What is content strategy?

Content strategy, content plan and content marketing are terms that I often see used interchangeably. But they shouldn’t be. Because they’re different.

What is content strategy?

Content Strategy

Content strategy explains how and why you will use content to deliver your marketing goals. It is your blueprint defining how you will demonstrate who you are and what value you will bring to your audiences using content. Your content strategy will include your content marketing goals, your target audiences, your competition, your themes, and how you will measure the success of your content. An effective content strategist therefore will make a series of choices that will enable you to tell your brand story, share your brand values and portray your brand personality through content. Your content strategy will act as your guide when planning content.

Content Plan

Planning content is the process of defining what content you’re going to create, how you’re going to create it and who is going to create it. A content plan therefore defines what content will go to which audiences via what channels at what time, alongside who will be responsible for which parts of the content creation by what deadlines. An effective content plan will usually include or be supported by a content distribution plan. This defines where you will publish and amplify your content through what levels of investment. By ‘where’ I mean, through which formats on which channels (and where appropriate) using which targeting parameters.

Content Framework

Many organisations will bridge the gap between a content strategy and a content plan, by creating a content framework. This a usable document that guides the content planners to align their plans to the content strategy. It will usually be a single page document. It’s designed to help the planners easily identify the appropriate audience personas, content pillars, the purpose of the content and the metrics that will define success.

Content Marketing

The output of this process of planning, creating, publishing, distributing and amplifying content in line with a content strategy is known as content marketing. The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain a relationship with a specified audience, so that in time you can drive profitable action.

Hopefully that clears things up.

Why do I need a content strategy?

Anyone can create content. But if you don’t have a content strategy, it’s quite likely that your content isn’t having the impact that you hoped. Or worse, you don’t know how to measure the impact of your content so you have no idea whether it’s having any impact at all. When you head straight into tactics without a strategy, it becomes so easy to let random ideas creep in, and to create content that doesn’t address your overarching goals. The result for your audiences is a series of mismatched content pieces that at best isn’t even seen by your intended audiences or at worst, lead to confusion around who you are and why you’re here.

Churning out content and hoping that it sticks isn’t a good use of time or money. You need to guide your team to create content that helps you to achieve your business goals. Content that resonates with your audiences because you’ve taken the time to understand their needs and their mindset. Content that allows your audiences to get to know you as a brand. Content that people will remember. Content that drives connection with your audiences. Content that drives people towards a specified action. These things don’t just happen. You’ve got to put the work in up front.

This is why you need a content strategy:

You need clarity on what you’re trying to achieve.

And importantly you need clarity on how you’ll know when you’ve got there. This means defining which success metrics to apply to which situations.

You absolutely must understand your audiences – not just who they are but what makes them tick – how to listen to them – how to resonate with them.

It’s also important that you know your competition – what’s working for them and what’s not – and importantly what makes you different.

And crucially, you need unity from across the organisation – you need to be aligned. You need to be working as one.

When you do all of these things right, your content will be coordinated, on brand, relevant and impactful. Content helps you to attract your target audiences, connect with your target audiences, convert your target audiences, build relationships with your target audiences. If you can get your content strategy right, that’s when you’ll start to see real business results.

Convinced yet? Okay good.

Let’s talk about how to create a content strategy.

How to create a content strategy

Here are 7 steps to help you to create a content strategy for your organisation:

1.Goals, goals, goals

We start with our business goals. What is it that we as an organization are trying to achieve? Hopefully you’ve got a marketing strategy that defines marketing goals i.e. what you’re expecting your marketing to achieve to help you to hit your business goals. Next we need to think about the role that content can play in helping you to reach your marketing goals. What is it that you need your content to achieve? Be specific.

2.Understand who you’re talking to

Next up we need to talk audiences. Who do you need to target in order to hit your goals? What do you know about them? Do you know enough? At this stage I’d recommend doing some research. Who is your content currently reaching? (Use Google Analytics). You need more than just demographics to target content effectively. What pages are they visiting (again use your analytics). What are their motivations? (I use search listening for this). What online platforms do they use and how? What media do they consume? (Here I use social listening). What are their interests? (I use social listening for this too). What are their pain points? (For this insight I might do some user testing).

3.Know how you can add value to your audiences

Then we need to look at the competition. There are a couple of things we want to determine. Where your competitors have the same or similar audiences to you, what content is best resonating with those audiences? Secondly, how are your competitors similar to you and importantly what makes you different? Identify your niche to understand what will make you stand out and how you can use that niche to make your content more valuable.

4.Decide what to talk about

By using a combination of audience and competitor insights, you can start to identify the sweet spots between your goals and your audience interests. This will lead you to your content pillars which are essentially themes that your content can hang from to ensure that every piece of content you create is both brand relevant and audience relevant.

5.Identify your channel roles

There are a huge number of channels available to us that we could use to distribute our content. But that doesn’t mean we should use all of them. If you have clarity on what you’re trying to achieve, you can align those goals to a marketing funnel. Likewise you can align channels to the same funnel. This will help you to identify the channels that will best enable you to reach your goals.

Next you need to think about your budget. If you have a small budget, some channels will be out of reach for you. Then you need to think about the channel combinations that will bring you the best impact based on likely customer journeys. You should be left with a handful of channels that you can assign clear roles to, so that each time your team create content, they can pick and choose the most appropriate channel mix dependent on the goal they’re working towards. It’s important that you revisit this section often. Channels come and go, new formats emerge, audience usage changes. You’ve got to stay close to the landscape and be ready to adapt if necessary.

6.Measure success

Now we know what we want to achieve and how we’re going to get there, we can be really clear about which metrics will best indicate when we’ve reached our goals (or how close we are to reaching our goals). Hint: your priority metrics are the ones that can tell you when you need to be doing something differently i.e. If X isn’t where I’m expecting it to be, I need to do Y.

7.Don’t ignore process

It’s not sexy. But in large organisations, a lack of process is the single thing that holds content teams back from having the impact they’re striving for. If processes don’t exist, content easily becomes disjointed and it becomes challenging to be impactful with your content. But if processes are too rigid or unclear, it becomes challenging to be reactive with your content. Similarly, if roles and responsibilities are unclear, content production and distribution becomes inefficient and expensive. You can see how for many organisations content marketing can become resource intensive and expensive with little demonstrable impact. It doesn’t have to be this way. Think about your processes when you’re designing your content strategy. Who does what when? And is any governance required?

So that’s it – a whistle-stop tour on creating your content strategy. If you think you might need some help, feel free to get in touch.

But most importantly, don’t jump straight into content planning without first defining your strategy – unless of course you don’t want to have much impact 😉