What is a content strategy?

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In today's newsletter:

• What content strategy is not
• 2 things a content strategy should do 
• Examples of content strategies you can actually replicate

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What's a content strategy?

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Wrong answers only:

• Keyword clusters
• TOFU/MOFU/BOFU
• An editorial calendar
• Outbound
• Retargeting

If that’s what your team thinks content strategy is… we need to talk.

None of those things is a strategy. They’re just tools.

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Content strategy is about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to do it 

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Let’s break it down.

What do you want to accomplish? 

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Goals ↓

- Generate leads

- Drive brand awareness

- Convert more customers into clients

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Make it specific. 

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❌ Not like this: 

We want to generate leads

✅ Like this: 

We want to attract CEOs of fast-growing startups who need flexible, long-term tech resourcing to support their development efforts. We provide dedicated development teams that can scale up or down based on your project needs. With our current capacity, we can supply up to 10 skilled developers within a month. For example, we helped one company expand to 50 engineers within a year, achieving 40% cost savings.

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Why this goal works:

• It identifies a specific audience with a specific pain
• It explains what you offer and how it solves the problem
• It includes proof of results

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Once your goal is this specific, the how becomes easy.

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How you’ll accomplish it

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We'll publish engineering management content on LinkedIn and in founder-focused newsletters, showcasing our scaling frameworks, developer vetting process, and real client outcomes through short case study videos and founder Q&A interviews.

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↑ This is your content strategy

All you need to do now is build a content roadmap with exact content pieces you're planning to create and how you plan to distribute them. 

Your roadmap needs to include:

• Awareness level (awareness, consideration, decision) or funnel stage: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU — what stage of the buyer journey does each piece support?
• Topics: What themes matter most to your target audience right now?
• Angles: What unique take or framing are you bringing to each topic?
• Point of view: What do you believe that your competitors don’t? 
• Content pillars: What 3–5 core areas will you consistently create around?
• Authors: Who’s writing or creating the content? Internal experts, freelancers, thought leaders?
• Distribution: Where will you distribute it?
• Lead capture: How will you turn visitors into leads (e.g. tools, templates, audits, webinars)?
• Lead conversion: How do you follow up and nurture those contacts into qualified leads or sales?
• Due dates: When will it go live?

If you need a content roadmap template, you can grab it here: Content Roadmap Template‍

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More examples of goals and content strategies to accomplish them

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Goal: Drive brand awareness

We want to get on the radar of product managers at Series B fintech companies who are struggling with user retention because of bad onboarding flows. Our UX audit service identifies friction points and delivers design changes in under two weeks. One client implemented our recommendations and saw a 30% increase in user activation within the first month. 

Strategy ↓

Publish a series of teardown case studies targeting common onboarding issues in fintech applications and distribute them through LinkedIn. Reference for teardowns →  https://growth.design/ 

Goal: Increase visibility on search

We want to increase visibility among RevOps leaders at SaaS companies who are searching for scalable solutions to unify sales and marketing data. Our platform offers pre-built integrations with top CRM and marketing tools, making implementation 5x faster than custom builds. For example, one client reduced data sync errors by 90% within the first month of switching to us.

Strategy ↓

Build a content cluster around the “RevOps tech stack” keyword space, targeting long-tail, high-intent searches like “HubSpot Salesforce integration,” "The best RevOps tools for SaaS,” “RevOps reporting template.” 

Optimize high-performing content with embedded lead magnet: Quarterly RevOps industry report with original data to earn mentions and backlinks.

Pitch the report to SaaS-focused newsletters and blogs.

Goal: Convert traffic into leads

We want to convert heads of marketing at mid-sized B2B tech companies who are investing in content marketing but not seeing results. With our content audits, you will see why your content isn't performing. Is it a messaging problem? Poor distribution? Gaps in funnel strategy? For example, we helped a B2B SaaS client revamp their blog and newsletter strategy, resulting in a 3x increase in MQLs in 4 months.

Strategy ↓

Publish insights from audit results and before-and-after content comparisons with a call to action “Run a content audit” and interactive lead capture tools (gated templates, email courses, and free audits of 1 blog post). 

Goal: Convert leads into clients 

We want to reduce the time it takes for CTOs at enterprise healthcare startups to move from leads to a demo call. These leads often compare us with generalist software development vendors. Our processes are purpose-built for HIPAA-compliant, FDA-ready software, and our biggest differentiator is speed to compliance. For example, one client launched a pilot in under 6 weeks and passed their first security audit with zero revisions.

Strategy ↓

Create bottom-of-funnel sales enablement content: comparison guides, objection-handling blog posts, short testimonial videos from past healthcare clients. Embed this in cold emails, nurture emails, sales decks, and demo follow-ups to help buyers build internal consensus and move faster.

Goal: Increase upsells

We want to increase upsells among SaaS clients who already use our core analytics platform but haven’t yet adopted our predictive insights module. This feature helps product teams identify churn risks. One client activated the module and discovered a segment of users 3x more likely to convert to premium, which led to a 22% revenue lift in a single quarter.

Strategy ↓

We’ll implement a personalized email strategy tailored to each client account. These emails will highlight specific wins they’ve achieved using our platform and subtly introduce complementary features or modules that align with their goals. (BTW, I talked about post-sale marketing in one of my previous newsletters).

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Want more examples?

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This month, Ann Daiko, our Zmist & Copy writer, published an awesome piece with some unconventional content marketing strategies that worked great for 8 different companies. You should check it out:

Feeling Stuck? 8 Content Marketing Examples You'll Want to Bookmark 

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See you next week

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I finally convinced my grumpy twin to redesign my website. Can’t wait to show you the results!

Kate

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P.S. If we aren't connected already, follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you like this newsletter, please refer your friends.

P.P.S. Need a hand with content? Fix your mediocrity problem with Zmist & Copy

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