How To Develop a Content Strategy Framework for Your Business

Shadow of a man pointing at a white board with post it notes on it discussing content strategy framework

CopyPress

March 13, 2022

Content marketing is one of the most important strategies you can incorporate into your marketing plan to help with search engine optimization and increase your organic traffic. But it’s not enough just to create a random blog or social media post and hope for the best. Developing a content strategy framework can help you make sure you’re creating and sharing content that’s valuable to your audience and helps your company or clients meet goals. In this article, we discuss topics like:

What Is a Content Strategy Framework?
Why Do You Need a Content Strategy Framework?
What Are the Key Components of a Content Strategy Framework?
How To Create a Content Strategy Framework
Tips for Creating a Content Strategy Framework

What Is a Content Strategy Framework?

A content strategy framework is a structured plan that details how your brand will create and for what audience. It tells not just how you plan to develop and distribute content, but also why you’re doing it. This happens when you analyze each piece of content you create or explain how each campaign factors into your larger company goals. A good content strategy framework helps attract your target audience at every stage of the sales and marketing funnel. It keeps them engaged and coming back, even after they’ve made a conversion or sale.

Why Do You Need a Content Strategy Framework?

Targeted, personalized, and focused content helps drive the most traffic and best results from the right audience. This can increase the number of qualified leads you have, which can increase sales and customer loyalty. But you don’t get those benefits if you’re not planning out your content strategy. Just creating content, whether for your business or your agency clients, and tossing it out on the internet isn’t enough. Writing or developing “just anything” won’t help you rank in search results or make people from your target audience take time out of their day to read it.

As Phoebe Buffay says, if you don’t even have a “pla,” much less a plan, you’re wasting your own time with content creation. But a content strategy framework lets you focus your content for the right purposes by creating a timeline and setting goals for content production. This helps keep you more focused and makes everything you do more valuable because it has meaning. Creating a strategy framework also helps keep your team aligned and aware of how their jobs in content contribute to the greater plan of the company.

What Are the Key Components of a Content Strategy Framework?

There are a few key components to consider when creating your content strategy framework. They include:

Goals: These help you understand why you’re creating content and how it can benefit your clients, customers, and the organization.
Target audience: Understanding who stands to benefit from your content and what interests them can help guide your framework development.
Segmentation: Learning how you can group your larger target audience into smaller segments can help you develop different levels of your content marketing framework.
Knowledge of user behavior, flow, and touchpoints: Knowing how your customers think and the methods they use to make decisions and purchases can affect how you structure your framework.
Marketing and sales funnels: Understanding which pieces of content target specific segments of the sales and marketing funnels can help you choose the right places and times to display them to your target audience.
Content types: Understanding what types of content exist and which ones fit best with your brand and audience can help you create a more robust and targeted framework.

How To Create a Content Strategy Framework

Use these steps to create a content strategy framework for your business or agency partners:

1. Set Goals

Image via Unsplash by @startaeteam

Depending on your company goals, there are endless possibilities about what creating content can do for your business. A content strategy framework encourages you to set goals for your goals. What do we mean by that? Company goals are often large, sometimes even lofty. They’re things you strive towards and work to reach over time. But your content strategy framework can help you set smaller, more achievable content goals you can reach right now, within one campaign.

Look at what you want to achieve with your company long term. It may be posting more often, increasing your traffic, or getting more sales. Then determine specifically how creating pieces of content could help you reach these goals. For your framework goals, it’s helpful to write them in the SMART style. SMART stands for:

Specific: The goal is obvious and well-defined. It only has one meaning or way to interpret it.
Measurable: You can measure the progress of the goal with specific criteria, statistics, and numbers.
Attainable: The goal is possible to reach within the course of the framework or campaign.
Relevant: The goal matches up with one of your overall company objectives and fits within your industry, niche, or your target audience’s interests.
Time-bound: The goal has a start and end date, or you can complete it within the course of the campaign or framework.

2. Define Your Target Audience

The audience matters in any content marketing framework, but finding the right one goes beyond looking at traditional demographics like age and geographic location. While knowing some demographic information can help you reach your goals, it’s good to dig deeper, but keep the research focused. There are a lot of things you can learn about your target audience that gives insights on how they make purchasing decisions or what needs they have. There’s also a lot of information you can learn about them that has nothing to do with your content or your business.

Think of yourself like a prospector digging for gold. You have to sift through a lot of dirt to find the valuable nuggets. You can do this by creating customer personas or by engaging in audience segmentation. Your framework can cater to more than one niche of your audience. Unique pieces of content may resonate with different groups and it’s okay to have separate approaches for each one. Questions you can ask yourself to learn more about your target audience or how to group them for segmentation include:

What is the skill level of the people you’re targeting? Are they experts in the field or are they people just starting and trying to learn more?
Does the content you’re producing relate to your products and services? Why do people need them and why should they be coming to you not just for sales, but also for information?
What channels, tactics, and topics relating to your products and services appeal to your audience? Where and how do you expect them to find your content and what’s going to make them stop and want to look at it?

3. Understand Your Value Proposition

What makes your company different from the others that are out there? What makes your products or services special? Coming up with a list of things that make your company great may be easier than convincing your audience of them. That’s why it’s important to create a unique value or unique selling proposition. Developing this kind of sentence or guiding principle can help you decide how you want to talk up your content to leads and clients. You can incorporate the proposition into your content to drive conversions and entice leads to take the next step in their buying journey.

If you’re looking for insights about how you can do this, get your free content analysis report from CopyPress. You can compare your current online content to that of three of your top competitors. The report can show you gaps in your content strategy and areas where you can elevate it to better target what your audience is looking for and what makes your company unique.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

4. Run a Content Audit

Looking at your current content can tell you more about your audience and more about what you’re already doing right with your content. Even if you’re new to creating a content strategy framework, if you’ve made content before or managed a content team, you already have a platform to start. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to review the content that’s already published on your company website and see how it’s performing. Which pieces have the highest organic traffic and lowest bounce rates? Are there pieces with more returning visitors than new ones? Which pieces rank highest on search engine results pages (SERPs)?

All of this data can tell you more about what topics your audience likes and what interests them. It can also give you insights about which content channels and types resonate with your audience. Analyze these pieces and make notes about what you’ve done well and what’s appealing about the top-performing content. This can help you make decisions for your content strategy framework for the new pieces in your campaign.

5. Choose Your Content Type

It’s not enough to just try to copy other high-performing content that’s already out there or even try to 100% replicate your own content that’s doing well. It’s a good starting point to determine what your audience likes and what they find useful. But like with most other plans in marketing, it’s also about taking what’s good and making it extraordinary. How can you push the envelope? How can you take a topic that’s out there and appealing to your audience and make it better than the competition? Choose from a variety of content types, like:

During the content choice phase, this is also where you either establish or ensure you’re incorporating your brand voice into every piece. It’s important to keep this consistent across all channels so that every communication with your audience is cohesive and sounds like it’s coming from one source rather than a large team of people.

At CopyPress, we help businesses like yours and agencies that provide marketing services to clients develop content that resonates with an established target audience. To ensure your content sounds likes it’s coming from one source, we work with you to create a style guide, then we train our expert writers on your specific brand voice. Schedule a call with us today to get started with our content creation and syndication services.

6. Select Distribution Channels

This step includes figuring out when and where you’re going to share the content you chose in the last phase. You may use channels you already have, such as a company blog or a Facebook page. This might also be the time when you choose to use new channels that you haven’t incorporated in the past, such as starting an email newsletter campaign. Examples of some distribution channels you may pick to use with your content include:

7. Set Up Workflows

This step is where you put together everything you’ve done so far into a tangible plan. How you set up the workflow may differ for every company. Your target audience and your goals may influence how you create the framework and when or how to move from one step to the next. To create a good workflow, think about the process one piece of content goes through to get from idea to publication. Make a note of every step it passes through, what tools you need to make it happen, and who’s in charge of each step. Define things like:

Who is creating the content
Where it’s being published
When it’s being published
Where it’s being shared
How often it needs updated

It may help to create a process map so you and your team can visualize a singular piece of content’s journey. When developing your team’s workflow, consider the tools that can help you automate parts of the process, like social media publishing, automatic replies for email or text marketing inquiries. Using automated workflow solutions can save your team time and energy for tasks humans must complete, such as research, writing, editing, or developing strategy.

8. Create and Publish Your Content

You’ve done all the planning. Now it’s time to put everything into motion. Start by creating your first pieces of content within the framework and let them progress through the workflow to publication.

9. Track Results

Once the content is out in the world, you’re not done. There’s still one more thing to consider to see how well you created your framework. The best way to tell if it’s actually working is to track the metrics and monitor how your content is performing. By creating SMART goals back in the first step, you created key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can measure and be able to tell if you’ve met your goals. You can use the same analytics tools you used to do your content audit to track new pieces.

If you find you’re not meeting your goals in the expected time frame, you may change your overall framework or set goals that are more attainable for your industry and business size.

Tips for Creating a Content Strategy Framework

Use these tips to help you develop your content strategy framework:

Create LUSH Content

If you’re trying to develop content that stands out from the sea of generic pieces, consider making your content LUSH. The acronym stands for:

Linkable: This content includes pieces that are well-researched, informative, and easy to understand. Other people in your niche or industry want to link to it to provide credibility to their own content, which helps build your backlink profile.
Unique: This content capitalizes on a topic area that nobody has covered yet, or puts a new spin on something others have described over and over.
Shareable: This content is easy to share on social media and enticing enough that people want their friends and colleagues to read or see it.
Highly engaging: This type of content draws people in with its summary blurb and keeps people interested through to the conclusion.

If your content can pass the LUSH test, it may have a better chance of becoming top-performing on search engines and be more valuable to your target audience.

Use a Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a program that lets you create, edit, publish, share, and monitor your content all from one location. This tool can help with your workflow because it creates a central location where all your team members can do their work, collaborate, and share comments or feedback. CMS programs are especially beneficial for agencies that work with multiple clients and share different types of content.

For example, at CopyPress, we have our own proprietary CMS, Dante, which allows our teams of creatives and strategists to work with different clients with one login, all in one place. When you become a client of ours, we give you access to this CMS so you can review the content we’ve created for you, make editing comments to the team, and even publish to WordPress right from our tool.

Optimize To Rank and Convert

When you’re setting up your framework, you’re likely looking to get exposure for your content and collect qualified leads for conversions. The way to do both is to optimize for both ranking and conversions. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you rank. It targets keywords that people search for online when they’re looking for information. The search engines use those keywords to present the most relevant content to searchers.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) answers visitors’ questions. People find your content because of SEO and you’ve hooked them to your page. Now, how are you going to get them to complete the next step? This part uses your knowledge of consumer psychology to figure out how and where you can put the right conversion points to turn people into paying customers. Doing both SEO and CRO helps you reach your goals and be more successful in your content marketing efforts.

Get Help From the Professionals

If you want a hassle-free way to develop your content strategy framework with your content writing, promotion, and custom design, leave it to the experts at CopyPress. We work with you to create a framework and workflow so you don’t have to worry about anything other than sharing your vision and seeing the results roll in. Set up your call today to start a partnership with us.

Content marketing integrates with all other types of marketing tactics, like SEO and social media. That puts it at the heart of your digital marketing efforts. By developing a content strategy framework, you can ensure that heart keeps beating and pumps things like higher conversion rates, more engagement, and increased sales throughout your company.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer