Create a long-term strategy for your content marketing with this guided content strategy template. (Available in Word, Google Docs and as a PDF.) Use this free template to define your target audience. Detail the goals for your content. And determine the promotional channels you’ll use to bring traffic to your content.

Why Use a Content Strategy Template?

As a marketing channel, content is hard to beat.

Effective. Scalable. And the benefits can stack over time (thanks to SEO).

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

Here’s what’s included in this content strategy template:

• Who you’ll help and how: Define your target audience. And why they’ll care about your content.
• Decide on the first topics you’ll cover: Give yourself some guidance for when you need content ideas.
• More nuts and bolts: Plan your content formats, publishing frequency, promotional channels and more.

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. Re-visit your content strategy on a regular basis to stay on track

How to Publish Killer Content Like Clockwork

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. A tweetstorm.
• 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 my step-by-step guide: How to Scale Content Creation.