Creating a Content Strategy in the Age of Customer Experience
“Content is King” is a phrase that is in vogue today, because brands have recognized the importance of content in building meaningful and lasting relationships with their customers. Content is at the heart of how brands interact with their audiences across diverse platforms. From social media to email, websites to mobile apps, businesses are using content to inform, engage, and guide consumers at every stage of their buying journey. For a brand, it’s no longer only about what is being said. It’s about creating a content strategy to assess how personalized, timely, and useful that message can be to your customer.
But with several businesses establishing their presence online, there is such a high volume of information available that consumers are often overwhelmed and flooded with digital content. Instead of gaining clarity about a brand or a product, they are left more confused and fatigued. This is where a strong content strategy becomes essential. It connects your business goals to customer values by using consistent messaging, automation, and personalization across channels.
The Gap in Creating a Content Strategy: Where Most Brands Fall Short
Despite increasing the budget for content and investing in it, many businesses still see unsatisfactory results from their content marketing efforts. There are various reasons for this:
Fragmented Data
Many companies use disparate tools for marketing, sales, and customer service. When these systems and data aren’t connected with each other, it’s impossible to get a 360–degree view of the customer and produce a detailed customer portfolio. As a result, the content team lacks a clear picture of who the customer is, what conversions they’ve made at each touchpoint in the buying journey, and what their needs, wants and demands are. The communication sent out by the brand often becomes too generic and doesn’t resonate with the target audience.
Lack of Personalization and Real-Time Access
Today’s consumers expect brands to be to-the-point and address their needs and interests. But due to a lack of access to real-time data and relevant tools, businesses cannot customize content for everyone. This leads to broad, or mass campaigns that don’t feel relevant and ends up causing customers to ignore the brand or unsubscribe to communication.
Reactive Planning
Many organizations make the mistake of creating content at the last minute, usually as a short-term response to an issue raised by a customer, or to address an urgent need. This hinders consistency in content and keeps the marketing team out of touch with important touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Instead of guiding the customer till the final purchase with well-timed content, brands often miss out on opportunities and lose prospects.
Low Visibility into Performance
One of the biggest issues that content teams face is the analysis of their performance. Without proper tracking tools or analytics, it’s difficult to pinpoint which content drives traffic, leads, or sales. Improving content strategy, or even measuring the value add of the current strategy in this scenario becomes challenging. Producing more content isn’t enough. Businesses must create a unified plan and put out the right content at the right time, with focus on quality rather than quantity.
Limited Resources
With fewer resources, it’s difficult to maintain a steady flow of high-quality content across channels. This often leads to rushed publishing and inconsistent messaging.
When budgets are tight or team capacities are limited, businesses find it challenging to focus on content strategies that offer the highest ROI. The aim should be to improve customer experience through digital channels while strengthening brand reputation. This means that businesses should be selective with content. Instead of producing entirely new content, teams can look at ways to refresh or repurpose high-performing ones, such as turning a successful blog post into a video or breaking an interesting whitepaper into a series of social media posts.
Lack of Alignment
When marketing, sales, and other departments operate in silos, content becomes inconsistent, misaligned with business goals, or even irrelevant to customer needs. Without a shared vision, efforts are duplicated and pulled in different directions.
Getting all teams on the same page is essential to run a seamless and effective content strategy. Before setting any goals, content objectives should be well-aligned with overall business priorities. This calls for open collaboration between marketing, sales and other key departments and stakeholders, so that everyone’s efforts are streamlined and they contribute to a unified brand message.
Inconsistent Quality
A major challenge in creating a content strategy is maintaining consistent quality across all platforms. In many organizations, content is created by a mix of in-house teams, freelancers, and external agencies, who do no follow set standards and guidelines. This leads to variations in tone, style, accuracy, and brand messaging, which can confuse customers and weaken trust.
Key Components of a Content Strategy
Creativity engages the audience, but strategy drives conversions. To create engaging content that converts, brands need a structured plan in place. Here are the key steps involved:
Setting Objectives
A solid strategy starts with clarity. The goal could be generating leads, connecting better with existing customers, increasing product sales, or enhancing brand visibility. The brand’s objectives should follow the SMART framework – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-bound. These targets will guide everything from the tone of the messaging to the choice of distribution channels and the metrics that are tracked.
Audience Portfolios
Developing audience portfolios helps companies understand different segments of the target audience based on demographics, behavior, age and preferences. For marketing teams, this is a goldmine from which they can extract information to tailor campaigns for customers ranging from first-time buyers to loyal members. A detailed and comprehensive portfolio leads to better personalization and helps improve customer experience online.
Pro Tip: Platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud allow you to bring together customer data into a unified platform, making targeting and segmentation easier and more accurate.
Content Audit
Before producing new content, content teams need to evaluate the existing communication through conducting audits. This allows teams to assess which content types are performing well, which need improvement, and which are outdated. By analyzing digital marketing KPIs (Key performance indicators) such as click-through rates, time spent on website, conversion rates, and SEO performance, businesses can uncover gaps in the customer journey and better leverage existing materials to improve overall content effectiveness.
Content Calendar
Content without a plan is just noise. It fails to bring brand recall in the minds of the audience. To make a brand stand out and build retention among the target audience, the marketing team needs to have a content calendar. They can then coordinate their efforts by aligning content creation with milestones like product launches, seasonal events, or sales campaigns and key conversions in the buying journey. This ensures that prospects and customers receive the right message at the right time, on the right channel.
Channel Strategy
Imagine filling LinkedIn with memes and posting whitepaper links on Instagram. Not only does the message get ignored, but it also shows a lack of understanding of the audience consuming content in each platform. Every channel has its own language, pace, and audience interest. A strong content strategy recognizes this and customizes content accordingly. For example:
- Email is best for personalized offers and professional communications
- Social media (Instagram, Facebook) thrives on quick, visual storytelling and community engagement
- Websites serve as an authoritative source of in-depth content about the business
- SMS is effective for quick, direct notifications
- Paid ads target users based on segmentation and drive to a clear call to action
The key is not to copy content across channels, but to reframe it based on how the audience uses the platform and what they expect from them.
Content Governance
As organizations scale, keeping content consistent becomes a real challenge, especially with multiple teams or contributors involved. Content Governance defines the rules of engagement:
- Who creates content? E.g., The content marketing team writes blogs; social media team handles daily posts.
- Who approves it? E.g., Marketing manager signs off on all campaign content before publishing.
- What matches the brand identity? E.g., Friendly tone, clean design, and customer-first messaging in every piece.
Establishing clear guidelines for tone, language, formatting, and brand visuals ensures consistency across touchpoints and reduces the number of times content needs to be reviewed manually.
Digital Marketing KPI Measurement Plan
Before content goes live, businesses need a clear understanding of what is defined as ‘success’ for their campaigns. This means setting platform-specific digital marketing KPIs like click-through rates for emails, engagement rates on social media, or lead generation. By connecting content metrics to customer profiles, you can track how specific content pieces influence customers in their journey from awareness to conversion. With the right tools in place, teams can build dashboards, automate performance reports, and continuously refine their strategy and ensure that every piece of content is both creative and measurable.
Growing Influence of AI in Creating a Content Strategy
AI is rapidly revolutionizing how content is planned and delivered. According to Salesforce, 71% of marketers expect generative AI to give them more time for strategic work, while 80% believe it cuts down repetitive tasks. But beyond this, AI also enables deeper personalization through real-time content, smarter audience segmentation, tailored recommendations, and even UX improvements.
The growing role of AI agents to improve customer experience is quite conspicuous. They offer assistance, resolve queries, and guide users through the buyer journey. AI is today a central player in content strategies as an enabler of smarter, faster and more relevant brand experiences.
Role of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in Creating a Content Strategy
Unified Customer View
Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives you a centralized platform that combines customer data from email, web, CRM, and other digital platforms. With this unified view, your teams gain a complete understanding of each customer’s journey from first impressions to repeat purchases without gaps in data.
Cross-Channel Engagement
With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, real-time interaction becomes seamless across email, mobile, social, and web channels. Automated, omnichannel workflows created here ensure that your messaging stays consistent throughout the customer journey in all platforms. This consistency empowers your content marketing to be impactful.
Real-Time Personalization
Personalized experiences for customers are crafted using real-time audience data and insights on their behaviour and interaction with the brand online. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows for the creation of customizable templates that include visuals, messaging, and offers that adjust dynamically, helping you increase engagement and boost conversions.
Built-In Analytics for Data-Driven Decisions
Custom dashboards and automated reports that highlight campaign performance, like views, conversions, and engagement, can be configured and automatically attributed to business results. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides robust performance tracking and inbuilt marketing analytics, including deeper insights with Einstein AI.
Integration with Sales & Service Clouds
Alignment between marketing, sales, and service teams is made possible through seamless integration with Salesforce’s ecosystem. This integration drives synergy across departments and elevates the end-to-end customer experience.
Why Choose Kasmo to Implement the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
As a proud Summit Partner of Salesforce, we specialize in enabling businesses to enhance customer journeys by implementing Salesforce for their unique requirements.
Unmatched Salesforce Expertise for Seamless Implementation
Kasmo brings 70+ certified experts and over 160 Salesforce certifications to the table, offering deep technical skill across the Salesforce ecosystem. Whether it’s crafting content journeys, automating cross-channel campaigns, or configuring personalized templates, our industry-proven delivery strategy ensures smooth and scalable implementation.
A Unified Approach That Breaks Down Silos
Creating an effective content strategy isn’t just about marketing, it requires alignment with sales and service functions. Kasmo’s strategic integration with Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds ensures that your content initiatives are taken keeping in mind customer interactions across every touchpoint. This builds a unified view of the customer and ensures content is timely, relevant, and driven by conversions made.
Advanced Personalization Backed by Real-Time Data
With Kasmo’s expertise in real-time personalization using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, your business can go beyond just static, non-responsive content. By analyzing behavioral data and customer preferences, Kasmo enables your teams to deploy real-time, dynamic content and targeted CTAs (Call-to-actions) that adapt as customers engage across email, mobile, and social media platforms. This amplifies ROI on each content that is published.
Make your Strategy more Efficient
Kasmo’s Salesforce accelerators play a key role in automating tasks, building dynamic analytics dashboards and more. They enable data-driven strategizing, optimal resource utilization and effective time management for our clients.
Demonstrated Impact Across Regions
We have implemented Salesforce solutions across multiple industries and showcased a track record of global success with long-term value for our clients. This is reflected in our 5/5 CSAT scores for multiple projects.
Make Content Strategy Your Competitive Advantage
Content is more than just a marketing tool in today’s digital era. It’s a business asset that has an impact on lead conversion and revenue.
But without a clear strategy, unified data, and access to the right platforms, even the most creative content can fall short. A successful content strategy connects your brand’s goals with your customer’s needs at the right time, on the right channel, with the right message.
From building unified customer views to activating personalized customer journeys across platforms, Kasmo can help your business utilize Salesforce Marketing Cloud to its full potential. Our goal is to transform your content marketing into a revenue-driving engine that scales with your growth.
