A successful marketing strategy functions much like an optimized final mile delivery route. It outlines the journey, and ensures every step serves a specific purpose in a well-planned sequence toward achieving your core marketing objectives.
How do you create a marketing strategy?
- Understand your business and what sets you apart
- Establish your goals
- Create a marketing budget
- Complete a competitive analysis – compare marketing approaches
- Identify your target audience
- Develop a content strategy – topics, channels, and frequency
- Include metrics and key performance indicators
You can find a step by step, detailed breakdown on how to create a marketing strategy in this HubSpot blog post.
Today, we’ll dive into step six and share tested tactics to ensure your content marketing strategy becomes a productive system.
How do you develop a content strategy?
Content marketing is used to connect with your online audience, build brand awareness, and spark interest in what your business offers. This is achieved through sharing media online such as:
- Social media posts
- Blogs
- Videos
- Podcasts
Developing a content strategy involves understanding your audience(s) and testing creative ways to deliver them information that’s educational, entertaining, or engaging with your products or services. It’s different from direct sales or advertising because you’re focusing on your audiences’ interests more broadly. You’re crafting thought leadership, keeping them abreast of industry news, and revealing more about your brand identity, company culture, and vision.
Once you decide on your approach, develop a monthly content calendar to map out what you’re going to create and when and where it will be published. We recommend you download or create a template like the one show below (thanks again, HubSpot!). No need to reinvent the wheel here. Your creative input on the topic, audience, media format and channel are most important here.
Content marketing calendar templates are an easy way to map out your content strategy.
Don’t rush your content planning but don’t drag your feet either! We’ve found that a one hour creative brainstorming session plus one to two more hours to map and get feedback are sufficient. Content concepting and mapping are valuable and worth the time. Be sure to communicate your plan to key stakeholders from all departments.
Should you implement AI in your content strategy?
In our recent article, Elevate Your Content Marketing: How SEO, GEO and Consistency Increase Conversions, we discussed how to evolve your content for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or AI search.
Now, let’s explore how AI can enhance your team’s content development and collaborate with human efforts.
For starters, there’s no replacing the human brain when it comes to creating a clever concept! You’ll ALWAYS want to start with your people to brainstorm concepts for your monthly content.
Once the strategy and concepts are clear, you may choose to invest in AI tools that can assist with content production. The choices today are fairly broad, and you can be selective as you give them a test run. AI tools can do everything from assist in project management to creating high quality videos and other media. Be sure to test, collaborate, and provide proper training when you’re engaging with a new AI tool.
Benefits of implementing AI include:
- Reducing manual task time to focus on creative or strategic initiatives
- Ability to create content for extremely specific audiences
- Increasing innovation
Marketing software platforms with AI features that could aid your content development:
- Zoho is an all-in-one business platform with tools for CRM, marketing, and automation to help streamline your operations.
- Hootsuite is a social media management tool that lets you schedule posts, track engagement, and manage content from one smart dashboard.
- Canva is a design platform that makes it easy to create professional visuals and marketing content with intuitive tools and AI features.
- Claude is an AI assistant that’s reputable in the content development niche.
- Jasper is a marketing AI platform the helps you accomplish everything from brand unification to content development and automation.
- SocialPilot is a social media management suite that helps you plan your content and provides a smart AI assistant.
Keep in mind, while AI is a powerful tool, it is not 100% perfect. It is important to review and fact-check any information as AI engines will sometimes make mistakes. Think of AI as a valuable assistant that can enhance your work, but never as a substitute for human efforts.
Be Authentic in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Being authentic in your content marketing strategy is key to building genuine connections. Ways to show authenticity include:
- Showcasing your company culture online
- Sharing candid photography from your workplace
- Highlighting your staff’s achievements
- Publicly celebrating your customers’ success
According to Hubspot’s 2025 Social Media Trends Report,
“76% of marketers say authentic content consistently outperforms polished, highly produced assets.”
Authenticity involves actively participating in wider industry conversations. Be human. Be imperfect. Don’t be shy about engaging with your peers online. Share time-tested tips, lessons, and stories!
Conclusion
Success in content marketing requires a strategic, systematic approach. If you thoroughly develop your content marketing strategy; map out your topics, formats, and channels; leverage AI to empower your team; and prioritize authenticity in your content, you’ll have accomplished something creative and worthy of building genuine connections to grow your business.
Are you ready to transform your content marketing into a high-performing system that delivers consistent results? We’d love to chat more with you about that. Contact us at Alter.
