your deck

Let’s start at the beginning. The purpose of your slide deck isn’t to show off all the things you know… or how great you are at analysis… or how beautiful your slides are.

Instead, the purpose of your slide deck is to persuade your audience and lead them to an objective. And, as the author of the slide deck, you need to set the objective before you start building your slide deck.

Having a clear objective for your slide deck is important for a number of reasons:

• It helps you focus your research and analysis on things that are relevant to your objective.
• You can quickly test the quality of your content by testing whether it is sufficient to achieve your objective.
• It helps inform the tone and positioning of the messages in your slides.

Your objective can take many forms. For example, it could be simply to inform your audience, to gain endorsement for a decision, or to achieve a specific action or next step.

As the author of the slide deck, you must ensure that the objective is clear and agreed upon. All the work that you’re about to do to build your slide deck is guided by your objective.

Craft the argument and storyline

Now that you’ve determined the objective of your slide deck, you need to craft an argument and storyline that leads to your objective.

To some extent, your slide deck’s argument will naturally appear from insights gathered through research and analysis. As you conduct research, you’ll slowly uncover the “real state of affairs”, which will be supported by data.

It’s your job to translate this argument into a compelling story; one that grabs the attention of your reader and communicates your argument in a clear and easy-to-understand way.

To do this, you should use a situation-complication-resolution storyline .

This is a universal structure; it’s used in books, plays, films, advertising, religion, politics, and more. It looks something like this:

• The scene is set and the characters are introduced (situation)
• Something goes wrong (complication)
• They fix the problem and live happily ever after (resolution)

When storytelling in PowerPoint, you should use the same structure. But in the context of your slide deck, your storyline will look something like:

• This thing is important  (situation)
• There is a problem with this thing  (complication)
• Therefore, we need to respond — and here is how  (resolution)

The dot-dash structure

Writing a storyline for your presentation doesn’t happen in PowerPoint. In fact, you don’t open up PowerPoint until you’re completely satisfied with your storyline.

Instead of jumping into PowerPoint, you start by writing out your storyline in a text document using the dot-dash structure .

By writing your slide deck’s storyline in a text document, you can easily identify any faulty or missing logic in your story and ensure that you have the data required to support each claim you make.

And when you’re completely satisfied with your storyline, you can move it into PowerPoint. Your storyline should be communicated in the slide lead-ins, like so:

And once you’ve built the skeleton of your slide deck with the storyline communicated “horizontally” across the leads-ins, you’re ready to start building individual slides and the “vertical flow”.

Build body slides

Before you jump into building individual slides, there are two main components of slides that you need to understand:

• The lead-in:  The text at the top of your slide. This should be written as an action title that communicates the implication or ‘so what’ of the slide, not describes the content of the slide.
• The slide body:  The content of your slide. You should only communicate one insight per slide and choose the simplest method possible.

There is a close relationship between the slide lead-in and slide body. And this relationship is best explained by the Golden Rule of slide building.

The Golden Rule of slide building is:

“One slide, one insight, fully articulated in the lead-in, and supported by the body”

In other words, each slide should only communicate one insight. That insight should be fully explained in words in the lead-in, and fully supported by data in the slide body.

In addition, there should be nothing in the lead-in that’s not in the body, and nothing in the body that’s not in the lead-in.

Data, charts, and other quantitative slides

Claims that are supported by data are naturally more compelling than claims supported by ‘expert’ opinions, focus groups, and other qualitative evidence.

Therefore, where possible, you should always prioritize quantitative slides over qualitative slides.

But don’t go overboard with your data visualization. Sometimes it can be tempting to show off our technical skills by choosing the most complex visualization available. This is bad practice.

Instead, you should always choose the simplest chart to demonstrate your insight. But it can be tricky to determine which chart to use. So we’ve put together a simple decision tree to ensure that you always choose the most appropriate chart for your data .

Text, conceptual, and other qualitative slides

There are some insights that simply cannot be communicated with charts or data. In these cases, you need to find the most appropriate conceptual chart.

Unlike qualitative slides, there are no simple guides for text and conceptual slides. And because of this, the ability to craft well-structured conceptual slides is the mark of a skilled consultant.

It’s surprisingly tricky to be able to communicate a qualitative insight in a clear and structured visual manner. The best way to build the skill is to practice. But you can also learn by exploring common qualitative slides used by strategy consultants .

Download 120+ strategy consulting presentations for free

Looking for slide inspiration? Download 120+ consulting slide decks from top strategy consulting firms, such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain!

Write the executive summary

An executive summary slide is the first slide in your presentation but the last slide you build.

The executive summary slide fully summarizes the argument, storyline, and supporting evidence of the body slides. Because we already need to have finished every other part of the slide deck, we write it last.

Executive summary slides help the reader “follow along” with your slide deck. There are a few main benefits:

• They provide context to help the reader understand why the topic of the slide deck is important.
• They communicate the high-level argument before the reader gets into the body of the slide deck. This helps the reader understand your more detailed body slides.
• They are a “map” that the reader can reference back to if they start losing the line of argument in the body of the deck.

A typical executive summary looks something like the following slides, which are from a BCG report on “Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination” and can be downloaded here .

Good executive summaries follow three best practices:

• They are structured with bolded text for summary sentences and bullet points for supporting data. This ensures that every claim is clearly supported by data.
• The bolded summary sentences can be read alone to tell the slide’s storyline (i.e. you don’t need to read the supporting data in the bullet points).
• The bolded summary sentences reflect the SCR storyline structure of the slide deck

One other good practice (that you don’t see in the BCG example) is to reference the associated body slide throughout the executive summary. This helps direct a reader to the detailed analysis behind every claim in the executive summary.

Review your slide deck

Now that you’ve finished building all your slides and writing your executive summary, it’s time to review and finalize your slide deck.

There are three things that you need to check as you review your slide deck:

• Chart completeness : Check that your charts are comprehensively labeled, including chart titles, axis labels, units, time periods, etc.
• Text brevity : Review your slide text, including your lead-ins, and ensure that you make your points with the minimum number of words possible.
• Slide consistency : Review your slides and ensure that there is consistent formatting across the slides.

Reviewing your charts and visualizations

There’s a surprising amount of detail contained in charts and it’s quite easy to forget to key include key information.

Some examples of common charting mistakes include missing chart titles, labels, axes, units, dates, and legends. You should also consider how you highlights the implication of your charts.

To make this easier, you should use a charting checklist to methodically cross-reference your chart with best practice.

Refining your slide text

There’s an important place for text in slides. Not only can your use text to provide important context to support your visualizations, but also to communicate insights without data.

Most people use too many words in their slides. They tend to use fancy “consulting speak” or long, verbose explanations that actually obsure their message.

As you review your slide deck, you should review all of the text in your slides and savagely sharpen your text by removing unnecessary words .

Ensuring consistency across slides

Finally, you should use your last review to check for consistency across slides.

Start by ensuring that the formatting is consistent. For example, your slide format, spacing, fonts and slide numbers should all be consistent across the slides.

And then finish your review by ensuring all concepts are communicated consistently across slides. For example, if you’ve numbered or colored concepts a certain way, then ensure that they remain consistent throughout your slide deck.

How to Create a Social Media Strategy Presentation

After creating a social media strategy, you need to make the case to stakeholders and your team. Learn how to create a social media strategy presentation today!

Learn about our

Updated March 6, 2024.

In the early days as the first social media marketing hire at a design agency in 2021, I found myself thrust into unfamiliar territory, including creating a social media strategy presentation. I felt uncertain and clueless about what to do with the blank Google sheet the co-founder had shared with me. 

I realized I was one of the many grappling with how to create social media presentations. This led me to learn that social strategy goes beyond having a content calendar, posting three times a day, or finding the best time to post. 

In this article, I'll unravel all the steps you need to create a social media strategy presentation in 2024.

How to create a social media strategy presentation

Creating a great social media strategy presentation includes the following steps:

1. Set SMART goals

Goals help you track and measure your brand's social media progress and understand shortcomings in your strategy.

SMART Goals are popular for a reason: they work.

According to the Sprout Social index, 60% of marketers in 2024 plan to connect the value of social to business goals by quantifying the value of social engagement in terms of potential revenue impact.

Take note of the term “Business goals."

But let me take you on a ride to the world of psychology first. If you want to give your brain a decent chance of meeting a goal, productivity folk wisdom insists that it better be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Based .

Here's how you set and document SMART goals when creating a social media strategy presentation:

Let's say your not-yet-SMART social media goal is to take your brand or client's online presence to a greater height in 2024. Let's make it SMART!

• Specific : "To a greater height in 2024" is a vague goal. Be more specific instead, like "Improve audience engagements by X% on all platforms, by the end of 2024, by creating content consistently."
• Measurable : Can you track your goals? Are there key performance indicators to ensure your social media content strategy gets you closer to your goal? If you want to take a brand's social media presence to greater heights, set benchmarks on things like engagement metrics or follower rates. So instead you could say: "10x social media presence by earning at least 200-500 monthly followers on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter."
• Achievable : Goals are achievable when within the range of possibilities. Using the same example of boosting followers, if you know it's impossible to earn that number of followers within a month, come up with an achievable figure. The social media game involves consistency, persistence, and incremental improvements, so set goals accordingly.
• Relevant : The relevance of social media goals is a measure of the positive impact they leave on your brand. It can be a financial result, more visibility, or something tied to the fulfillment of your unique value proposition. So, before you document, ask yourself if each is goal relevant to your business's purpose. Is your social media marketing plan actually helping the business reach more potential customers and moving the needle on overall business goals?
• Time-based : "The end of 2024" is not specific. When exactly do you want to achieve your goal? For instance, maybe you want to reach out to 50 potential clients per month. That's a time-based goal, but still vague. A better version "I will send at least 12 cold DMS per week" gives you the kind of actionable insight into your strategy that business owners want to see.

2. Choose relevant metrics

 (Source) 

Goal setting doesn't determine the result. The results of your social media marketing efforts are the sum of your decisions and consistent execution.

And while taking these actions, bit by bit, you need to track them to ensure continuous improvement in your results.

“What metrics should I be looking at? What should I be tracking? How often should I look at Analytics?” are three key questions every good social media manager or social team asks themselves when penning down the metrics for a social media strategy.

When choosing metrics, Andy Crestodina recommends two factors:

• The visibility of the metric – Is the metric easy to find? Is it available to the public? Do you need tools? Or do you need to research to uncover it?
• The importance of the metric – Does the metric correlate with business success? Is it likely to affect financial outcomes?

Here are some relevant metrics to look out for in your social media marketing outcomes in 2024:

• Follower count/growth rate
• Awareness metrics (i.e. impressions and views)
• Referral traffic
• Conversion rates
• Click-through rates
• Cost per click

Remember that metrics vary from one business and one strategy to another. To get the best outcomes, focus on what counts: your brand's visibility and revenue.

3. Describe your audience

The next step in your social media strategy presentation planning is to describe your audience.

A target audience is a more specific term describing a particular group of people you're trying to reach with your social content plan.

Take audience research seriously. Bad audience targeting is the cause of many brand failures. Without a target audience in mind, you’re going to get little to no engagement on any social media campaign you launch.

To increase your social media marketing conversions, figure out who exactly is your primary target audience, what they want, what matters to them, and what are the sources of friction for them.

And if you say your social media target audience is “everybody” or “anyone interested in your services,” you don’t have much of a chance to boost conversions.

I like how, Rakefet Yacoby, CMO at Mayple puts it in an article on audience targeting :

“Your audience can be wide (e.g. if you sell napkins, everyone uses them, so your target audience will be quite broad) or it can be a narrow market segment (e.g. you might be selling makeup-removing wipes for people with a specific skin condition/type of skin).”

Describe your audience with these five simple questions:

• Who are they? Who are the people you're trying to reach with your content? Simple and Obvious question, but you'd be surprised how many businesses fail to answer it by either aiming for too broad or too specific of an audience.
• Where do they look to find information online? There's no point in publishing content on a social channel if your ideal audience isn't there.
• What are their biggest challenges or desires? Understanding your audience's fears and dreams makes it easier to present your solution.
• Pro tip 💡 Why.  Conduct interviews to get an even better understanding of your intended audience. Choose three to five current customers and ask questions like "How did you hear about us?" and "What made you buy from us?"

4. Conduct a competitive analysis

Competitor analysis is all about understanding your position in the marketplace about your competition.

As you conduct this analysis for your social media marketing, pinpoint who your competitors are. It's often helpful to compare notes with other team members, particularly in the sales or business development departments, who have often have insider industry knowledge. You can add parallel companies, who may not be direct competitors, to the list as well if their strategy has caught your eye.

Take an in-depth look at their posts on all of the platforms they use, noting content performance, what kind of content has the maximum engagement, their use of user-generated content, how much visual content they post, and so on. 

Try to spot the strengths and weaknesses in their strategy. Seeing what works for your competitors can help you identify gaps in your strategy; the gaps in their strategy, meanwhile, are opportunities for you to shine. Now you're ready to make data-backed decisions with some serious inspo.

Here's how to conduct competitive analysis when planning your social media strategy:

• List your strong competitors
• Identify their social media strategy by observing their campaigns, how they engage with their audience, and the format and frequency of their posts
• Take note of their top-performing content. Is there a pattern in their highest-performing pieces of content? For example, are they in one specific medium (video, infographic, written content)?
• Find the Points of Difference (PODs): PODs are the features that are important to your prospects and not available from your competitors

5. Run a social media audit

A social media audit involves reviewing your business's social presence point-by-point. This includes performance metrics and future opportunities to grow and optimize your accounts.

With social media audits, you can sieve out irrelevant tactics and get concrete answers to your troubling questions.

Here’s how to run a social media audit in five simple steps:

• Document and take an inventory of all your brand’s social media profiles. This includes every platform where you have a business presence of any kind – yes, even that Facebook page that's been neglected recently. Ensure the consistency of your marketing messages and note the follower count for each profile.
• Look at the analytics dashboard of each profile to find the percentage of impressions, likes, new follower count, and clicks. You can also use a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social. With these analytics reports, you can dig into your demographic data, geographic data, and company data.
• Note your social media brand style and assets. One of the most important steps in a social media audit process is to check the styling of your posts, color, consistency of brand style, and your bio. Your brand assets on social media including your link in bio must correlate to your unique value proposition.
• Analyze your top-performing posts and marketing campaigns, and try to find out why they performed so well. Document the reactions of your audience to those posts and find out how you can work on future posts to get the same results.

6. Include social media listening notes

Listen first. Talk later.

What are your customers saying about you? Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitor brands, and related keywords.

Monitoring conversations and discussions around the industry gives you important insights about what’s working, and what’s not, for your target audience.

One tactic is to join communities where your target audience hangs out and listen to what they're saying about your competitors and the different solutions offered in your industry. You can also swipe through comments on your posts or mentions of your brand and pick through the good and bad reviews.

Use audience research tools like SparkToro to find topics your audience is discussing, discover relevant influencers in your niche, and see which websites your target customers hang out on.

7. Talk about the chosen channels

There are many social channels you can choose from: Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and more. Prioritize identifying the right channels for your business when deploying organic social or paid social marketing.

There's been a lot of debate surrounding the maximum number of channels that should be chosen by a brand. The rule of thumb is to stick to what you can manage, optimize, and analyze.

Social media platforms with a high population base don't cut it if your audience doesn't reside there. For example, Facebook is the most used social media platform in the world in terms of monthly active users (MAUs). Over 3 billion people log into the platform each month. But if they're logging on to stay in touch with family abroad, they're likely less receptive to brand messaging that would work on, say Linkedin.

So if you're targeting C-suite leaders and professionals in different industries, Facebook impressive stats won't be relevant to your digital marketing strategy. Don't forget to make this important point in your social media PowerPoint presentation.

8. Explain paid media involvement

During economic downturns, companies that focus on social media growth plan investments tend to outperform their rivals when markets recover.

 Social media ads let you invest money into different social media channels to increase your brand awareness and revenue. Your paid media efforts can fall into three content pillars or buckets per RefineLabs on the philosophy of Paid media :

• Product ads : These ads specifically tout the product/solution in some way and drive directly to a declared-intent page on your website.
• Content : These ads are primarily focused on fostering education and awareness at a higher level and may drive to a thought leadership blog post, third-party article, or other lower-intent content piece.
• Social proof : These ads specifically aim to affirm prospective buyers by highlighting case studies, ROI data, and/or industry recognition.

Explain each of these buckets, with a budget breakdown to explain the cost of each paid media practice (more on that next!).

Need to make sure your social content is on point? Hire a Mayple-vetted social media content freelancer . Just get in touch with us and we'll match you with the perfect one.

9. Do a budget breakdown

Did you know that the average US organization spends anything between $72,000 and $126,000 on social media services?

Even in the low range, that's a lot to leave to chance – if you don’t want to waste money, that is. This is precisely why building a sensible social media budget is crucial to your success.

A social media budget can help you set the right goals, expectations, and KPIs for your organization. With a budget in place, you know exactly what your organization can afford to do and how much it will cost. Include:

• Costs associated with advertising, including pay-per-click campaigns and sponsored posts
• Fees for the use of paid social media management tools
• Costs associated with content creation, such as contracting freelance writers and graphic designers
• Fees for influencer campaigns
• Costs associated with analytics and reporting tools
• Any other expenses related to the social media activities of your organization

10. Show inspiration

Be sure to include in your social media marketing strategy presentation examples of successful strategies that you're looking to mirror. Successes can be broken down into factors such as general strategies that make big brands win, or the consistency of their approach.

No brand is an island. Every strategy that exists today has always been around in one form or another. So use other brands as inspiration. And as for you, the leader of social media marketing operations, you can strive to be an inspiration to your colleagues.

Here are three ways to show inspiration:

Success stories

The social media marketing success of a brand is never an accident. It's a sum of goals, executions, plans, and consistency. And maybe a bit of luck here and there, just kidding.

One of the best ways to convince the C-suite leadership at your brand that social media marketing works is to show them success stories. With these stories, they can believe that these strategies and frameworks have worked.

But you must bring clarity at this point of your presentation:

• Note the success stories of brands ahead of you and make it clear that patience is key to getting these results.
• Don't overframe the early results of a brand. Yours might not be the same. So, make sure every story is achievable and believable, yet convincing.

You can get success stories from:

• Meta, on Advertising success from various brands
• Drum, on social media success stories and case studies
• MarketingSherpa, 1789 marketing case studies and counting

For example, Sprout Social did an in-depth analysis of how Duolingo rose to fame using TikTok. Looking for similar examples will help you make your case in front of the leadership, get their buy-in, and get approval for your budgets. 

Awarded accounts

Check award-winning accounts in your niche to serve as inspiration and motivation for your brand to build systems that result in successful outcomes.

Favorite brands

Highlight your favorite brands in terms of where you want to be or that get outstanding results. These brands can serve as references and motivation.

Identify areas where they dominate your presentation document. Ideally, it'd be great to make a list of these brands based on their dominance on each of your preferred channels.

11. Explain the division of responsibility (Explain the “Crawl, walk, run plan”)

Division of responsibility is one of the keys to success in an organization, especially when you are not a one-man marketing team. Just as every child progresses from crawling to walking and then running, lead your social media marketing team to each of these phases via coaching, teaching, and mentoring.

The crawling approach would be explaining to your team the why of your social media strategy. Review every step of the process and their roles throughout.

So, for example, you can explain to your founder or C-suite team their social media roles, and why it's important to take LinkedIn posting seriously. You can provide the steps to take to ensure they authentically support the company brand using their personal brand.

Then use the walk approach to supervise the first set of executions. You can help with post scheduling and supervise content creation for all profile pages, especially if an in-house team member or freelancer handles it.

In the run phase, your team is fully functioning with the social media marketing practice. They operate with greater confidence and at full speed, under your regular supervision.

This is an example of a crawl-walk-run framework for an eCommerce business:

12. Create a content calendar sketch

A content calendar helps you with efficient workflow and a consistent posting schedule.

I spoke to Susan Anderson , an editorial director with decades of experience handling content publishing, and she listed a couple of steps to create a content calendar sketch.

Firstly, she believes that it's key to understand your audience and your content creation capabilities.

She also highlights the benefits of knowing your asset library and keeping things simple and clear. Start by either creating a Google spreadsheet, or using project management tools like Trello, Airtable, and Notion

Then add columns that include:

• Topic/pillar: the topic for each social media post and content
• Content formats: for example video, image, carousel or podcast
• Frequency/Time of posting: Keep this realistic and relevant. You might want to leave Saturday and Sunday out from the calendar, for example
• Keywords (if you're aiming for SEO) and hashtags: note down keywords and hashtags relevant to your industry. Input these keywords in your post so your content can get more traction
• Channels: Write down social media platforms where you'd be posting your content
• Working/finalized title: A headline for every post
• CTA: Plan the action you want your audience to take after they consume your post
• Date to Publish: Write down the expected date of publishing each post
• Status: Make a status section for each post, from ideation to publishing
• Notes: If you have brief notes of insights for your team, add them!

Pro tip : If you want all of this taken care of for you, consider our list of top  social media managers for hire .

Best practices for a compelling social media strategy presentation

Now that you have the plan nailed down, here are some best practices for a good social media strategy deck:

Build a natural flow

Structure is everything in presentations. If you don't organize your goals, frameworks, and strategies hierarchically, you'll be unable to convince your executives. The first step is building a natural flow, ensuring that every part of your social media marketing strategy makes sense to the preceding point.

Use a mix of text, images, illustrations, and tables. If you are not speaking out loudly while presenting, make sure you make your presentation easy to read and understand.

Leave room for Q&As

Give room for questions, corrections, and suggestions. Executive leaders may have concerns, reservations, and skepticism about certain strategy elements.

With these Q&As, clarification on aspects of the social media strategy that may not be clear would be more clear. After your presentation, ask questions like: how can we improve our strategy? What do you think is missing in this strategy?

Use enticing graphics

Your social media strategy doesn't have to be a long block of text on a big table. You can use illustrations and graphics to explain terms like audience journey mapping, buyer persona, and content creation.

Looking for a social media strategy template? 

We got you. Check out our free social media worksheet . It includes everything you need to turn your 2024 social media marketing strategy into a winning one. 

Leave room for experimentation

We thrive in an ever-evolving landscape and trends come and go. Emphasizing experimentation signals that you are committed to learning and innovation. You can discover new and unexpected opportunities for engagement, follower growth, and conversion rates.

Keep it simple

Prioritize the most important things. Don't complicate your presentation, keep the structure simple and clear. Otherwise, no matter how great your social media marketing plan is, it might fall on deaf ears.

The best social media marketing presentation starts with the strategy

Your social media marketing presentation needs to be more than just a pretty slide deck. It needs to be grounded in a solid strategy that aligns with your business goals.

Social media marketing goals, social media metrics, the types of content you choose to publish, and every social media post itself should all be rooted in one question: how do you reach your ideal customer, get their attention, and make them love your online presence so much they buy from you? 

If you need help drawing up an efficient social media marketing strategy, reach out today. We can match you with a vetted social media marketer with experience in your industry, audience demographics, and the specific type of social media efforts you want to employ. 

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