Your content strategy is part of your marketing strategy, and your marketing strategy should align to your business goals. Therefore, there’s an awful lot of info you need to establish before you begin working on your content strategy. Much like how there’s supposedly no such thing as a free lunch, there’s also no such thing as a quick content strategy (in fact, even more so, as I’m pretty sure that technically I’ve had some free lunches while putting content strategies together).
Let’s preface this by clarifying what we mean by content strategy, A content strategy means different things to different people. Some use it as a term to describe a content schedule or a calendar. I’m talking about the bigger picture that your content schedule is developed from.
To give you fair warning, this isn’t an article about what to include in your content strategy or how to put one together (sorry), it’s more of a checklist of what information to gather before you start.
- Business objectives – as I alluded to earlier, you need to understand both what your business is trying to achieve and the measurable KPIs against these goals. Each piece of content, and the distribution behind it, needs to be doing something to achieve these objectives.
- Marketing objectives – the same goes for marketing objectives. It might be a good idea to detail these in your content strategy so they’re always front of mind for those using it.
- Audience persona(s) – this might be the most important piece of intel you gather. Not only do you need to understand who your different audiences are, but also what they know, what they don’t know (and better still: what they don’t know they don’t know), what they care about and what their challenges are. In my experience, sales teams are great people to speak to for this. Remember though, not all pieces of content need to cater for all audiences.
- USPs – not every piece of content will relate to your services or products directly, but your wider content strategy should be built around taking advantage of your company’s USPs and selling points.
- Past activity and performance – all marketing is largely trial and error. In our industry it’s so common for people to move roles frequently, or draft new agencies in, that often the same person isn’t overseeing the content strategy for any significant space of time. Delve back through your analytics accounts, and speak to people internally to try and establish what’s worked and what hasn’t, and make use of it.
- Channels available to you – I’m a big believer in first understanding the content topic and its desired result, and then planning what format it should take and where to promote it, so obviously it helps to have a list of your available channels to hand first. Other than the obvious options like email and social platforms, think about online profiles you might have, paid media agreements, or industry bodies you belong to, which might have an outlet for member news.
- Budget – if you’ve got budget for your content strategy, whether that’s for the creation of content (for example conducting consumer research) or for the promotion of it (for example boosted social posts, or an advertorial in a magazine), then establish what’s available to you and when.
- Key dates – when planning a content strategy, it’s really useful to have a list of key dates to work around. These could be events you’re attending, seasonal trends within your industry, or new products or services launching.
And of course if you’re too exhausted from getting all this info to put your content strategy together, give us a call!
