10 Content Marketing Strategy Checklists and Where to Find Them

 70% of companies say they have no documented content marketing strategy. Use these Content Marketing Strategy templates and become a Content Marketing hero!

 In our Content Marketing Strategy sessions we often hear marketers ask two questions concerning their Content Marketing Strategy.

• “What should be included in a Content Marketing Strategy?”

• “How to create a Content Marketing Strategy?”

Since 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing, these questions require a clear answer, quickly.

On a daily basis, marketing teams put in effort to produce millions of content pieces. They create and share these to attract and retain customers to, ultimately, drive profit.

Driving profit however is not easy when you don’t structure your efforts. The easiest way to structure your efforts is by using a template.

We researched content marketing templates for you. We learned there are tons of content marketing strategy templates out there. But you don’t have time to go through all of them; you are busy executing your Content Marketing Strategy.

In this blog you’ll learn which elements to include and how to produce and share content in a quick and structured way.

If you want to know how to measure the effectiveness of your content, however, see our overview of Marketing Strategy KPIs.

Two types of Content Marketing Strategy Checklists

We found that there are two types of Content Marketing Strategy Checklist.

• One checklist type covers the crucial elements that should be covered in your Content Marketing Strategy plan.
• The other checklist type tells you which steps to take to craft a Content Marketing Strategy plan and how to make it actionable.

Browse through this collection of marketing strategy checklists to get a quick overview of the most popular (and newest) publications out there. No need to plough through lengthy PDFs and e-books: it’s all here, in an easy to consume format.

Without further ado, let’s get this marketing strategy checklist party started.

5 Crucial Content Marketing Strategy Elements Checklists

This checklist isn’t shocking in any way, which is ideal when you want to get the basics right.

1. Goals or mission: Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?
2. Target Audience: Clearly define your content's target audience:: also known as your "buyer persona."
3. Types of Content: Write blog posts or venture out and try producing other content pieces
4. Content Management: Have a system in place where you can manage your content

This checklist warns you that if your staff is bored writing their (predictable) content, your audience probably feels just the same reading it.

1. Consistency: How consistent is your content marketing?
2. Relevance: Does your content marketing deliver the right information?
3. Style: Does your content engage your market?
4. Efficiency: Do you have an efficient process for selecting and producing topics for your content?
5. Influence: Does your market position or level of influence improve each month?
6. Goals:Does your content support your firm’s long-term goals?
7. Challenge:Does your staff find your content marketing to be adequately challenging?

This checklist reminds you that you are in competition with… competitors. Make content that will gain you an advantage over them.

1. Business Goals:Why are you creating content?
2. Content Goals:What do you want your content to do?
3. Audience:Who will your content speak to?
4. Competition:What advantage can you gain?
5. Content Formats:What content types can you create?
6. Distribution:Where will your content live?
7. Implementation:Who will produce your content?
8. Measurement:How will you track success?

This checklist is an all-round original approach. Original checklist items described in an original way. It’s a particularly un-boring read.

1. Don’t build on rented land
2. Craft your cornerstone
3. Make your content worth reading
4. Give your content a secure environment
5. Don’t give your great content an ugly apartment
6. Create content that attracts a wider audience
7. Build an email list sooner rather than later
8. Create content on a larger stage
9. Don’t go too long without making an offer
10. Go to social media … once you’ve got something to talk about

This checklist tells us to always send new content to suitable influencers in your industry. Have them distribute your stuff to their broad(er) network.

1. Content Audit and Analysis: List existing content and establish what is missing
2. Goal Definition: Define goals and priorities clearly
3. Content Development and Planning: Create a current editorial and production plan
4. Creation and Seeding: Keep the editorial and production plan well maintained
5. Monitoring and Controlling: Maintain any changes and developments and optimize processes

5 Content Marketing Strategy Creation Step Checklists

This checklist mentions regular check-ins, which is great. Let’s get iterating to stay agile.

1. Define your objective
2. Select channels, tactics, and strategies
3. Have deadlines been set?
4. Are budgets set?
5. Delegate tasks to appropriate team members
6. Outline project completion steps
7. Establish success metrics
8. Set dates for check-in meetings

This is a simplified (but an arguably incomplete) list of the steps and phases provided in the book.

This checklist… shouldn’t actually be called just a checklist. It’s more than that. It’s an entire workbook that encourages you to actually take action on every step.

1. Identify your business objectives (starting from scratch or optimizing your program)
2. Compose your content marketing mission
3. Generate some starter ideas that fulfill your mission
4. Use goals to come up with potential content ideas
5. Build personas for your target audiences
6. Revisit your initial ideas and align them with your personas
7. Assign your roles, which translate to content marketing responsibilities
8. Set up your calendar

At the risk of sounding like a car salesman, we use this list ourselves. Content’s good. Wording’s good. Design’s good. It’s, ehm, good!

The big picture

1. Goals: Start big and work your way down
2. Target audiences: Summarize each buyer persona
3. Target buying stages: Move a prospect to the next stage of the buying journey
4. Trigger events: Think about the events that trigger interest in your solutions
5. Sweet spot: Find where no one has a better claim on expertise than you do
6. Content audit: Know where your gaps are
7. Themes: Decide on your content success criteria and score each theme against them
8. Seo key phrases: Decide on your seo key phrases before you pick a topic
9. Editorial calendar: Schedule production and delivery in one sheet

Focus on your next piece

1. Topics: Generate topic ideas for each persona
2. Media: What medium is best for the topics
3. Information sources: Where will you get the goods
4. Tone & style: Share the look and feel with content creators

Flog it

1. Promotion: Spin content for maximum impact
2. Lead nurturing: Become scientific about who you contact
3. Atomization: Turn each major content piece into lots of different related pieces
4. Measurement and testing: Work out what success really means for you and
5. Learning: Capture what has worked, what hasn’t and why you think it’s true.

The ‘ka-pow’ flashiness aside this checklist isn’t particularly special, but it is substantial and solid.

1. Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
2. Know Your Audience
3. Find your content sweet spot of relevance
4. Create A Content Calendar
5. Give you content some visual Ka-Pow!
6. Use Search Engine Optimisation
7. Promote Your Content
8. Measure Results

This checklist reminds you of the value of reviving old content and/or republishing it. ROI could be very high for this.

1. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Otherwise known as “Do a content audit.”
2. Stop making productivity an accident. Adopt or more fully embrace a content calendar.
3. Bring content back from the dead, Leo style.
4. Go into the nitty-gritty with your email database
5. Stop trying to be everywhere.
6. Set 3 KPIs to tackle in the next 90 days.