With the right content strategy, you'll know exactly what the word count for that blog post should be (it’s between 250 and 1500 words). Or if you should have a video instead of a web page of text. Or both. Podcast, anyone?

In my view (and many others) content strategy is how you attract the right people at the right time with the right content to make them more aware of your expertise and knowledge about a product, service, or cause. Often content strategy and content marketing are used interchangeably. (I have been guilty). Here are the basic steps of a content marketing strategy:

Identify target audiences from market research
Identify best channels (online and offline, but often mostly online) and best type of content (long blog posts, short blog posts, video, podcast, tweets, etc.) to reach those audiences
Develop core messaging that aligns with your brand and resonates with your audiences. You might have variations on your messaging for each audience. Hopefully, you're delivering content through your marketing channels that is personalized for each target audience.
Establish the tactics, including an editorial calendar, and implement the technologies that support your strategy

The idea behind content-driven marketing is establishing trust with a prospect by providing information that they are seeking and is relevant to what you have to offer as an organization. With the right content strategy, you capture their attention, and then with the right marketing automation strategy, you nurture your content-based relationship with that prospect until they become a customer, member, or donor.

That pretty much sums up content strategy as I see it. Now, I should mention that some people see content strategy and content marketing as separate disciplines with content strategy expanding beyond marketing to all of an organization's content being an asset to be managed (e.g., knowledge base for technical support) -- see what the Content Marketing Institute has to say.