What are the essential elements of a successful content marketing strategy?

Having a great USP

I agree with @ctrl_alt_launch. Before you can focus on content marketing and come up with a detailed plan, it's recommended to come up with an overall marketing strategy that addresses various topics like your brand or business objectives, your ideal customers, your value proposition, your execution/distribution plan, and your important metrics. I recently posted some notes on how how to quickly draft a marketing plan - https://ulrich.bearblog.dev/how-...

Definitely have to have a defined audience in mind to create content for, a content and distribution plan like what channels are you delivering your content through and how often, clear marketing objectives for the strategy like to generate leads for a product, and tracking to analyze and optimize the strategies you've implemented.