Marketing your business without a plan in place is never a good idea. It’s always essential to have a strategy to have goals and steps to take to reach them. A content strategy ensures you’re using content marketing to achieve your business objectives, rather than just randomly creating and publishing content with no real direction. It turns content marketing into an ongoing process that adapts to the needs of the business to be effective.
But what does a content strategy consist of, and why is it so crucial to your business?
Content Strategy Provides Direction
The key purpose of a content strategy is to provide direction for your content marketing efforts. Without a clear plan, you can aimlessly produce and share content without a clear idea of why you’re doing it or the results you want to gain from it. If you don’t have a one, you can get distracted by every idea that comes into your head. Your content won’t have a clear purpose, and you won’t have a solid idea of how to measure its performance. A content strategy is also essential to your SEO strategy for effective online marketing.
Nearly 80% of B2B businesses have a content marketing strategy (although less than half have documented it). In comparison, 71% of B2C marketers agree that they need to have one, but only a third officially document their strategy. A written content strategy can be shared with anyone who might need to see it, whether your employees or outsourced marketing agencies and freelancers you choose to work with.
Smart Content Helps You Reach Goals
You probably already use content in some capacity. You might have published blog posts, created white papers, or posted on social media. A content strategy isn’t just about posting content on a schedule. It focuses on using content to achieve the overall goals of your business. You need to begin with your business objectives, which should inform your content strategy and help you make decisions about how to use content to reach your goals.
Starting with your business goals will help you define the objectives your content strategy needs to meet. You can begin defining the metrics you need to measure and the key performance indicators to track. You’ll need to ask multiple questions when determining your content strategy to align it with your business goals.
Your content strategy should be an ongoing effort. After defining your goals, you should be continually assessing the performance of your content and going through the lifecycle of creating content for your brand.
Fisher Green Creative can help you with your content strategy. Contact us if you’re looking for support to develop your strategy and implement it.
Jenny Green, Co-Owner of Fisher Green Creative, specializes in digital strategy development, social media marketing, and SEO for small businesses. Away from helping clients or studying the latest marketing trends, Jenny volunteers her time coaching youth soccer, enjoys a cold craft IPA, and works to save the elephants. Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn or email.
