What is a content strategy and how should I use it in my business?
- Samantha Tanner
- Feb 9
- 4 min read
If you’re responsible for, and currently running, the early stage marketing set up in a small business, be that whether you’re a founder, CEO, MD, or a junior marketing team of one, you’ve probably heard that you just need to do more content about a hundred times.
And you nod, because it sounds about right. Then you put together a few LinkedIn posts, start putting together a couple of blogs, start a case study that never sees the light of day, and then someone will suggest that a podcast is a good idea.
You’ll then feel further away from the day job and start wondering if all this content production is ultimately worth it as everything becomes so scattered and like you’re just doing it to complete the task. That is where the term checkbox marketing comes into play and that’s something that ultimately won’t fuel growth.
Having a manageable content strategy in place for your business forms a large part of your overall marketing strategy, defining who you’re producing content for and what the goal is.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is simply:
How content will help your business attract, convert, and retain customers.
Not content for content’s sake, simply posting more, or copying your competitors
You've got to start creating based on what your customers are trying to solve, where they are in their customer journey, and where they are likely to see it. So within your overall marketing strategy, you'll have defined your ICP, so in your content strategy approach, you'll need to answer the following questions with regards to your content approach:
Who are we trying to reach?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What do they need to believe before they buy?
What content will move them through that journey?
How do we produce and distribute it consistently?
With teams that are at the early stage of defining their marketing strategy, plans and processes, you’re not going to have unlimited resources for content creation. With most businesses I work with, it’s usually the founder or the CEO taking over the content reins, meaning that content also happens sporadically, fitting it in around the day job.
And this also then means that over time, you’ll end up having a collection of:
Blog posts no one reads
Assets that don’t support sales
Content that doesn’t solve anything
Random acts of marketing
And some very vague LinkedIn posts posted 6 months apart
By getting strategic with your content, you’re going to build trust by educating your market, which will create demand, support your sales process, and then provide the credibility needed to drive brand awareness.
What content should you actually be creating?
You don’t need to be everywhere. You’ll initially need a small number of high-impact content formats that can be reused and repurposed across different formats and platforms. You’ll also need to start building out what your core content pillars for your business look like, this could look like:
1. Problem-first thought leadership
Show you deeply understand the space. This is how you build trust before people even want a demo and usually shows up as thought leadership content on the founder’s LinkedIn page.
Examples:
Industry trends
Common mistakes
New ways of thinking
Building in public
Lessons learned
2. Educational how-to content
This pillar helps support inbound demand over time and will provide valuable insight for buyers doing research. This is where your blogs and videos come in to play.
Examples:
How to build an ESG reporting process in 30 days
What metrics matter most for operations
When X industry should start worrying about Y
3. The credibility or proof content
This is the content that shows how you help. The proof that backs up your sales messaging.
Examples:
Case studies
Testimonials
Founder-led stories
Before/after outcomes
4. Sales Enablement Content
Sales will always need content too for that joined up revenue team approach that they can send to prospects and clients.
Examples:
One-pagers
Objection-handling blogs
Implementation guides
Pricing explainers
Don’t start treating content as just another thing to do
Content strategy isn’t about producing more to feed SEO or to attract more people on LinkedIn, or to out-produce your competitors. It’s about producing the right things, for the right people, at the right time.
And when content is aligned to your customer journey, it becomes:
A demand engine
A sales asset
A trust builder
A growth lever
Not just another marketing task.
A simple strategic starting point for your content
If you're early-stage marketing development, start with this:
Define your ICP clearly
List the top 5 customer pain points
Map objections prospects have before buying
Build 3–4 content pillars
Publish consistently in one main channel
Repurpose everything
Then you’ll have yourself a simple strategy.
If you’re a founder, CEO or MD and wearing all of the GTM hats, I partner with businesses to take the marketing hat off their plate and grow marketing functions from scratch, including building the strategy, plans and processes.
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