Content Marketing: Strategy, Audit and Distribution
Content marketing questions test whether you can plan content around an audience and a business goal, govern its production, distribute it deliberately and measure it honestly. The exam is less interested in copywriting craft than in the decisions around content.
Strategy before assets
A content strategy defines audience, purpose, formats, channels, governance, budget and measurement. Map content to personas and to funnel stages: top of funnel (education, awareness), middle (comparison, consideration), bottom (proof, purchase). Map it also to buying triggers and to the questions sales and support already answer - those are validated demand signals. Formats follow intent: guides and explainers for research, case studies and demos for evaluation, calculators and templates for action.
Governance and audit
An editorial calendar records topic, owner, format, channel, publish date and distribution plan. A content audit classifies assets as keep, improve, consolidate or remove using traffic, conversions, backlinks, accuracy and freshness. Removing content without redirects destroys accumulated equity; consolidating thin pages into a single strong hub usually outperforms publishing more thin pages.
Distribution
Plan distribution at the brief stage: owned channels (site, email, community), earned (PR, partners, influencers, organic social) and paid (promotion, syndication, native). Repurposing - long-form guide into short video, carousel, newsletter series - multiplies return on the original production cost.
Worked example
An audit of 300 blog posts shows 40% receive fewer than 50 sessions a year, 10 posts generate 70% of content-attributed conversions, and 25 posts overlap on the same topic. Reasoning: do not mass-delete. Consolidate the 25 overlapping posts into one authoritative hub, redirecting the retired URLs; refresh and internally link the 10 conversion drivers; keep low-traffic posts that support sales enablement or rank for valuable long-tail queries; prune only genuinely obsolete, non-linked, non-converting pages with redirects in place.
Traps
- Producing content with no distribution plan or owner.
- Judging content solely on last-click conversions.
- Deleting pages without redirects, losing links and rankings.
- Confusing a content calendar with a content strategy.
- Measuring volume of output as a success metric.