Today, your audience discovers brands everywhere. Google, ChatGPT, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn — you name it.
Without a strong content strategy, you’re guessing at what topics resonate, which formats work, and where to invest your time.
This content strategy template (available in Excel and Google Sheets) will help you map out every decision:

• Choose the most impactful goals
• Define your target audience and their pain points
• Identify high-impact topics
• Align every step with customer awareness levels
• Build a consistent publishing process

Why Use a Content Strategy Template?

Content marketing is powerful. But without a strategy, it quickly becomes scattered and hard to scale.

A content strategy helps you:

• Focus on the content your audience actually wants
• Publish consistently across the channels they already use
• Build authority around core topics
• Drive meaningful business results (not just traffic)

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that content marketing is getting more competitive. Which means publishing excellent content is no longer enough.

To succeed with content today, you need to align each piece of content with your overall content strategy. All the pieces need to work together.

That’s where this content strategy template comes in. It covers everything you need to lay out your long-term plan. And to track your progress along the way.

What’s Included

The content strategy template is organized into multiple tabs, with each tab walking you through one step of the planning process.

You’ll document everything from your goals and target audience to topics and channels.

Follow each tab in order or work at your own pace. Once you’ve filled out the fields, you’ll have a complete, customer-focused content strategy.

Here’s what each tab covers:

• Your goals: Map business goals to content goals – so every piece has a clear job and a way to prove it worked
• Who you’re creating content for: Define your key customer segments, their pain points, and where they are in their buying journey
• High-impact topics: Start with the questions your customers actually ask – across search, social, forums, and AI tools
• Promotional channels: Pick the channels you can consistently show up on, and clarify what role each one plays
• Performance tracking: See what’s working, what’s fading, and decide what to update, repurpose, or retire

We’ve also included a content strategy example in the first row of every tab to show you what a completed section looks like.

Why we built it this way: Most content templates stop at topics and formats. This one considers customer awareness at every step. The same topic requires different angles, whether someone has just found their problem or is ready to buy.

How to Use This Template

1. Download the free Content Strategy Template on this page
2. Fill in the blanks to define your long-term content strategy
3. Optional: Use our free Content Marketing Plan Template to plan your individual pieces of content
4. Publish and promote your content
5. Revisit your content strategy on a regular basis to stay on track

3 Tips to Get the Most From This Template

As you work through the content strategy plan template, use these tips to guide your decisions and keep your plan customer-focused.

1. Plan Content Around Customer Awareness Levels

Your audience isn’t all at the same stage.

Some know they have a problem. Others are comparing solutions. A few are ready to buy.

Use customer awareness stages — from Problem Aware to Most Aware — to choose topics and formats that meet people where they are and naturally move them closer to a decision.

2. Plan Content for Every Discovery Channel

Plan content that covers the full discovery journey.

This means creating assets for search, social, video, communities, and AI-powered results so your brand shows up wherever your audience is looking.

3. Track Performance and Refine Your Strategy

Content performance changes over time.

Awareness shifts, customer needs evolve, and discovery channels get noisier.

Tracking your results helps you spot what’s resonating, what’s fading, and where to focus next.

This is why we included a “Track & Refine” tab in the content strategy document.

You’ll know which content, formats, and channels help you meet your goals. And contribute to your long-term success.

What to Do After You Complete the Template

Let’s be honest: creating great content is hard.

Creating great content regularly? That’s REALLY hard.

The content strategy you’ll create with this template will help a lot. But it takes more than a solid strategy. You also need execution.

Here are a few tips.

• Create a detailed content calendar. Half the battle is staying organized. So schedule out your content months in advance. That way, you’ll always know the next step.
• Let the data be your guide. Run a content audit on yourself. It will be 100% clear what’s working and what’s not. Next, double down on the winners and stop wasting time on the rest.
• Repurpose your content. Why reinvent the wheel? Let’s say you just published an in-depth YouTube video. Don’t stop there. Turn it into a blog post. A podcast. A guest post. An email newsletter.
• Focus on what you KNOW. If you aren’t an expert, don’t pretend to be. It’ll take you 10x as long to write the content. And people will see right through it. If you HAVE to produce content about something you aren’t an expert on, make yourself part of the subject. Show your own learning journey. Be the guinea pig.

For more ideas, check out our step-by-step guide: How to Scale Content Creation.