What’s a content marketing strategy and why your business needs one

These days the trending phrase of the moment is “Content is king” so all you have to do is post more to Instagram or join Tik Tok (since everyone is on it) right? 

Not exactly. 

Imagine, jumping into your car and driving with no final destination in mind. You just end up wasting gas and end up nowhere. The same can be applied to content. YES, content is king, but content without a plan is not only useless but a waste of your time.

Enter: the content strategy. 

So, what exactly is a content strategy?

A content strategy is your blueprint and the heart of your marketing efforts. It’s basically your business’ master plan, detailing how and why every piece of content will be created, managed, distributed, and analysed. As with any plan, a content strategy will also outline objectives for your content, proposed outcomes and delivery. Ideally, your content strategy should answer these questions: 

• Why are we creating this content?
• What types of content are we going to create?
• Where and when will we be publishing our content?
• Who are we creating this content for / Who is our target audience?
• How will our audience find our content?
• What kind of actions and reactions do we want to achieve?
• How will we promote the content once it’s published?

Now that we know what a content strategy is, we can dive into why your business needs one. But first, I have a super helpful, easy-to-follow template that you can access and download for FREE to kickstart your own content marketing strategy.

5 reasons every business needs a content strategy

1. You can establish  goals that are in line with your overall business objectives

As mentioned before, content without a clear direction or end goal is a waste of time and effort. A content strategy can give you a path that’s aligned with your short, medium and long-term business objectives. Instead of randomly creating content or social posts and hoping for the best, your content strategy ensures that you can generate ideas that are aligned with your bigger picture goals, produce content that is cohesive and, at a glance, tells the story of your brand as well as refine and reinforce your brand’s message.

2. It’s cost-effective

Creating and distributing content can get costly. When marketers work without a content strategy they can often lose sight of the bigger picture and spend far too much on projects, leaving only limited funds for later in the financial year. Content strategies help define how much money should be spent per project, how it should be spent and how marketers can find ways to cut costs if needed. 

3. You can determine what’s working, what isn’t, and refine your strategy to suit 

You’ll hear me say on numerous occasions but it’s only because it’s true: ANALYTICS IS EVERYTHING. No marketing strategy is worth the effort if you have no way of measuring its impact. No matter the platform you’re using to produce your content (website, blog, social media, YouTube, etc) there are multiple tools you can use to track and monitor your content. Analytics is a powerful means of figuring out what type of content is resonating with your audience as well as what isn’t.

No marketing strategy is worth the effort if you have no way of measuring its impact. Analytics is a powerful means of figuring out what type of content is resonating with your audience as well as what isn’t. Click To Tweet

Most people tend to get discouraged or take it personally when they see certain posts with little engagement. Don’t! This is the time to really dig deep and get context as to why that post didn’t perform well. Maybe it was the time of day it was shared…or it could be the content type (your audience probably prefers video instead of text or image).

A sound content strategy backed up with robust analytics is the best way to ensure that you’re putting out the best content for your audience. content marketing requires a fair amount of experimenting, testing, tweaking, and refining. A content strategy is crucial to help you outline your goals, identify KPIs, and track related metrics to help you gain insight into whether or not your efforts are actually working.

4. It ensures that you publish content consistently

Content marketing isn’t a numbers game; pushing out random, irrelevant content will not give you the ~long term~ returns you want.  It’s more about providing a strong, cohesive message. A content strategy is the key to this because it lets you take a more integrative approach and create a schedule that produces routinely. 

5. It allows you to identify new and potential opportunities

A good content strategy is flexible and should allow you to recognise the potential for new story/post ideas, especially if your analytics are showing that certain types of content are what your audience is already looking for. At the same time, you can make the decision to determine whether those new ideas are in line with your overall business objectives. Without a content strategy, such opportunities may be disjointed or uncoordinated and would look as much in your brand’s publications.   

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