Why You Need a Content Strategy Template

It can be easy to get caught up in content marketing and just start producing as much content as possible as quickly as possible. But this is a temptation that’s important to avoid, and here’s why:

When you create content without a specific goal or strategy in mind, it becomes super difficult to track where content is performing well and how it’s driving your overall business goals. 

To prevent this problem before it even begins, you need a content strategy before you start creating any serious amount of content. And to do that, you should be using a content strategy template. 

Why do you need a content strategy template?

You may be wondering why you need a template to create a content strategy, and when it comes right down to it, technically, you don’t. You could create a strategy without using a template. But, there are certain benefits to using a content strategy template that make it an even more useful tool for you. 

Reason #1: Organization. For one, a template is a straight shot to getting organized. You already have to do a lot of thinking to fill out a strategy; why reinvent the wheel when it comes to formatting it? Make use of a template that ensures you fill out everything you need and stays consistent each quarter or content cycle.

Reason #2: Cover All Your Bases. In a similar vein, using a template will help you cover all your bases. There’s a lot that goes into a strategy (more on that in a minute!) so using a template will give you peace of mind that you actually covered everything you need to before you get started cranking out content. 

Ideally, you should have one overarching content strategy for your business, but you may run into instances where you need a specific campaign or project strategy that feeds into that. If you use a content strategy template in your business and use the same one every time, you’ll also ensure consistency across your different marketing efforts in addition to covering all your bases. 

4 Parts of a Content Strategy Template

There are tons of content strategy templates available online, so you’ll be able to take your pick to find the one that works best for your business and your marketing brain. That being said, no matter which template you choose, it should have these four key parts: 

Section 1: Research

Before you start writing any content at all, you should be doing some research. This is where you should lay out things like a content audit, an analysis of your competitors and their content, a deep dive into your industry, keywords you want to target, etc. You can’t create successful content if you don’t know your audience and what they need from you, so the first part of your strategy is putting your audience and their pain points down in writing. 

Section 2: Strategy

Once you know who you’re talking to, you can start to plan out what you want to say and how. 

Start with your content mission statement and laying out your goals so you have a clear picture of what metrics you want to track and what numbers you actually want to hit. 

Setting Goals

Let’s talk about content goals for a minute: These goals are separate from your overall marketing goals and business goals but each of these should be in conversation with each other. If your overall marketing goal is to generate more leads for your business and your content goals don’t relate to leads at all, you won’t be able to measure or show the impact of your content program. Pick goals that make sense for your team and your business. 

Creating Content Pillars

After defining your content mission statement and setting goals, create content pillars, or broader categories that all your content can fall under. These should be closely related to your audience research from step 1; using audience pain points as guiding lights for your pillars is a good way to ensure that your content will always be valuable to your audience. 

Content pillars are also a good way to focus your own time, energy, and money; focusing on three or five content areas rather than every possible topic online will be much easier to manage internally. 

Choosing Assets and Formats

Within those pillars, think about what kinds of assets you’re going to create. Just because a type of content exists doesn’t mean you have to be making it. There is such a thing as doing too much, and you can easily spread yourself too thin. Think again about where your audience is likely to be spending their time, and focus your time there as well. 

If your target audience is on Twitter/X, reading blogs, and browsing LinkedIn, don’t spend time and money on Instagram assets. Figuring out your workflow for creating assets where people will actually see them is key to creating a sustainable content system; if you focus on pieces of content that work together, it’ll be more feasible for you to create them consistently and more likely that your audience will actually want to engage with them. 

Primary and Secondary Assets

As part of this section, also think about the difference between primary and secondary assets. A primary asset is typically a longer content piece like a lead magnet that your audience can download, usually in exchange for their email address. Think guides, ebooks, whitepapers, webinars—longer form, high value content pieces. 

Supporting assets are then all the content pieces that feed into your lead magnet funnel. These are things like blogs, social media posts, emails, shorter videos, etc. They drive traffic to your primary asset, but they also add value to your audience and let them know that you’re a brand they can trust for information. 

Section 3: Activation

A lot of people confuse the activation stage of a content strategy template for the entire strategy, but that’s not the case. You just saw how much time and planning goes into creating a content strategy before you even think about creating workflows or calendars; this is one of the last steps, but one of the most fun! 

Here, you’ll start to define your workflows for creating content, so designating who creates what part of the asset and what, if any, gets outsourced. If you do outsource any aspect, you’ll need to create some kind of workflow or template for your creative briefs so everyone knows what’s expected of them. You’ll also start to fill out your editorial and content calendars based on everyone’s workloads. 

Part of the reason this stage is at the end is because you need to already have in place what your primary and secondary assets are. Your workflows for each of these (and in turn, your deadlines for freelancers and in house creatives) all stem from how much work, time, and resources will be required for each asset. 

Section 4: Kick off! 

Completing your content strategy template, as you can guess from all these steps, takes time, and so your larger team may lose track of its status or what’s included. No matter how big your content marketing team itself is, it’s important that you let your broader marketing team and company know when your strategy is complete. 

This does a couple things for you: It shows off the work you do, and can help you demonstrate the value that content marketing brings to the larger organization.

But, it’s also important that all teams are aware of the strategy and what it includes, so that if you ever need to push back on a content ask that’s outside your strategy, you have buy-in already and a leg to stand on. 

This is also a great time to get feedback on your strategy template and implement any changes that you feel are appropriate. Sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in a content bubble, so bringing in outside marketing perspectives can help a larger team function more smoothly. 

Once you’ve implemented any and all feedback, you’re ready to officially launch your strategy and start producing content! 

Tips for using a content strategy template

Now that you have an understanding of what a content strategy template is and why it’s important, here are a few tips to make using them a little bit easier. 

• Tip 1: Save blank copies before you begin! If you want to be able to operationalize your template, make copies of everything before you start typing. This will also save you time from having to delete old information, and will help you keep a record of previous strategies.

• Tip 2: Tackle one section at a time to avoid overwhelm. As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into this. Don’t try to do everything at once, or you’ll burn yourself out. Focus on one section at a time and to a thorough job, and you’ll save yourself work in the long run too. If you have a large enough team, split the sections up amongst them based on their strengths and scope of work.

• Tip 3: Revisit your template. The content landscape is constantly changing, as are business goals and audience needs. Once complete, your content strategy template shouldn’t be set in stone; it should be malleable as all these factors change as well. Set a date once a quarter to review your document and update anything that no longer applies or that you have a more advanced understanding of than you did before. 

For more hands-on help creating your business’s content strategy, Trail Mix Marketing has your back! Book a free content strategy session today.