What Are the 3 Components of Content Strategy?

A whopping 91% of organizations are using content marketing, and there are 213.65 million companies worldwide. This means 194.42 million companies are using content marketing. 

Feeling slightly intimidated by those numbers? Completely understandable. Of course, not everyone is competing for the same audience, but it does give some perspective on how many businesses are out there clamoring for attention. 

If your Google searches lately have been filled with terms like “SEO pillar strategy” or “essential components of good web content,” your head is in the right place for content improvement. In this blog, we’re covering the most important components of creating content, including the secrets of content pillar strategy, and how your business can push to the top of the fierce pool of competition.

What Is Content Strategy?

To put it simply, content strategy is a method of achieving business goals through online content. How does it work, exactly? First, let’s break it down a bit further by answering an easier question: “What is content?” The content we’re talking about is the principal material offered by a website. This could be anything from illustrations to music, but in this blog we are specifically focusing on written content. Written content can come in many forms, from blogs to newsletters to white papers and more. 

How you use your written content to grow your business is where the strategy comes in. You can make all the content you want, but if it’s sitting alone in a corner of the interweb with no visitors, that content is serving no purpose other than wasting the time of its creator. How do you pull your content from the corner to center stage? Let us show you.

3 Components of Content Strategy

Most successful content marketing strategy examples will focus on three components:

1. The Audience and Brand Overlap
2. The Plan-Create-Promote Cycle
3. The Analyze and Improve Phase

Here’s how each component works. 

1. The Audience and Brand Overlap

Your business has something to offer to the world, meaning there are people in the world who need or want what you have to offer. How you find those people, and more importantly, how they find you, is one of the first elements of content marketing. A great place to start is having clearly defined answers to these questions about your business:

• What exactly is my business offering?
• How do we define our brand?
• What are the goals and objections of my business?

• Who is most likely going to use my service or buy my product?
• What questions is my audience asking that relate to my business? 
• What problems do my offerings solve?

The overlap between these sets of questions is where your content should be focused. And while you can probably answer most of these questions, the trickiest one is knowing what questions your audience is asking. Using consumer insights from a platform like DemandJump is one of the best ways to learn the exact content to create based on your audience’s commonly asked questions.

2. The Plan-Create-Promote Cycle

Now, the fun part! Or maybe not so fun, if writing isn’t one of your strengths. Whether you’re creating the content or outsourcing it, you must first have a content plan. This plan should have the titles of all the pieces of content to write, and those titles should be pulled from keywords and questions. But simply choosing titles at random is not the best route to go. This is where content pillar strategy comes in. 

Content pillar strategy is one of many types of content strategy, but in our opinion, it’s the most successful one. It certainly got you to this blog, didn’t it? The premise of pillar content is relating and linking all your content down from one pillar page. We think this visualization helps solidify the concept:

Let’s look at each content type a bit closer:

• Pillar - The pillar page lives by itself at the top of this structure. It should cover a broad topic, have a length around 3,000 words, and include 15-20 keywords. 
• Sub-pillar - Nestled underneath the pillar page are the sub-pillar pages (at least three for each pillar), which are 1,500-2,000 words and include 12-15 keywords. Sub-pillars should cover topics related to the pillar topic, just not quite as broad. 
• Supporting Blogs - At the very bottom are the supporting blogs (at least three for each sub-pillar). These only need to be around 750 words with 5-7 keywords included. Supporting blogs are where you can dig into narrower, more specific topics that relate to the pillar.

The next piece of this component is to keep writing. Google algorithms are searching for the authorities on subjects to present to its searchers. To become and remain an authority, you must continuously write content to answer emerging questions and meet your audience’s needs. Additionally, people are constantly asking the same types of questions with different wording, so you may find yourself writing similar content to ensure all angles are covered. 

As you write your content, you must also distribute and promote it. Every time you add new content to your website, you need to advertise that content on all of your business’s social media pages. If you use content pillar strategy, you’ll find that you have to do very little for content promotion other than that, as the keywords and pillar structure will do most of the heavy lifting to get your website to page one of Google.

3. The Analyze and Improve Phase

This is the last component of the content strategy cycle. Here, your business should be asking questions like:

• Which pieces are performing well? 
• Which ones aren’t getting as many clicks?
• Why is this piece performing so much better than this piece? 

Answering these questions is simple when using DemandJump. Our marketing attribution reports automatically gather this data for you to show you exactly how your content is fitting into your customer’s journey. 

After you have this data, the last and most important question to ask is this: “How can we do better?” As with any good business practice, improvement is key. Find the weak spots in your content strategy and look for ways to strengthen them. If you're having trouble coming up with a solution or you find your strategy isn’t working, it might be time to call an expert. 

The #1 Content Strategy Platform: DemandJump

Hey, we get it—content strategy isn’t easy. We’ve also found that around 90% of published content gets zero traffic, so it can also feel like a fruitless endeavor. This is why we created DemandJump: to give businesses the power to increase their first-page rankings and drive outcomes. If you want the ability to see the exact needs of your audience and how your efforts are driving sales pipeline value, then try our platform today for free!