Maksim Fetisov — Content Strategist — Netscape
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My name is Maksim Fetisov.

I'm a content strategist and CEO of the international agency TELLER.

I help brands turn what they want to say into what consumers want to hear.

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Content Strategist · Almaty, Kazakhstan
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Articles by Maksim Fetisov on content marketing in Kazakhstan

What a content strategy should include: a checklist

, content strategist, CEO of TELLER Kazakhstan ·

Translated from Russian.

In short

A good content strategy goes from the market to the numbers: context and competitors → the audience and its information needs → the big idea → channel and formats → media plan and forecast results. If a document has no audience, no idea or no forecast, it's not a strategy, it's a pretty presentation. It takes 2–3 weeks and a team of several specialists.

What a strategy consists of: 14 points

This is how we put a strategy together at TELLER. You can use it as a checklist to review a document from any contractor.

Understanding the market

  1. Market context. What's happening in and around the category.
  2. Open-source data. Research, statistics, industry reports.
  3. Competitors. What they do in content and how they approach it.
  4. Good practice. Examples of brands from your category, usually from the US, where content marketing has been developing the longest.

Understanding people

  1. Audience personas.
  2. Information needs. What people are looking for, what they doubt, what they want to understand. Ideally based on in-depth interviews rather than guesswork.
  3. Conclusion. What all this means for the brand.

Coming up with a solution

  1. The big idea. The core thought the whole project rests on.
  2. Channel. Which one we choose and why.
  3. How the idea unfolds in the channel. Sections, storylines, mechanics.
  4. Content formats and volumes.
  5. The project's visual style.
  6. Content examples. What the project will look like in practice, not just in words.

Calculating the result

  1. Media plan and forecast results. The promotion budget and the core marketing metrics we expect.

How strategy connects to money

At the media plan stage we calculate core marketing metrics: reach, cost per contact, cost per lead. And we keep one important thing in mind: if the strategy takes off, the final result will beat the forecast. After 3–6 months of running a project, organic growth catches up and the cost of performance metrics goes down. Content that answers the audience's real questions eventually starts working on its own.

How a strategy differs from a content plan

A content plan answers “what do we publish and when”. A strategy answers “why, for whom, where and what will it bring the business”. A content plan is point 11 on the list above, not a substitute for the whole document.

How long it takes and who does it

A strategy takes us 2–3 weeks. Many people are involved: a strategist, an editor, an art director, a content manager and a media producer who organizes everyone and brings the work together. A strategy that was “done in two days” is worth checking against this list especially carefully.

Signs of a dud

Framework overload. Models and diagrams are great, but it's often unclear how they affect your business and what to do with them next. If a framework isn't followed by a concrete decision, it's there to pad the document.

Unedited AI slop. Everyone uses neural networks now, and that's fine. But nobody has cancelled human editing. Text without it is easy to spot: endless constructions like “this isn't just X, it's Y” are everywhere by now and are terribly tiresome. Google's guidelines warn about this too: mass-generated content with no value for the reader may violate its policies.

No forecast of results. If the strategy has neither a media plan nor expected numbers, you won't be able to tell whether it worked.

It's a common problem: in a Content Marketing Institute survey, a third of B2B marketers name measuring content effectiveness as one of their main challenges.

Key points

  • A strategy goes from the market and audience to the idea, channel and numbers.
  • Information needs are best uncovered through in-depth interviews, not guessed.
  • A strategy must include a media plan and a forecast of results.
  • After 3–6 months, organic growth lowers the cost of performance metrics.
  • Frameworks without conclusions and unedited AI text are signs of a dud.

Want to check your strategy or create a new one? Message me on Telegram at @maximfetisov: I'll look at what's missing. What a strategy includes and what it costs is on the Services page.

Sources

  1. Content Marketing Institute: B2B Content and Marketing Trends — Insights for 2026
  2. Google Search Central: guidance on using generative AI content

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