How to Create A Content Strategy Framework

A robot content manager working on content strategy

A content marketing framework is vital for planning and creating engaging content that delivers value and drives business results.

When you learn how to implement a content strategy framework, you give yourself the perspective needed to optimize content for humans and search engines alike. As algorithms and guidelines continually change, time and time again, we’re seeing that trying to strictly game search engines is the surest way to fall behind. The right content strategy framework will result in helpful content that real humans find useful.

“Content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing but costs 62% less.” — Content Marketing Institute

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve brought up search engines multiple times in this introduction. The reason for this is that content is only valuable if it’s read, at least, in terms of ROI on your money, time, or both. Fortunately, search engines are getting smarter and smarter, meaning that they are better than ever at understanding what humans want and giving users those results.

In this article about how to create a content strategy framework, we’re going to get into the specifics of what humans want and what it takes to signal to search engines that you can deliver value to consumers of your content.

After reading this article, you’ll be able to implement a content marketing framework that will give you direction, consistency, and the know-how to refine and iterate.

So without further ado, let’s dive right into this content strategy mini-guide and build the framework you need to create with confidence, precision, and purpose.

How to create a content strategy framework

What is a Content Strategy Framework?

A content strategy framework can assist in producing engaging content, arranging it, and disseminating it to the public. They offer guidance and organization throughout your content marketing process.

With a thorough content strategy framework, you can:

Direct your team's creativity and make sure that your content goals are being met, whether your KPIs are tied to increased organic traffic, conversions, concrete business goals, or growing thought leadership.
Find the optimal combination of content formats, communication platforms, and scheduling to increase audience interaction and maintain a steady stream of valuable content.
Produce marketing campaigns that are well-structured and targeted to your audience.

A content strategy framework is essentially a content roadmap that is customized to your organization's ability to grow its content. It provides a clear picture of how your content can develop, progress, and help to achieve your goals. By using a content strategy framework, you can move forward confidently in the constantly evolving world of content marketing, reach higher levels, and engage your audience through user-friendly content experiences.

Content frameworks also outline your content goals, target audience, and stages of your content funnel. They include the necessary tools, people, systems, and processes to execute your content plan. It's a blueprint that guides you to success in creating and delivering impactful content to your audience.

Some of the most common elements of an effective content strategy framework include:

The purpose of your content
Your target demographic
How your content will trigger the desired action (buying, signing up, etc.)
How the content will be produced
The systems and processes that will put your content marketing into action
Who will manage and execute the various components of your content marketing process

What are the benefits of a Content Marketing Framework?

Businesses can benefit greatly from using content marketing frameworks. These frameworks provide a strategic and focused approach that helps businesses stay on track and achieve their goals. They help create clear messaging, a better understanding of the audience, and efficient content creation, resulting in increased consistency. Content marketing frameworks also demonstrate ROI, establish brand authority, engage audiences, and scale content efforts as businesses grow. Now, just in case you aren’t already all-in on creating a content marketing framework, these are some of the elaborated benefits of a content strategy framework:

1) Strategy and focus: A content marketing framework is a strategic approach that helps you stay focused on your goals and guides your efforts.

2) Consistency: Using a content marketing framework allows you to produce content on a regular basis while keeping your brand message and tone consistent.

3) Audience impact: A content marketing framework can give you a better understanding of your intended audience and help you produce content that will strongly appeal to them.

4) Content planning: You can pre-plan your content, which will help you create a well-organized editorial calendar and prevent you from rushing through tasks at the last minute.

5) Content scalability: Establishing a clear framework can increase the scope and influence of your content marketing strategy as your company expands.

6) ROI and measurable results: With a content strategy framework, you can establish specific goals and monitor important performance metrics. This helps you assess how effective your content marketing initiatives are and prove their worth in terms of investment return.

7) Audience engagement: Content marketing frameworks enable you to better connect with your audience by learning about their needs, problems, and interests. This allows you to create content that specifically addresses those areas and engages them more effectively.

8) Brand authority: Providing your audience with valuable and insightful information through a content framework positions your brand as an authority in your industry.

9) Efficiency: Content strategy frameworks can help you optimize your content creation process, resulting in greater efficiency and less time wasted on irrelevant tasks.

10) Adaptability: A framework enables you to adjust to fluctuating market conditions and audience tastes, ensuring that your content stays up-to-date and impactful in a constantly shifting environment.

How to Create a Content Strategy Framework

Building a content strategy framework involves defining clear goals, understanding your target audience, mapping out the buyer's journey, selecting appropriate content types and channels, establishing key performance indicators, and developing a well-structured content calendar. This framework will help guide the creation, distribution, and evaluation of your content. Now let’s go into depth and get into the nitty gritty of developing your content strategy framework step-by-step!

Step 1) Set goals and objectives

The initial step is to determine your goals and objectives. What do you aim to accomplish with your content marketing? Is it to enhance brand visibility, produce leads, or boost sales? When you identify your goals, you can begin developing a strategy to attain them.

The goals within your content strategy framework should be clear, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For instance, instead of saying "I want to increase brand awareness," a better goal would be "I want to increase website traffic by 25% within the next 8 months."

Setting content goals and objectives as a step in content strategy framework creation

After setting your goals, you can proceed to develop objectives. Objectives are the specific actions that you will take to meet your goals. For example, creating and publishing 12 blog posts per month could be an objective to achieve the goal of increasing website traffic by 25% within the next 8 months.

Remember, it's important to have a content strategy framework that can be updated as goals and objectives evolve. To set effective goals and objectives, consider consulting with your team and striking a balance between challenging and achievable. Also, remain flexible and adapt your plan as your business changes.

Step 2) Solve problems with your content

After setting your goals and objectives, it's important to identify the issues your target audience is facing and struggling with. This helps you determine what problems your content will address, so you can create helpful and relevant content.

To understand the needs of your target audience, you can follow these tips when considering the problems you'll solve:

Reach out to your target audience and ask about the challenges they're facing.
Analyze your competitors and their problem-solving approaches to identify unique opportunities.
Conduct research to determine the most urgent problems for your target audience and the most effective solutions.
Understand the problems your target audience is facing. Focus on developing content that addresses their specific problems and helps them reach their goals.

Some good examples of content that can solve problems include:

How-to articles: Instructional articles that teach your audience how to do something (like this one).
Case studies: Examples that demonstrate how your products or services have benefitted previous customers, which can establish confidence and reliability with your target audience.
White papers: In-depth, often technical information about a particular topic.

Lastly, always be clear and concise, use visuals, and be helpful as you look to solve problems with your content.

Step 3) Conduct competitive research

Conducting competitive research will aid you in analyzing your competitors' actions and how you can distinguish yourself. To do this step correctly:

Make a list of businesses that offer the same products or services as you (direct competitors) and businesses that offer similar products or services (indirect competitors).
Study their content to see what, how, and where they are publishing
Look for ways that you can stand out from them, such as writing about different topics, using a different writing style, or publishing your content in different places.

Conduct competitive research as a step in your content marketing framework

When conducting competitive research you should:

Use online tools to conduct competitive research and analyze your competitors' content.
Obtain feedback from your target audience on your competitors' content to identify areas for improvement.
Remain objective during competitive research and acknowledge your competitors' strengths in order to learn from them.

Step 4) Learn about your target audience

Ensure your content is relevant and appealing by learning about your target audience after setting your goals and objectives, identifying problems to solve, and conducting competitive research.

In order to learn more about your target audience:

Identify your intended audience by analyzing their demographic information, psychographics, and behavior.
Conduct research using methods like online surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gain a better understanding of your audience's needs, wants, and challenges.
Create buyer personas; fictitious avatars and representative profiles of your ideal customers.

Customer research tips as part of content strategy framework

Additionally, get to know your audience even better by using online tools and talking directly to customers about their wants, needs, and pain points.

Step 5) Establish plan to deliver value

Delivering value to your audience is one of the most important aspects of content strategy. When you create content that is valuable to your audience, you are more likely to keep them engaged and coming back for more.

There are many ways to deliver value to your audience through content, including:

Providing helpful information: One of the best ways to deliver value to your audience is to provide them with helpful information. This could include anything from tutorials and how-tos to industry news and analysis. When you provide your audience with valuable information, they are more likely to see you as a trusted source of information and turn to you for help in the future.
Sharing your expertise: Another great way to deliver value to your audience is to share your expertise. This could be done through blog posts, articles, infographics, or even videos. When you share your expertise, you are demonstrating your knowledge and authority in your field. This can help you build trust with your audience and position yourself as a thought leader.
Entertaining your audience: Not all content has to be serious and informative. Sometimes, the best way to deliver value to your audience is to entertain them. This could be done through humor, storytelling, or even just by creating visually appealing content. When you entertain your audience, you are more likely to keep them engaged and coming back for more.

Step 6) Conduct a content audit

Conduct a content audit to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current content and make suggestions for improvement.

To conduct a content audit:

Create a comprehensive list of all the content you have generated, such as blog posts, videos, social media posts, infographics, and articles.
Scrutinize the content to judge its suitability for your target audience. Evaluate it based on the following factors: Is your content relevant to the interests and needs of your target audience? Is your content informative, well-written, and engaging?
Optimize your content for search engines and assess its performance
Promote and update content that is performing well.
Improve or remove content that is not performing well.
Create new content to fill gaps in your content strategy.

Conduct content audits as a part of content strategy framework

For additional help conducting a content audit, you can use online tools, get help from a content marketing consultant, or combine these two options.

Step 7) Hone in on your content types and distribution channels

Enhance your content strategy framework by choosing content formats and distribution channels. This will help you reach your target audience with your content.

Here are some tips for choosing formats and distribution channels:

Consider your target audience to determine their content preferences and online habits.
Set clear goals and objectives for your content marketing strategy.
Determine your budget for content creation and distribution.

After assessing these factors, you’ll be ready to select appropriate formats and distribution channels.

choose content types and distribution for content framework

Here are some examples of formats and distribution channels:

You can publish blog posts either on your website or on a third-party blog.
Infographics are a great visual tool for presenting complex information and can be shared on social media such as LinkedIn, email newsletters, or your website.
Videos can also be shared on social media, your website, or YouTube.
If you want to host podcasts, you can either do it on your website or on a third-party podcasting platform.
Social media can be used to share all these types of content.
Email marketing is ideal for sending out newsletters, blog posts, and special offers.

Step 8) Choose your content tools

After completing the initial steps of defining goals, identifying problems, analyzing competitors, understanding the target audience, and conducting a content audit, it's time to select content tools. These tools will assist you in creating, organizing, and distributing your content in a more efficient manner.

When selecting content tools, it's important to consider the following factors:

What types of content do you need to create?
How much content do you need to produce?
How frequently do you need to create content?

Additionally, you should consider your budget and the skill levels of the people who will be using the tools. Once you've taken these factors into account, you can begin the process of selecting the right content tools.

Content tools for content strategy framework

Some examples of content tools include but are not limited to:

A content management system (CMS), which are a type of software that can assist you in creating, organizing, and sharing content on your website. Examples of popular CMSs include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
Project management tools such as Trello, Asana, and Jira.
Content creation tools, which help create various content types like blog posts, infographics, and videos. Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Grammarly are quite popular in this category.
Content distribution tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Mailchimp.
SEO tools like Clearscope, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO.
Grammar checkers such as Quillbot, The Hemingway App, and Grammarly.
Plagiarism checkers such as Originality AI
And speaking of AI, artificial intelligence tools, and generative software for a variety of purposes.

To achieve your content marketing goals, it's important to select the right tools for creating, managing, and distributing your content. Consider these tips when choosing content tools:

Read reviews of different content tools to gain insight into their effectiveness and determine which one would best fit your needs.
Take advantage of free trials offered by many content tools to test them out and determine if they're a good match.
Hire a content marketing consultant if you need help selecting the right tools.

Step 9) Include your content management strategy

Create a solid content strategy framework by including content management as a step. This will help you manage your content efficiently and track content performance after you have completed tasks such as setting goals, conducting research, and selecting formats and channels.

To incorporate content management into your content strategy framework, follow these guidelines:

Set up a content calendar to ease workflows, brainstorm content ideas and keep it in one place, and publish content consistently.
Assign roles for content creation, editing, and publishing.
Use a content management system to create and manage website content.
Monitor the performance of your content marketing efforts using tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot to determine their effectiveness.

To enhance your content strategy framework, consider these suggestions for content management:

Regularly assess the relevance and accuracy of your content to ensure it remains current.
Utilize social media, email marketing, and other channels to publicize your published content, thereby increasing its reach and driving traffic to your website.
Analyze the success of your content marketing initiatives to gain insight into what is effective and what requires improvement. This will guide you in making informed decisions about your content marketing approach.

To create and distribute high-quality content on a large scale, you need to focus on content management. Assigning key roles is important for executing your content strategy, but the most crucial one is the content manager. The content manager is like the foreman of your content factory, responsible for managing the operation. Their responsibilities may include creating, editing, or distributing content.

To achieve your desired business outcomes, it's important to understand the content process from beginning to end, no matter if you're an executive or a content manager. A trend to keep in mind when developing your content strategy is the increasing use of automation and AI. As you work on your strategy, consider using processes, systems, these rapidly evolving tools, and talent to save time and allow you to focus more on identifying opportunities and curating content instead of needing to be hands-on and constantly creating it.

This image displays the various steps involved in creating a content strategy framework. It includes a flowchart that shows how different elements like goal setting, audience analysis, content planning, channel selection, measurement, and iteration a

Examples of Content Frameworks

While a content strategy framework is more comprehensive, some commonly thought of content frameworks include:

1) The AIDA Framework

The AIDA framework is a way to create content that will get people's attention, keep them interested, make them want what you're offering, and take action. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, and it's a classic content strategy framework.

2) AIDA B2B Content Marketing Framework

The B2B content marketing framework is a strategy aimed at businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses. With this framework, you can create content that will assist you in captivating, involving, and persuading potential clients.

3) The Inbound Marketing Framework

The inbound marketing framework is a strategy for creating and promoting content that pulls customers towards your business, instead of you having to chase after them. By using this framework, you can produce content that draws in potential customers, builds relationships with them, and ultimately convinces them to become paying customers.

Outsourcing Content Strategy

If you want to make the most of your content marketing efforts, it might be useful to consider outsourcing your content strategy. This way, you can benefit from specialized professionals who have industry knowledge, creative skills, and strategic insights to help you develop a strong content strategy. This can save you time and resources while ensuring that you have a well-crafted plan tailored to your goals and target audience.

If you want to make the most of your content marketing and achieve your business goals, it's important to find the right content marketing agency or consultant that shares your vision and can produce the results you want. Don't hesitate any longer and consider outsourcing your content strategy today. Reach out to us now to discuss how we can assist you in enhancing your content strategy and meeting your business objectives.