Content strategy isn’t just about capturing eyeballs and a frontpage post on Hacker News. You need to ask yourself how your efforts are actually helping your company. Whether you’re trying to increase leads, hiring new staff, or defining a new market category, you need to have a strategy.

What are the Basic Tenets of a Content Strategy?

• Create Objectives: Pick a goal, attack that goal, measure your performance. Leading SaaS companies drive upwards of 70% of their inbound leads from their content efforts. There are many other reasons to create content, but you need to define what matters upfront.
• Target Your Audience: Who are you trying to reach? If your answer is everyone, you’re doing it wrong. Not every piece of content is relevant to every audience – define specific targets, learn where they spend time, know what they care about, and craft content that delights and engages them.
• Create & Measure Conversion: There’s an art and a science to high ROI content. Experimentation with different formats and distribution channels is key, but if a tactic is failing, drop it and move on. Calculate your cost per acquisition across channels and decide whether your efforts are meeting your goals.
• Prioritize It: Real strategies are repeatable and require diligence. You can’t depend on product launches, fundraising announcements, or a single celebrity employee to drive all of your inbound traffic. You also can’t expect amazing performance if a team doesn’t have org-wide buy-in, budget, or the time to execute. If you’re going to do this, do it right.

If you’re stuck in that spray and pray mode of content creation, or you’re interested in seeing some of the top founders and marketers in the SaaS and developer space, check out the videos from DevGuild: Content Strategy – a half day conference that featured speakers from Stack Overflow, Auth0, Algolia, Twilio, Box and Intercom.