10 Questions to Ask Before You Start a Content Marketing Strategy

Updated August 16, 2022

Content marketing can bring a multitude of benefits to your company. Your target customers' content preferences, your company's resources, and a content distribution strategy are among the considerations your company needs to review or questions you need to ask when creating your content marketing strategy. 

By offering useful and free resources, content marketing can establish a foundation of trust between a brand and its potential and existing customers.

Sometimes, however, in the race to create more content, companies forget that the key to success for content strategy is quality rather than quantity.

It's important to create content not just to have it or meet a publishing schedule. Instead, your content should create value for your business and customers.

Consider these 10 marketing strategy questions before you develop your marketing plan.

10 Marketing Strategy Questions to Ask

1. What outcomes should my content achieve?
2. Who are my buyer personas?
3. How can I make my content more visual for marketing efforts?
4. How do I scale my content operation?
5. How long does it take to see results with content marketing efforts?
6. How do I distribute my content?
7. How do I measure success with marketing campaigns?
8. What content marketing tools do I need?
9. What are my competitors doing?
10. What are my customers’ pain points?

All these questions should be top of mind for any marketing manager or team. 

1. What Outcomes Should My Content Achieve?

Before you create any content, you need to determine the objectives of your overall content marketing strategy.

Your content marketing strategy should have a true purpose and a clear goal, for example, such as driving traffic to your website.

If you determine what you want your content marketing strategy to deliver, it is a lot easier to prioritize and shape how you are going to get there.

Ask your team, target audience, and other stakeholders key marketing questions to see if you can put together a digital marketing plan for your business. 

2. Who Are My Buyer Personas?

Understanding your buyer personas is crucial to determining the kind of content you need to develop for the ideal customer.

It’s essential for content marketers to understand what resonates with their customers.

One of the most important factors is how different demographics react to specific types of content. For example, content consumption habits platform differ by generation. 

Content marketers must understand what kind of content their target audience prefer and develop the content accordingly. Consider the following questions to structure your content in a way that best engages your target audience.

• How much time does your target market spend consuming content?
• Which devices do they use to view content?
• Which content formats do they favor?
• How long are the written articles they enjoy reading?
• Which social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok, etc.) do they use most often to share content?

Read this: ‘How to Create an Effective Buyer Journey Map’

3. How Can I Make My Content More Visual?

Society is shifting towards a more visual form of storytelling. More than half of people are visual learners, and our brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster compared to text.

Take these statistics into consideration when creating your content strategy. Video and other visual elements allow you to engage with your audience more effectively than other forms of content. 

Read through the 2022 Small Business Advertising Report to see how companies use visual content to their advantage. 

4. How Do I Scale My Content Operation?

Your content marketing strategy needs to be flexible and include a content production and distribution plan. 

Consistently producing high-quality content is key to your company meeting modern customers' demands. To accomplish this, establish an efficient workflow to move your content production process forward.

A content workflow streamlines your content marketing process so that you constantly produce high-quality, marketable content. Its core components include:

• SEO (search engine optimization) research to uncover high-value keywords
• Developing the content 
• Marketing the content 

A content workflow also clarifies each involved party’s role in the content creation process. When this process runs efficiently, the brand is able to meet its content demands and provide customers with the material they seek.

Additional Reading: ‘5 Cross-Promotion Ideas that Still Work like a Charm’

5. How Long Does It Take to See The Results of Content Efforts?

Effective content marketing engages your target audience and drives profitable customer action.

However, you won’t see an increase in organic traffic from day one. Expect at least 3-6 months to see the results of your content marketing strategy.

Content marketing is not designed to convert leads immediately. The goal is long-term, continuous engagement. The more time your leads spend interacting with your content, the more educated they become. 

If you can drive engagement and earn high-quality backlinks to your content, the authority you build through content marketing will continue to drive traffic even after you stop creating and promoting the content.

Eventually, an educated lead will see something relevant that triggers a response. 

Content marketing may take longer to convert leads, but over time, it significantly drives down conversion costs and increase brand awareness for your services.

6. How Do I Distribute My Content?

Distributing your content involves research and planning. Use the following tactics for choosing your distribution plan:

• Determine your target audience: Figuring out your audience is key to shaping your message. Think about who would most benefit from the article you’re writing.
• Target customers according to their stage in the sales funnel: You can’t just write content for a particular audience without purpose. You must understand your buyer’s journey and target your content for buyers at each stage of the sales funnel. This gives you a framework that can greatly help in the delivery of relevant and engaging content. For example, a "salesy" message that pushes readers to buy when they don’t know anything about a company or product will probably not be very effective. However, that same message could be incredibly effective when the reader is already seriously considering a purchase.
• Choose marketing channels to promote your content: For many marketers, content distribution is as important, if not more so, than content creation. Distribution channels include your blog, email marketing, social distribution, PPC, SEO, podcasts, and content distribution tools. It is always a good strategy to run both PPC and social media advertisements. However, if you can only afford one platform on an ongoing basis, then take the time to run a test on both ad platforms and see which one gives you the best ROI.

Influencer marketing is also a strategy for businesses. Over recent years, its become a popular marketing strategy to attract new customers. 

However, you decide to distribute your content, make sure your marketing plan meets where your target audience is. 

7. How Should I Measure Success?

Content marketing is a long-term strategy. Without proper budgeting, you cannot take it forward.

Before setting your budget, it is important to establish a content strategy with concrete goals. Specifically, you need to determine how to measure content performance.

A few ways to measure content performance are tracking the likes, shares, and comments a particular post receives.

Likes and shares, for example, are indicators of your content engagement and popularity among your audience.

The number of comments under the post demonstrates the level of content engagement even better than social likes and shares do. It takes more time to write a comment than to like or share a post. So, if a reader is motivated enough to express his/her opinion in a comment section, it is often a good sign.

You can also measure content performance through traffic metrics: volume, source, and referral path. Analyzing traffic sources allows you to identify which marketing channels and strategies are working best for your content distribution.

Use a tool such as GA4 to measure traffic metrics. 

8. What Tools Do I Need?

There are various tools and resources that can help you in different phases of your content marketing strategy. 

Content Discovery and Ideas:

• Feedly: A web news-aggregation service. If any site provides content in RSS, you can add this site to Feedly and then read that blog’s content on Feedly on your desktop or mobile, instead of going to the source site.
• Flipboard: A personalized magazine app that takes stories from around the web based on your own interests and delivers them to you in a visual feed.
• Quora/Reddit: Quora and Reddit are platforms for the question and answer discussions. You can identify trends from consistently asked questions to inform your content creation efforts.

Marketing and Distribution:

• Yoast: An SEO plugin for WordPress that helps optimize your content for SEO. Yoast makes it easy to control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords, and track how often you’re using them.
• Slideshare: A slide-hosting service that allows users to upload files (PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote, or OpenDocument presentations) that can be viewed or embedded on other sites.
• Buffer: Social media scheduling app.
• MailChimp: One of the major email marketing platforms.

Organization

• Evernote: A web-based application that allows users to capture, store, and synchronize text, image, and video files across multiple computing devices.
• Trello: A collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. It provides a visual overview of ongoing projects, including involved parties and their status.
• Pocket: Application that organizes your commonly visited resources.
• Pinterest: Allows users to visually share and discover new interests by posting images and videos and browsing what other users have pinned.

Content Creation

• Google Keyword Tool: Search for keywords to use in the headlines and body of your articles that are commonly searched on Google.
• Issuu: Allows you to create online magazines and lookbooks.
• Thinglink: Tag images to make them more engaging with links to music, video, text, images, Twitter, Facebook, shops and more. This tool allows readers to comment on images and follow image channels of creative users.

Writing

• Skyword: Offers businesses different levels of content creation services. Clients use Skyword’s proprietary platform to request, receive, and post content, and many contract Skyword to find writers.
• Contently:  Allows businesses to work with high-quality freelance writers. It also handles the payment and management of the editorial process.
• Textbroker: A content creation service offering a quick turnaround on articles, press releases, and written snippets for websites and more from a database of authors.

Content Tracking and Performance

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for site content and is available to anyone with a Google account.

All of these tools are a resource for crafting a great marketing strategy and plan. 

9. What Are My Competitors Doing?

Research your competitors content to determine your organization’s competitive advantages. Study their content models and the sort of engagement they earn through their content efforts. 

It's important to ensure your strategy and messaging are uniquely yours compared to your close competitors in order to separate yourself in the eyes of your customers. 

10. What Are My Customers’ Pain Points?

A pain point is a particular problem that your prospective customer experiences. You can think of it as a plain and simple problem.

Pain points generally are grouped into 4 categories:

• Financial: Your prospective customers are spending a lot of money on their existing products/solution/provider and want to decrease their spending.
• Process: Your prospects want to improve internal processes, such as assigning leads to sales reps or nurturing lower-priority leads.
• Productivity: Your prospects are wasting too much time using their current provider/solution/products or want to use their time more efficiently.
• Support: Your prospects aren’t receiving the support they need at critical stages of the customer journey or sales process.

Understanding these categories enables you to think about how to position your product or company as a solution to their problems.

For example, if the pain points of your prospect are primarily financial, you could highlight your product’s features within the context of a lower monthly subscription plan.

Understand Content as Part of Your User's Experience With Your Company

Asking these 10 questions for marketing strategy helps you execute the strategies to achieve your content marketing goals.

Instead of thinking about your content as just another marketing activity, think about the experience you want to provide. The experience you create for your customers is what they remember and determines whether they want to come back again.

Is it your first time putting together a marketing plan? Browse our directory of digital marketing agencies. 

Additional Reading:

• 17 Content Optimization Tips to Boost Traffic and Conversions
• Social Commerce: The Ultimate Guide
• Top 11 Tools for Conducting Market Research for a Startup

About the Author

Savaram Ravindra is a content contributor for Mindmajix and Tekslate. His previous experience includes a role as a Content Writer for Vmonlinetraining. His passion lies in writing articles on different niches including emerging software technologies, digital marketing, and businesses. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.