Content Strategy: Creating Marketing Traction

Marketing traction is the heartbeat of a successful go-to-market strategy. It’s not just about creating buzz—it’s about creating forward motion. Without traction, your marketing efforts are like wheels spinning in mud: noisy, costly, and frustratingly stagnant. But when you find the right mix of content, channels, and audience fit, traction becomes your multiplier—amplifying everything you produce.

In fact, traction is the real-world proof that your content strategy is working. It means people aren’t just seeing your content—they’re acting on it. They’re engaging, sharing, converting, and coming back. This latest article in my Content Strategy series will help you think strategically about how to assess your current landscape, focus on what works, investigate channels that your competitors may not be utilizing, and unlock the kinds of opportunities that build lasting momentum.

1. Assessing Your Marketing Channels

To build real traction, you first need to take stock of your terrain. Every business operates across a set of channels—social, email, SEO, paid ads, partnerships—but not all of them deliver equal results. Attribution—understanding what customers click on and, ultimately, close a sale—is difficult, but a worthwhile pursuit. Just remember that a marketing method that may cost more or take more time to execute could, in fact, deliver stronger conversion rates. Evaluating your current marketing and sales ecosystem gives you the clarity needed to make informed decisions about where to double down and where to pull back.

Why this matters:

• Knowing your strongest channels allows you to focus and scale what’s working.
• Understanding weak-performing channels helps reduce waste.
• A clear channel assessment gives you a roadmap for testing and investment.

Tactical actions:

• Use analytics tools (Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc.) to track performance by channel.
• Talk to your sales team to understand where qualified leads are coming from.
• Rank each channel by cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and return on effort.

2. Identify Strengths and Skills

A crucial part of gaining traction is playing to your team’s strengths. You can chase every new trend, but if your content creators are writers and you’re chasing TikTok virality, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Aligning your go-to-market execution with internal skill sets helps you produce consistently excellent content—and consistency is a key driver of traction.

Why this matters:

• Aligning content format with your team’s capabilities increases consistency and quality.
• Playing to your strengths helps differentiate your brand naturally.
• Poor execution on a trendy platform often wastes more resources than it gains.

Tactical actions:

• List the formats and platforms your team is most comfortable with.
• Audit past content to see what’s been most engaging.
• Match high-performing formats to channels where they will thrive.

3. Analyze Customer Acquisition Cost by Channel

Not all wins are equal. It’s easy to get excited by a spike in leads—but if those leads came at an unsustainable cost, the traction won’t last. Understanding your customer acquisition cost (CAC) by channel gives you a lens into which channels offer the best return on investment and scalability. Low-CAC channels often reveal underutilized gems in your strategy.

Why this matters:

• Knowing your customer acquisition cost (CAC) helps determine which channels to scale.
• Lower CAC means better profitability and faster reinvestment.
• Some underutilized channels may deliver better results for less.

Tactical actions:

• Calculate CAC by dividing spend by new customers from each channel.
• Compare CAC across paid vs. organic strategies.
• Reallocate budget to lower-cost, higher-conversion opportunities.

4. Seek Out Low-Competition Channels

The most crowded spaces are often the hardest to break into. Major brands dominate mature platforms with massive ad budgets, pushing smaller players to the margins. But traction can be more easily gained in overlooked or emerging channels where competition is light and attention is still up for grabs. These channels give you space to experiment, connect more directly, and often punch above your weight.

Why this matters:

• Less competition means lower advertising costs and less noise to cut through.
• Early adopters of underused channels often gain outsized visibility.
• Channel novelty can create stronger brand recall and differentiation.

Tactical actions:

• Explore emerging platforms (e.g., niche podcasts, industry forums).
• Look at where your competitors are not spending.
• Use third-party tools to track share of voice or brand mentions by platform.

5. Create a Traction Strategy You Can Measure

Traction isn’t about short-term spikes. It’s about building sustained, predictable momentum. To do that, you need to treat traction like any other strategic initiative—with defined goals, a repeatable process, and clear indicators of progress. A measurable traction strategy gives your team the feedback loop it needs to improve and grow with intention.

Why this matters:

• A defined strategy helps you build momentum, not just random wins.
• Measurable progress boosts team focus and stakeholder confidence.
• Without a feedback loop, it’s hard to know what’s really driving traction.

Tactical actions:

• Set channel-specific goals (e.g., leads, impressions, sales conversions).
• Use dashboards to track weekly performance.
• Reassess your traction plan quarterly to adapt and grow.

Build Traction Through Focused Execution

Creating marketing traction doesn’t require you to be everywhere at once. In fact, the opposite is true. The most successful content strategies come from knowing your strengths, focusing your energy, and doubling down on what actually works. And you won’t know what works until you try, fail, measure, adjust your strategy, then try again. Persistence and consistency are the keys to finding the right channel for your business.

Start by evaluating your current marketing landscape, identifying overlooked channels, and narrowing your focus to where you can gain the most traction with the least resistance. When you align your content strengths with smart channel selection, traction becomes not just achievable—but sustainable.