Developing a content strategy sounds intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be.
We’ve curated five proven types of content strategies to help you find the right framework for your business. Plus, you’ll learn exactly how to develop your own strategy.
But before we dive into the content strategy examples, let’s cover the basics.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a carefully planned approach to planning, creating, optimizing, and distributing content that reaches your target audience and supports your business goals.
This content can be in formats like blog posts, videos, social media posts, and podcast episodes.
The right format depends on the marketing channels you’re posting content on, your audience’s preferences, your larger marketing strategy, etc. And you may even need a slightly different approach for each channel.
Executing an effective content strategy is beneficial because it helps in:
- Getting your content in front of people who are most likely to buy from you
- Prompting users to engage with your content
- Achieving your objectives for producing content—like building brand authority or increasing conversions (desired actions like account sign-ups or purchases)
If you need help getting started, use the sample content strategies below as inspiration.
5 Content Strategy Examples
Some of the most popular (and proven) content strategy types include:
1. SEO-Led Content Strategy
A search engine optimization (SEO) content strategy is primarily focused on content designed to enhance your site for higher rankings (positions) related to relevant search engine queries, so more users see your content and click on it.
For example, travel booking site Booking.com gets nearly 28 million monthly organic (unpaid) traffic visits, according to Semrush’s Domain Overview tool.
And the site attracts that traffic through high-ranking pages for queries like “tokyo hotel,” “flights to ohio,” and “rental car booking.”
An effective SEO content strategy includes these steps:
- Performing keyword research: Keywords are the words and phrases your target audience types into search engines to look for information. Identify keywords relevant to your business so you can create content for them.
- Determining keywords’ search intents: Search intent refers to the user’s purpose when performing a search—navigating to a specific site, researching a product’s pros and cons, etc. Knowing search intent helps you create content that addresses users’ needs.
- Creating quality content: Your content should offer valuable information and be easy to read. It should also include visuals to illustrate the concepts you communicate.
- Optimizing content: Apply techniques that prime your content for readers and search engines. For example, use headings to break up the discussion into subtopics. And add your target keywords to your content’s title tag (the HTML title that shows in browsers and might show in search results) and body text.
- Monitoring rankings: Once you’ve published your content, use a tool like Position Tracking to track its search rankings over time. To measure how visible and likely to attract clicks your content is.
Learn more in our guide to SEO basics.
Topic Clusters
A strategy focused on topic clusters (groups of related pieces that explore a main topic and related subtopics) is a subset of an SEO-led strategy that helps you build authority around certain subjects to gain credibility with users and improve your search rankings.
For each topic cluster, there’s a main page known as a pillar page that provides a general overview of the topic. And pages that dive into subtopics in more detail, which are called cluster pages (or subpages).
Here’s a good topic cluster content strategy example from Allrecipes:
The site’s header menu links to pillar pages with recipes for dinners, regular meals, special occasions, and so on. And hovering your cursor over each menu item reveals cluster pages for relevant subtopics.
Like pages with recipes for chicken, beef, or pork if you want recipes that use a specific ingredient.
If you’d like to execute a cluster strategy, use a tool like Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder to brainstorm your topics and pages.
Open the tool and enter a seed keyword (main topic), choose the country your target customers are based in, and click “Create list.”
Once the tool has finished running, scroll down the “Topics and pages” tab until you see pillar page suggestions and subpages for each.
The tool will display basic SEO data on each pillar page (and subpage) idea, including keyword difficulty and monthly search volume. Use this data to shortlist ideas to create content pages for.
Further reading: 9 Pillar Page Examples (And How to Make Yours Just as Great)
2. Video-Led Content Strategy
A video-led content strategy focuses on using videos to reach audiences and tends to work well for brands covering topics that users can understand more easily by watching or listening to them.
Many brands that adopt this strategy mainly publish to YouTube. Which people use as a search engine to discover new videos and the brands behind them.
Linus Media Group is a great example of a brand with a video-led content strategy. It’s posted 7,000+ videos to its Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel since 2008.
The brand has various online assets, including a community forum and an online store. But it doesn’t have a blog.
Instead, it focuses on creating YouTube videos.
Further reading: Video Marketing: The Ultimate Guide for 2024
3. Product-Led Content Strategy
A product-led content strategy makes your product the main focus of your content (for example, by showcasing its unique selling points and demonstrating how it helps users) to persuade people who engage with your content to buy your product.
Check out ClickUp for an example of a product-led content strategy in action. The brand promotes its project management software through content like:
- Pages that cover key product features in detail
- Use cases for different teams and company types
- Educational resources, including product demos, video tutorials, and webinars for users to learn how to use its software
- Customer stories that show how its software has helped other brands succeed
- Blog posts that discuss readers’ pain points and how its product is the solution for these. For example, this ClickUp blog post pitches its software as one of the best options for users looking for free project management software:
4. Thought Leadership-Led Content Strategy
A thought leadership-led content strategy involves using content to communicate novel ideas and research that gets attention on your brand, which can translate to more brand awareness and conversions.
On X, for instance, author James Clear positions himself as an expert in building good habits:
Clear backs up his profile’s claim by regularly posting tips on that very subject.
These tips routinely get a lot of engagement because they’re inspirational and thought-provoking. But still easy to understand.
As he posts his tips, Clear also promotes his email newsletter to encourage people who like them to subscribe:
The result?
His newsletter currently has over 3 million subscribers.
5. Customer Support-Led Content Strategy
A customer support-led content strategy emphasizes creating content that helps customers understand and gain the most value from your product, so they continue being loyal customers.
Since this content strategy targets people who are already customers, brands often use it alongside other content strategies that cater to users higher up the content marketing funnel (i.e., prospects searching for a solution to their problem).
Here’s an example:
As part of the brand’s customer support-led content strategy, Figma’s help center contains dozens of articles explaining how to use its product design software.
Like this one:
And the platform has shared best practices to help users do more with its software.
This content strategy for supporting and retaining customers is used alongside Figma’s main product-led content strategy to attract new prospects.
One example of the prospect-focused content the brand creates is a resource library to introduce beginner product designers to product design concepts and how to apply these in Figma:
How to Develop Your Content Strategy
Now, create your own content strategy with this six-step process:
1. Set Your Goals and Choose Your Strategy Type
Decide what you want to get out of publishing content and use that to set the goals for your overarching content strategy, which will affect everything from your formats to the strategy type you decide to use.
Make your goals as specific as possible, so you can track your progress toward them.
What do you want to achieve? By when? And what number will you need to hit?
Also, ensure your goals are realistic to ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure.
For instance, instead of trying to gain 100 account sign-ups overnight, aim for gradual growth over a few months.
Here are examples of goals you could set and how they could inform your content strategy type:
- Boost organic search traffic by 25% within six months → Pursue an SEO-led content strategy
- Improve product sales by 30% over the next two years → Implement a video-led content strategy that features process overviews and actionable tips for using your product
- Drive 500 account sign-ups every week over the next quarter → Use a product-led content strategy that drives account registrations
- Increase total website traffic by 20% in the next year → Use a thought leadership-led strategy that focuses on original research to get media coverage and drive direct visits
- Reduce software subscription cancellations by 10% in the next six months → Use a customer support-led content strategy to provide more guidance to customers
2. Research Your Audience
Getting a thorough understanding of who your audience is (backgrounds, desires, etc.) helps you determine what content to create and where it should live.
More specifically, it’ll inform:
- The topics you should cover to attract your prospects’ attention
- The platforms you should publish on to reach your target audience
- The format your content should be in to suit your platforms and your audience’s preferences
Semrush’s One2Target tool helps you research your audience to gain the insights you need.
To use the tool, enter up to five competitors’ domains, select your target location, and click “Analyze.”
Use the tabs at the top of the report to learn more about the domains’ audiences:
- The “Demographics” tab breaks down these audiences’ ages, genders, and countries. Use this information to understand which life stages to speak to and whether you should create localized content for different areas.
- The “Socioeconomics” tab sheds light on these audiences’ educational qualifications, so you can tailor your content’s readability to their education levels
- The “Behavior” tab shares these audiences’ interests, favorite social media platforms, and preferred device types. It’s great for identifying the platforms to create content for.
- The “Audience Overlap” tab shows you other domains these audiences visit most often (when you scroll down). These sites may be worth undertaking content collaborations with to boost brand awareness.
Make a note of these insights as you go.
3. Analyze Competing Content
Doing a competitive analysis of your rivals’ content strategies helps you get ideas for your own.
Competitors aren’t always businesses that sell similar products or services. They could also be market players like industry publications and content creators who focus on the same audience.
You already know some of your main competitors (they’re the ones you used in the last step). But how can you find others?
Use the Market Explorer tool.
Open the tool and click the “Find Competitors” tab. Enter your domain, set your target location, and click “Research a market.”
Scroll down the tool’s “Overview” report until you reach the “Domain vs Market Dynamics” section.
You’ll see the sites with the largest share of website visits in your market. Which means, they’re your competition.
Once you’ve compiled your list of competitors, head to the EyeOn tool to monitor their content efforts.
Click “+ Create list” to start a new list. Then, enter the competing domains you’ve found.
The tool will then provide an overview of the number of new content pieces your competitors have published within a certain time frame.
You can also enter your competitors’ social media accounts to track their social posts.
Then, view any of your competitors’ latest content in detail by clicking one of their domains under the relevant content type. Like blog articles or social posts.
Study their content to understand what topics they cover. After that, research how their content is performing to gauge the results you could get from creating similar content.
EyeOn even provides basic social media metrics for your competitors’ social posts:
As for performance metrics for website content, use Traffic Analytics.
Go to the tool and enter a competitor’s domain (or one of the domain’s subfolders, like “/blog” if you’re analyzing its blog content). Then, select a location and click “Analyze.”
Traffic Analytics will provide metrics like these for the specified month:
- The number of visits the domain has gotten
- The estimated percentage of purchase conversions from visits to the domain
- The domain’s market share
Use these findings to decide how much of your competitors’ content you want to emulate as you shape your content strategy.
4. Audit Your Existing Content
Next, conduct a content audit to learn how you’re currently performing, so you can keep doing what works well and overhaul anything that isn’t producing results.
The specific type of audit you do and the metrics it focuses on will depend on the strategy you pursue.
But regardless, one way of assessing your content is to compare current performance metrics against past ones.
If you’re using an SEO-led content strategy, you can use the Position Tracking tool to track your search rankings over time.
Follow the Position Tracking configuration guide to set up your project.
Then, view the tool’s “Landscape” report to get a snapshot of your rankings distribution, top-ranking keywords, and more.
Go to the “Overview” tab and scroll down to the “Rankings Overview” section to see your target keywords and how your rankings have changed over a certain period.
Use the date filter to adjust the time period you want to track ranking changes for.
You can also use any performance metrics you’ve collected from earlier competitive analyses to inform your content audit—and your content strategy as a whole.
5. Choose Content Types and Channels
You’re now ready to choose the formats and distribution channels that will help your content reach your target audience.
Your chosen content strategy type will influence the main channels you create content for. For instance, your website is likely your main channel if your intention is to rank in search engines.
That said, other channels can still act as supporting distribution channels.
Here are some examples:
If YouTube is one of your audience’s favorite channels, your content marketing strategy could involve producing more YouTube video content (even if you’re not using a video-led strategy).
And while a customer support-led content strategy generally involves publishing support resources on your site, you could also have your team answer questions that people have posted about your product on platforms like Reddit and X.
Some channels support multiple content formats. If that’s the case for the ones you’ve selected, consider which format(s) help you best communicate with your audience.
For example, Instagram supports image and video posts. If you want to illustrate ideas in a dynamic way, creating video posts may be best.
Like this Instagram post from Coconut Odyssey that uses video to share underwater exploits:
6. Establish Your Content Creation Process
Now that you know your approach, channels, topics, and more, draw up your plan for creating that content.
Your creation process should cover matters like:
- Who will create your content: If you’re writing blog posts, you may need to assemble a team of content strategists, writers, editors, and graphic designers. You may also choose to outsource the work to freelancers or agencies.
- Your content workflow: In other words, the sequence of steps your team will take to create content. And who’s responsible for each step.
- The tools your team will use to create content: This could be investing in camera and lighting equipment if you’re producing videos. It could also be SEO tools for optimizing your content for search engine traffic.
- How often you want to publish: Consider what frequency you can feasibly manage. Setting up a content calendar can help you track the publish dates of all past and upcoming content.
Implement Your Content Strategy
At this point, you have ideas for different strategy types and a framework for creating an effective content strategy.
Now, you need the tools to put these steps into action.
A single Semrush account gets you access to dozens of tools. Try them out with a free account.
