This Simple Content Strategy Template Will Help You Organize Your Content Program

Planning a content strategy can seem overwhelming to a lot of marketers. Over the years, one of my goals has been to make the process as simple as possible.

In January, I wrote about a Venn diagram you can use to identify the pillars of your content marketing program. Pillars are the big topics your brand will cover. They should lie in the overlap between what your brand is passionate about and what your audience is passionate about.

But then what?

That’s one of the big questions we tackled in our free content strategy course. As Emily Gaudette and Deanna Cioppa explain in the video below, once you come up with your pillars, you need to identify the sub-topics that fall under them. That will make it easier for you to come up with specific story ideas that align with your target audience.

Once you’ve done that, you can use those story ideas to map out the first few months of your content calendar. After three months, you should be able to optimize your strategy based on which topics perform best.

We included a content strategy and content calendar template in the course to help you through these exercises, which you can download here. (But don’t rely on Excel or Google Docs for too long—a proper content marketing platform like Contently will save you a lot of time in the long run.

If you want to learn more about building a content strategy, sign up for our free course that’s full of video lessons, templates, and tools.