How to Plan a Content Marketing Strategy and Keep It on Track

Gone are the days when simply producing large volumes of content could boost your traffic and visibility. Today, the market is saturated with content from both companies and their users.

So how do you stand out in all the noise? That’s where a content marketing strategy comes in.

A content marketing strategy is a strategic plan that guides the creation and distribution of your content to attract, engage, and retain your audience. It should align with your business goals and span multiple marketing channels, including your website, social media, newsletters, and events.

In this article, we’ll explore the essential elements of a content marketing strategy, how to create one, and how project management can help you implement and manage it effectively.

The power of a strategic content plan

A strong content marketing plan delivers 4 key benefits:

• Organizational alignment: Having a clear, approved plan ensures internal buy-in. When marketing efforts align with business goals, execution becomes seamless, and cross-team collaboration strengthens.
• A stronger brand: Clearly defining your brand’s voice, values, and messaging builds consistency across all channels. This clarity helps your audience know when and why to engage, fostering long-term trust and a competitive edge.
• Elimination of waste: Without a plan, teams waste time and resources going in different directions. A strategic roadmap keeps everyone focused, ensuring efforts are intentional and moving in the same direction.
• Increased ROI: Understanding your goals and audience allows for purposeful content creation that delivers the right returns. By having measurable outcomes, you can also refine strategies, uncover hidden opportunities, and drive better business results.

The value of a well-defined content marketing plan can easily be tracked to important measurable results—higher sales, new members, increased donations, newsletter signups, and more.

But beyond the increased ROI, the most exciting transformation happens within a team. As a digital strategist and project manager for more than 25 years, I’ve seen firsthand how a strategic marketing plan unifies an organization and impacts the results.

When teams align around (and, more importantly, invest in) shared marketing goals that serve both the business and its audience, something different happens. You can see the excitement building as people finally understand their users and how to engage them effectively.

These projects, regardless of budget or resources, are the most successful—and, honestly, the most fun for me to work on.

Elements of a successful content marketing strategy

Before diving into how to create a content marketing strategy, let’s cover its core elements. Your plan should include:

• Goals: Marketing goals that align with your organizational goals and follow the SMART goals framework—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. 
• Audience insights: A clear understanding of the people you’re speaking to, what they need, why they need you, and how they engage. As an organization, you’ll need to prioritize target audiences and their needs across different marketing channels.
• Content assessment & creation: An audit of existing content to decide what to keep, remove, or repurpose based on your audience's needs and engagement journeys. You should also have a content plan that outlines new content needed for key user and SEO topic clusters and how they might differ across your marketing channels.
• Distribution & maintenance: A plan for how best to distribute content across marketing channels using tools for efficiency and reach. Be sure to set aside time for content maintenance and user engagement on your platforms. 
• Performance analysis: A documented way to track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure alignment with goals. As needed, refine your strategy to improve outcomes, uncover new opportunities, and support evolving business initiatives.

Executing these pillars successfully requires a project manager—often the secret ingredient in content marketing success. This role is best suited to guiding cross-team coordination, task planning, and ongoing progress tracking.

How to create a content marketing strategy in 8 steps

The benefits of a well-executed content marketing strategy are clear, but committing to one is another story. It requires buy-in across your organization, along with dedicated resources. I don’t want to scare you off, but it’s important to understand that this isn’t a small, quick, or one-and-done effort.

Let’s dive into the key steps for building a successful content marketing strategy.

1. Set goals

Start by defining your goals. As mentioned earlier, they should be SMART and aligned with your organization’s overall direction.

For example, if your company is focused on brand awareness, your goal might be to increase social media engagement by 20% more shares, 30% more likes, and 10% more comments by the end of Q4.

In addition to knowing your business goals, ask yourself:

• Why this goal? What do we want to achieve with our content?
• How can marketing support company growth?
• What resources (e.g., time, budget, team) do we have?
• What do our target audiences need?
• What actions do we want our audience to take?
• What does brand awareness mean to us?
• What risks or challenges should we consider?
• Are we open to stepping outside the box and maybe doing something different?

I recommend setting 3-4 key goals—few enough to stay top-of-mind but impactful enough to guide your strategy. If you have multiple priorities, set shorter timeframes, meet them, and revisit (as able) once those are in maintenance mode.

One important note: Before setting goals, you might need to present your vision and explain why strategic content matters to gain leadership buy-in. Building a business case can be challenging, but once leadership is on board with changing the company’s culture around it, the impact will be unstoppable.

Remember, your goals will shape everything about your strategic plan. Make sure they’re clear, and get buy-in first.

2. Establish KPIs

Once you’ve set goals, establish KPIs to measure success. (As a project manager, you might also want to include critical success factors (CSFs).)

Here are key questions you should discuss:

• What metrics are we tracking today?
• What new metrics should we track based on our goals?
• Do we have a mix of qualitative (e.g., customer feedback) and quantitative (e.g., page views) data?
• How do data collection methods vary across channels?
• What systems need to be in place to track the right data?
• Do we need new tools for better tracking?
• Who will analyze and report the findings?

Remember, data is only useful when someone is actively analyzing and reporting it. These insights are invaluable in guiding decisions and allowing you to pivot when needed.

3. Complete research

Investing in research is essential to understanding your marketplace, users, and internal operations. The type of research you conduct will depend on factors like your marketing channels, brand positioning status, and available resources.

Some effective research methods include:

• Focus groups or interviews
• Internal stakeholder interviews
• Heatmap tracking
• Analytics reviews
• Surveys
• Usability testing
• Online reviews and comments
• On-site visits

Since time and budgets are often limited, focus on the areas where you have the greatest knowledge gaps and where research can deliver the most value.

NOTE: Keep in mind, research often overlaps with other steps in this strategic process, such as defining your audience or your brand. Once the research is complete, organize and present the findings in a clear, actionable format that can be easily shared across your team.

4. Define your audiences

Understanding who you’re trying to reach—and what they need—is critical to achieving your goals and delivering the right content. User research will help you define and refine these audiences.

While it’s useful to identify all potential audiences across your marketing channels, prioritize 2-3 key audiences per channel to start with. Then, create user profiles and user journey maps that outline their engagement cycles. These shareable documents ensure your team has a common understanding of your target users, leading to a more cohesive and effective approach.

Even the most well-crafted content won’t be effective if it doesn’t reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time. When building user profiles, consider these key questions:

• Who are they?
• What are their needs, concerns, and questions?
• How do they discover us?
• What prompts them to engage?
• Where do they interact with our brand?
• What do we offer that they need?
• What do our competitors offer that we don’t?
• What would delight them?
• How do we want them to engage?

 Here’s an example of how you can use a project board in TeamGantt to build a user profile your whole team can access:

5. Define (or refine) your brand

Having a clearly defined brand helps users understand who you are, what you believe, and the value you offer. Where you start in this phase depends on your brand’s current state. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to fully invest in branding. Common reasons include:

• Lack of budget or time
• The assumption that branding won’t impact the current project
• Difficulty getting leadership buy-in
• Resistance to change

But here’s the truth: If you get branding right, you can afford to invest in new initiatives!

While branding isn’t my primary expertise, I’ve collaborated with many specialists in this field. Their work typically includes:

• Brand purpose/manifesto: Why do you exist? What’s your mission?
• Brand personality: Your voice, tone, and communication style
• Visual identity: Logo, colors, fonts, and overall aesthetic
• Value proposition: How you differentiate yourself from competitors
• Messaging pillars: Core themes and messages that define your brand

A strong brand foundation ensures all communications align with your mission, goals, and identity, creating a seamless and recognizable experience for your audience.

6. Plan your content marketing calendar

Now it’s time to create a plan for content creation and distribution, ensuring the right content reaches the right audience at the right time. Project managers excel at this step, as it’s all about coordinating workflows and keeping everything organized with a content marketing calendar.

Your content calendar will help you manage your pipeline—from backlog to publication— and should include:

• Theme/topic 
• Goal it supports
• Target audience
• Marketing channel
• Content type
• Link to content 
• Visuals needed
• Author/owner
• Status
• Publish date
• Keywords

A well-structured plan ensures consistency, improves efficiency, and keeps your content strategy moving forward. As you build it, be sure to discuss:

• Capacity and workflow (how much content your team can realistically produce, review, and manage across channels)
• The best tool to track progress
• Where to store and organize content and media assets
• Opportunities to repurpose existing content 

Example: Building a content marketing calendar in TeamGantt

Let’s look at how you might build a content marketing calendar in TeamGantt. Each group in the gantt chart represents an overarching theme or topic, with tasks for different content angles.

You can add all the important details to each content task. In the example below, we used Notes to provide direction on the goals, audience, keywords, and visuals and included a link to the full content brief.

The Board tab makes it easy to create a simple Kanban workflow for tracking content from backlog to publication. We used labels to indicate the marketing channel and content type.

You can view the publication schedule in Calendar view anytime. In this example, content tasks are color-coded by marketing channel so it’s easy to see where each piece will be published at a glance.

7. Analyze and create content

This step doesn’t necessarily fit perfectly here. For example, at this point, you may have already completed a content audit and formed your content team.

But for the sake of this conversation, let’s cover all the core elements of content here. 

Content audit

You need to get a full snapshot of the content you have today. This includes the amount of content, types of content, which content you’ve been updating, how it’s currently performing, where it lives, and what aligns best with your audience's needs.

Conducting a proper content audit across your entire ecosystem takes a lot of time. Find one expert on your team to do it, and allow them to guide the recommendations.

SEO & keywords

SEO and keyword research should be completed alongside your content audit to determine which topics have high potential for your company. Use these data points throughout this process to help prioritize content opportunities.

Content pillars

Determine the key topics or content pillars that will guide your content creation. These are the themes you will start to cluster your content around. Your research and strategic planning to date will guide these decisions as you discuss:

• What supports your marketing strategy goals
• What matches your audience's needs
• What supports your brand identity
• What provides SEO benefits 

Content types & channels

Based on your content audit and overall marketing strategy, you’ll want to identify the key content types and channels you’ll regularly invest in. Discuss how one piece of content can be upscaled across multiple channels.

Roles & responsibility

Establish which team members will be part of the content creation and review process. Define their roles and responsibilities—author, editor, subject matter expert, reviewer, etc.

Workflow

You need to establish a clear workflow so that content can move through to get published. Tracking this movement in an online tool will be key so you can track the many tasks as content moves from person to person.

Media assets

I’m calling media creation out as a separate item, as it usually needs its own planning and scheduling to ensure top-quality video and images are produced.

8. Measure, review, and refine

Tracking and analyzing data is critical to understanding the impact of your content marketing efforts. This is the only way to determine whether you're making progress or need to pivot. It also helps justify continued investment by leadership.

Since you’ve already established KPIs and tracking methods, you should have a solid plan for a measurement dashboard. Your next step is ensuring insights are shared effectively with your team and leadership while refining your strategy based on the findings.

When reporting, keep it high-level for stakeholders who aren’t deeply involved in the work. Focus on key takeaways like:

• What content is performing well?
• What content isn’t resonating?
• What’s taking too long to create?
• What should we start producing?
• Where are we seeing the biggest returns?

Beyond regular reporting, project managers should lead annual post-mortems to provide a broader perspective on long-term trends and ways to refine the strategy for future success.

When spreadsheets aren’t enough

The way we document and execute content marketing strategies has evolved drastically. Collaboration methods and available tools have changed, making traditional spreadsheets less effective for many aspects of content marketing.

While I still love using spreadsheets for certain tasks, they often fall short when managing a dynamic, multi-team strategy.

Ditch the spreadsheet when:

• You have too many items to track.
• You need to make frequent adjustments.
• Multiple team members are involved.
• You want a visual interface.
• Team members prefer different ways of viewing and organizing tasks.

Common challenges a project management tool can help you manage

While you’ll likely hit many roadblocks when creating a content marketing strategy, strong project management (and an accompanying tool) can help you navigate common challenges like these:

Getting overbooked

It’s easy to take on too much, especially after investing time in a strategic plan. The excitement to execute often leads to content overload—producing too much, too quickly, across too many channels. Instead, gradually ramp up production to maintain quality and consistency.

A project manager can track team capacity and workflow timelines to prevent overload. Tools like TeamGantt help by setting hourly estimates, individual capacities, and workload tracking to balance tasks efficiently. If someone is overbooked, work can be rescheduled quickly.

See workloads in action in TeamGantt.

Inconsistent releases

While avoiding overbooking is crucial, so is maintaining a steady content cadence. Different content types require different publication frequencies.

For example, an animal shelter might:

• Send a quarterly newsletter
• Publish a monthly success story
• Post an adoptable animal video every 1-3 days
• Share a weekly post highlighting available pets

A structured publishing schedule ensures consistency across channels.

Low visibility & accountability

Missed deadlines are common, especially when team members aren’t natural writers. Using a project management tool during meetings provides a clear visual of tasks and deadlines, helping keep everyone aligned and accountable.

In TeamGantt, you can also share a view-only link with leadership, allowing them to track progress without micromanaging. They can choose their preferred view—list, calendar, or gantt chart—for better transparency.

Single-channel focus

Many teams start by focusing on a single channel—often the one with the most engagement or the most immediate need, like updating a website. However, this can limit reach and create inconsistencies across platforms.

If you begin with a single channel, log future tasks for other channels in a backlog (using labels in TeamGantt). This keeps cross-channel expansion on your radar and ensures brand consistency over time.

Lack of flexibility

Plans change—new projects emerge, external events require responses, and leadership shifts priorities. A dynamic project tracker allows you to adjust quickly without disrupting workflows.

Choose a tool with drag-and-drop functionality (across kanban, list, or gantt chart formats) to easily shift timelines while maintaining dependencies.

Plan clear and confident content marketing strategies

We can all agree that content marketing—when done right—delivers measurable impact. But success requires investing in research, creating a thoughtful plan, and executing it effectively.

If you want to stay on track, you need easy tools that provide visibility, streamline team collaboration, and adapt to changing plans!

The right platform can support both planning and execution, helping you:

• Facilitate visual workshops and keep shared notes accessible
• Store all documents and strategy assets in one place
• Build a visual content calendar to manage timelines
• Assign tasks, track accountability, and manage workloads
• Reprioritize and pivot quickly when needed
• Maintain a history of completed work for future insights
• Share progress with leadership in a clear, digestible way

TeamGantt provides the backbone you need to ensure your content marketing strategy stays on track—far beyond what a spreadsheet can offer.

The best way to see if it’s the right fit? Try it for yourself. 

Sign up for TeamGantt for free today!