How to manage a content marketing strategy

If you’ve been in marketing for longer than 5 minutes, you’ve probably heard the mantra “Content is king.”

We know, we know — it’s so cliche.

But it’s hard to deny content’s impact on marketing, sales, and well, pretty much every aspect of a business.

In fact, 59% of marketers say their content marketing ROI is excellent or very good, helping them increase leads, conversions, and brand loyalty.

But this kind of success doesn’t pop up out of anywhere. You need a customized content marketing strategy to get you where you want to go.

And you need a tool that helps you manage your content marketing strategy and overcome its challenges.

That’s why we’re here. We’ll walk you through what a content marketing strategy is and how to create one, as well as give you tips for creating effective blogging, video, and social media content strategies.

Along the way, we’ll show you how a platform like monday.com can make all your content marketing dreams come true.

What is a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is a way to grow your business through written, visual, or audio content.

A content marketing strategy is a roadmap for how to reach those business goals through content. Content marketing experts such as Fluxe Digital Marketing recommend dedicating as much time as necessary to create this roadmap because everything about your content marketing is so much easier when you plan ahead.

A content marketing strategy is also an organized effort to create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer actions.

With a content marketing strategy, you can boost SEO, generate leads, and increase conversions.

Even better, it helps you define your goals, audience, and unique value so you and your team can create more effective content in every channel.

Your content marketing strategy can focus on just 1 type of content — such as blogs or videos — but ideally, it will merge several different content formats into a single strategy, like in this monday.com content production template.

monday.com content production template

The benefits of content marketing are obvious, but 63% of organizations lack the processes and tools they need to create a strategy and put it into action. And 60% say communication between teams is a top challenge, especially for more complex content marketing strategies.

To help you overcome this hurdle, we’re not just explaining how to create a content marketing strategy. We’re going to help you manage it too.

With monday.com, you can build the exact processes and tools you need to successfully manage your content marketing strategy. As we go through each content type, we’ll give you tips and examples for how to make monday.com your own.

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5 steps to creating a content marketing strategy

As tempting as it might be to start creating that series of infographics you dream about, that’s not going to lead you to long-term content success.

To create quality content that connects with your audience — and helps you reach your business goals — start with these steps for creating a content marketing strategy.

Define your marketing goals. What should your content achieve for your company? Choose specific goals that reflect the realities of your business.
Research your target audience. What are your audience demographics? What are their values and pain points? 50% of content marketers say connecting with their audience on these issues was a key factor in their strategy’s success.
Choose content formats and distribution channels. Will you use written or visual content, or both? Will your audience find your content through organic search or social media? Focus on the content types that will truly resonate with your audience.
Conduct a content audit. Compile a list of every content asset you have and whether it’s helping you reach your marketing goals. Find ways to refresh or repurpose the ones that don’t.
Create an editorial calendar and action plan. Use the information you’ve gathered to schedule content 3 to 6 months in advance. Start listing tasks and assigning work to your team.

These are pretty basic steps, so you’ll need a little more planning to hit the ground running.

To help with the details, let’s take a look at how to create effective content marketing strategies for 3 major types of content.

How to manage a blog content marketing strategy

Blogging might sound like an old-school approach to content marketing, but there are several reasons it’s still highly effective.

First, blogging is an SEO goldmine, and 75% of content marketers say SEO was their most effective content marketing tactic in 2020.

Second, blogging helps your audience conduct research before they buy — something 53% of shoppers always do.

And lastly, blogs are a great way to get visitors into your sales funnel. On average, 19% of blog visitors become subscribers. And subscribers are a lot easier to turn into customers.

It’s clear that blogging is an important content marketing effort across the board. Before you take action, ask yourself what the overall goal of your blog is.

So how do you get started?

Brainstorm content ideas

You can find inspiration for blog content ideas almost anywhere. Conduct SEO keyword research, create seasonal blog posts, or accept internal requests for content topics — something 43% of marketers do.

To manage these requests, you can create a form within monday.com that funnels ideas to your content team.

You can even set up automations to kickstart your content creation process.

Set up a content calendar

Put all of your content ideas into an editorial calendar that reflects your publishing schedule. The publish date serves as a deadline for all parts of content production.

You can build your calendar in a monday.com editorial calendar template that fits perfectly with your entire content creation process.

Create content guidelines

To consistently produce quality content, it’s worth the effort to create content guidelines. These guidelines should outline your brand voice and values and any special style rules you’d like your content to follow.

You can use file-sharing features on monday.com to make sure everyone always has access to the latest version of your content guidelines.

Establish a content creation process

Even blog content requires multiple steps before publishing. You can’t just type out a draft and post it right away.

Well, you could, but we don’t recommend it.

Your content creation process needs to consider the research, writing, editing, and optimizing stages, as well as any design or creative requests that accompany the blog post. You also need to have a clear editorial focus as per Google’s Helpful Content Update. Creating content for your audience will help you grow or maintain your SERP rankings.

To keep your content creation process moving smoothly, build your workflows on monday.com.

With content creation templates like the one above, you can visually track the status of every phase of content, even across channels or formats. Plus, your entire team can access it, keeping everyone on the same page at all times.

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How to manage a video content marketing strategy

Video content is on the rise, with more than 90% of Gen Z and millennials using YouTube regularly.

Plus, 41% of content marketers say video was a top tactic in 2020. It works.

But video is far more complex than blogging, requiring more skills to produce a single piece of content. And — with the cross-departmental communications issues that plague 60% of marketers — video production can present an enormous challenge.

There are 2 key things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of your video creation. Do these in addition to your foundational content strategy to create the highest impact.

Understand your video production capabilities

If you’re a small organization, you might not have the resources for a star-studded, high-production-value video.

But you also might have more video ability than you think.

Work with your creative team and other stakeholders to figure out exactly what kinds of videos you’re able to create.

A video production template like this one can help your team understand the time required for shooting and editing video.

You can customize this board to show other columns or connect with other editorial calendars too.

Create a production schedule

Since video production has so many moving parts, it’s critical to outline each step and understand how they’re connected.

You’ll need to know how long each task should take, what tasks are dependent on others, and what can be completed simultaneously.

This is where monday.com’s Gantt chart feature comes in handy. You can add this view to your video production boards to see the big picture — and make changes as needed with the drag-and-drop interface.

Your first production schedule can easily be converted into a repeatable process or workflow to streamline all of your video content creation in the future.

How to manage a social media content marketing strategy

Social media is a powerful way to distribute your content and build brand awareness.

It’s so powerful that 94% of companies use social media to promote their content strategy.

No matter what other kinds of content you create — like blogs, infographics, or videos — you also need a social media content marketing strategy to keep up with the competition.

Here’s how you can create one (and consider using an AI-powered platform to help with your social media content creation.)

Choose your social platforms

Worldwide, people spend an average of 145 minutes per day on social media, but it’s likely split between a few key platforms. Leverage demographic research to choose the best platforms for reaching your target audience, and focus your efforts there.

Conduct a social media content audit

A social media content audit looks at what posts perform best in terms of likes, shares, or other engagement. You can use this data to help you understand how to get the best results from every single post.

You’ll also get insight into exactly what kinds of content resonate with your audience, which can help inform your larger content marketing strategy.

Align your editorial calendars with your social media calendar

Draw from your editorial calendar to decide on your posting schedule for social media. Pull all of this information into a holistic social media schedule, like the one below.

You can add steps for each piece of the publishing process, like finalizing images, including links, and more. And, you can set up integrations and automations to schedule posts directly from monday.com.