How to create a content marketing strategy that engages each stage of your funnel

A content marketing strategy helps you create, publish, and promote valuable content that engages your audience—and ideally turns them into lifelong customers.

But without a clear roadmap, you risk spaghetti testing: churning out content and hoping something sticks.

So, how do you build a strategy that isn’t random and connects with the right people, supports your sales team, and drives real results? 

It all starts with a solid foundation. And we’ve put together 8 practical steps to walk you through the entire process.

Key insights

• In a B2B content marketing strategy, you’re speaking to an entire buying committee rather than just one person (like you are with B2C audiences). The buying committee might include the person who wants to purchase your product, the one who controls the budget, and the end user who will rely on it day-to-day. Each of them has different goals, questions, and concerns—and a strong content strategy should address all of them. 

• Vanity metrics (like page views or impressions) might look impressive, but they rarely tie to concrete results. When deciding which metrics to track for your content marketing strategy, choose ones that support your overall business goals, like revenue.

• You can have incredible content, but if it’s difficult to consume (think videos without captions), your audience will click away and find something else. Take care to place UX at the center of your content marketing strategy, so you don’t just attract people, you get them to stick around.

8 steps to create a content marketing strategy framework

While this framework is designed with B2B businesses in mind—think longer sales cycles and multiple decision makers—it’s flexible enough to adapt to other business models, too.

Whether you’re in SaaS, ecommerce, or another industry entirely, the core principles of our content marketing framework help digital marketers from all industries build a strategy that educates, builds trust, and supports audiences. Let’s dive in!

1. Set goals and KPIs 

Setting goals that align with business objectives—and tying clear KPIs to those goals—helps you create content that contributes to overall business growth (and helps you prove the worth of your content marketing strategy to stakeholders!).

Start by grounding your content goals in your broader business objectives. For instance, if your company is focused on driving product upgrades, your content goal might be to create resources that showcase advanced features and demonstrate the value of upgrading.

To make your goals actionable, use the S.M.A.R.T. framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). In the above example, a strong S.M.A.R.T. goal could be: “Publish 3 advanced feature guides and 2 customer stories by the end of the quarter, aiming for a 10% increase in upgrade conversions from existing customers.” 

Then, define KPIs for each goal so you can see how you’re performing over time (and know when you need to adjust your strategy). Just be careful to avoid choosing vanity metrics—metrics that look impressive but don’t actually contribute to your goals—like impressions or page views. Examples of useful KPIs include:

• Engagement: time on page, scroll depth, bounce rate, social shares, or comments

• Conversion: email subscribers, CTA clicks, product trial signups, purchase rates, conversion rates by funnel stage

• Acquisition: marketing qualified leads (MQLs), organic traffic growth, cost per lead (CPL)

• Revenue impact: revenue generated, customer acquisition cost (CAC), closed deals

At Contentsquare, we also track KPIs like accounts created, tags installed, and paying customers.

Once you’ve defined your KPIs, Contentsquare’s Page Comparator can help you track performance by grouping similar types of pages—like blog posts, product guides, or landing pages—and comparing how they stack up. This makes it easier to spot trends, identify top performers, and prioritize what to optimize.

Contentsquare Page Comparator lets you create mappings (groups of pages) to compare KPIs at a glance 

2. Research your audience

Understanding who you’re creating content for helps you pick relevant topics that your audience is more likely to care about and consume.

To create content, first define the different roles in the buying process and then build out an ideal customer profile (ICP) for each one. Here’s what to focus on (and where to find the data):

• Demographics: use tools like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Crunchbase to identify industry, company size, geographic location, and job titles

• Psychographics: turn to resources like SparkToro G2, customer interviews, and your sales team to uncover pain points, goals, motivations, values, and buying behaviors

• Firmographics: speak with your ICP and sales team to discover their business model (for example, SaaS, B2B, B2C), stage of growth, tech stack, and procurement process

Contentsquare’s Interviews capability lets you define interviewee demographics so you can reach your buyers (and get valuable insight with each interview).

Use our Interviews tool to set interviewee demographics like age, industry, job titles, and more 

At Contentsquare, audience research is a cross-functional effort that involves input from multiple teams:

3. Map the customer’s journey

Once you know whom you’re speaking to, the next step is to understand how those people buy. In other words, what journey do they take to go from “I have a problem” to “I need [insert your product’s name here] because it solves my problem.” That’s called the customer journey map.

A journey map includes many different touchpoints—your website, social channels, ads, emails, and more. To start, review your site’s web analytics to see which channels drive the most first-time visitors. This gives you a baseline understanding of how people discover your brand.

Then, use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis to understand how visitors move through your site once they arrive. Look for

• High-traffic pages that don’t lead to action. These are clues that visitors are looking for content that’s not there yet.

• Where users land and where they bounce. This reveals gaps between what they expect and what they find.

• Confusing paths, dead ends, or drop-off points. These are prime spots to add helpful content. 

And adding exit-intent surveys to these pages lets you ask users what they need so you know what content to create.

Ask users why they’re thinking of leaving and what they need to help you brainstorm content ideas

But don’t stop at your website. The customer journey often begins—and continues—well beyond your owned channels. People may hear about you in a LinkedIn post or read a G2 review before ever landing on your homepage.

To map the full journey

• Analyze referral traffic sources and social media engagement

• Monitor ad interactions and retargeting sequences

• Review sales touchpoints and email campaign data

An example of a journey map created by Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare)

Pro tip: while your journey map might look linear on paper, real people rarely move through it in a straight line. Everyone takes their own unique path—sometimes looping back or skipping ahead. That’s why it’s important to make your content easily discoverable at every stage (think intuitive site navigation and handy internal links), so your audience can find what they need no matter how they get there. 😉

4. Tie your content to the customer journey

Someone just discovering your brand needs different information than someone ready to make a purchase. Tying your content to each stage of the customer journey ensures you're giving people the right information at the right time. 

Start by identifying which topics and formats (like case studies, guides, or short-form videos) best serve your audience’s needs during each stage of their journey. If you’re unsure, use Contentsquare Surveys to directly ask your audience what info they’re missing and what topics they’d like to learn more about.

💡 Pro tip: use the Contentsquare x Trello integration to automatically create Trello cards based on survey responses, so your team always has a live content idea bank to pull from.

Then, segment your content with the content marketing funnel in mind:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU) content helps your audience understand their challenges and explore possible solutions

• Middle of the funnel (MOFU) content dives deeper into how your solution works and what makes it different

• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) content proves you’re the right choice—and the best fit

🔥 Want a deep dive into the content marketing funnel? Check out chapter 1 of our content marketing guide.

Nea Björkqvist, the Global Content Lead at Contentsquare, explains how she picks format types for Contentsquare’s content marketing strategy:

5. Create an editorial calendar

Editorial calendars help your team stay on track. Define your publishing cadence based on your team’s capacity and business goals, such as

• Weekly blog posts

• Monthly webinars

• Quarterly research reports and white papers

• Annual ebooks

A useful calendar typically includes key details like

• Content type and format

• Funnel stage

• Target audience

• Status (drafting, editing, published)

• Publication date

• A link to the project folder

Track these items with content marketing software or through a simple spreadsheet. Here’s a sample of Contentsquare’s guide publication calendar (we use Monday 🥳).

At Contentsquare, we use multiple Monday boards to track our entire content marketing plan 

6. Outline content distribution

A distribution plan puts your content in front of the right people at the right time. For example, if your team creates an informative ebook to capture leads, you might promote it through paid social ads. Some other examples of content distribution include

• Sharing new content with your email list

• Partnering with industry-relevant influencers 

• Posting organically on social

• Optimizing blog posts with keywords and building backlinks for SEO

Then, use a traffic analytics tool to monitor traffic from different marketing channels and review user behavior across each channel. Contentsquare lets you create dashboards for various acquisition channels that give you detailed information about each one.

Review each acquisition channel to understand which channels bring the most engaged users

And use Contentsquare Funnel Analysis to dig even further: see where people drop off and hypothesize what content they need to stop them from leaving.

Reviewing funnels helps you understand what your content marketing strategy is lacking

7. Measure content performance 

Once your content is live, you need to measure its performance against your goals. Track the KPIs you defined in Step 1 using a web analytics tool like Contentsquare, which gives you granular insights about your content's performance across traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics. 

And through Contentsquare’s advanced user filtering, you can easily identify highly engaged audiences, making it easier to back up your content ideas with data and secure buy-in.

Pro tip: create a custom dashboard in Contentsquare so you can effortlessly track your content marketing analytics every time you log in.

Contentsquare lets users create custom dashboards so each team can see the numbers that matter most

8. Optimize your content

Creating content is just the beginning—optimizing your content keeps it fresh, relevant, and performing well over time.

Use free Contentsquare tools like Heatmaps and Session Replay to analyze how users interact with each page to understand how you can improve it.

Review heatmaps for your content and hop to relevant replays with the click of a button

And use Impact Quantification to zoom in on specific content elements—like CTAs—to see which ones drive the most conversions. These insights help you optimize existing content and apply successful patterns to future pieces.

Impact Quantification ties numbers to specific events, so you have concrete data to prioritize content optimization efforts

Here are a few ways to optimize your content:

• Make content easy to consume on any device

• Ensure accessibility (high contrast, legible font, alt text on images)

• Collaborate with your design team for clean, uncluttered layouts

• Use descriptive anchor text for links

• Add visuals to break up dense text

• Include captions on videos

• Use clear CTAs 

Great content starts with your users

The most impactful content strategies aren’t built on guesswork—they’re built around real people. When you create content that speaks to each stage of the funnel and every voice in the buying committee, you’re not just sharing information, you’re giving your audience something of value.

And the only way to create great value? Listen, watch, and learn. Gather feedback from the people you're creating content for, and let their insights guide what you build next.

FAQs about content marketing strategies