With the growing adoption and proliferation of business produced content on the web, using a "spaghetti" approach to content marketing (throwing things against the wall to "see what sticks") is no longer effective and can do more damage than good. Investing time to determine your content marketing goals and being selective on the formats and channels you invest in are critical in measuring your effectiveness.

So what is a content (marketing) strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a framework that will help guide you on who you are marketing to, your messaging, where you will concentrate your content, what type of content you'll produce, and set goals that you are trying to achieve.

Therefore, an effective content marketing strategy includes the following key ingredients:

1. Understanding your customers = develop customer personas
2. Defining how you solve their problem = develop your Unique Sales Proposition (USP)
3. Determining where they "hang out" online = determine marketing channels
4. Learn how they consume content = determine content format
5. What do I want to achieve = defining clear objectives
6. How will I know if it's successful = determine how to measure activity

Here is an example of a simple content strategy for a company that sells computer software for lawyers:

1. LawyerConnect sells to the general partners of small law firms (less than 10 employees) in North America that specialize in criminal and small claims cases. Our ideal clients are computer savvy and heavily involved in marketing their services.
2. We solve law firms number one problem which is finding, acquiring, and onboarding new qualified clients in their local market at 1/10th the cost of traditional advertising.
3. Our target market often searches for new way to market their services online and invest a lot of time reading blogs about local marketing and search.
4. Our target market reads over 40 articles per week on marketing tactics on popular legal marketing blogs. They spend an hour per day on twitter, and almost 2 hours on Facebook (though not for professional purposes). They do not use Linkedin often for generating leads. Therefore we will use a combination of blog posts to publish content and connect and share with potential clients through Twitter.
5. We'd like to become one of the most popular destinations for educating lawyers on marketing best practices.
6. We will determine the success of our content marketing program based on total number of views (for generating awareness), the "clickthrough rate" to our marketing landing pages (for buyer interest), and software trials (for customer acquisition). We will use google analytics and software reporting to track our KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).

While this fictitious marketing strategy is very simple, it provides focus to the organization's content marketing efforts and content.