Why You Need a Content Strategy

Is Content Strategy the same as Content Marketing? And does my company need both to be successful? The answers might surprise you. They are not the same! However, they are both necessary to publish successful content and grow your company.

So what is a Content Strategy? Ultimately, it is a blueprint for your company to use to complete the building, where as Content Marketing is the building. It is the process you go through to create a plan for how all of your content relates to your company’s goals, vision, or future direction. Your Content Strategy explains why content should be created and how it should be managed.

Set Your Goals

When developing a Content Strategy, one of the first elements to address is the creation and implementation of goals. There is a hierarchy system to setting goals with Content Strategy. From your business goals, you can then create your marketing goals, which finally should guide your content goals. These newly created content goals will help define how your company uses content to meet your marketing and business needs.  

Do Quality Research

Once you’ve defined your goals, you will need to do research in your industry and specifically into your biggest competitors. In order to create content that hits your target audience, you need to truly know your audience and understand what is grabbing their attention in your industry.

Create a Defined Plan

Your Content Strategy should include your research results, your goals, your company’s vision statement, specifically curated themes to reach your intended audience, and finally the people responsible for overseeing and creating the content. Publishing content about your chosen themes will require you to choose which avenues you’ll use to reach your audience and which tactics will be most effective. If all of your content follows your Content Strategy, this will help your company be consistent in its branding, which builds credibility and brand loyalty with your audience.

Ask Great Questions

Developing your Content Strategy should be a team effort from leadership and the marketing department. Here are some questions to ask when developing your strategy and getting ready to publish content:

  • Who is our intended audience?
  • Why are we creating this content?
  • How will our audience find our content? And where will it be published?
  • What is the reaction we hope to achieve from this content?
  • Who is in charge of overseeing the content? Creating the content?
  • How will we make sure that all our content is consistent with our branding?
  • Does this content fit into our selected themes in our strategy?

Having an internal Content Strategy guide for your company is necessary to produce quality, consistent content that will reach your intended audience. This will make your process of publishing content easier and more productive as well. Creating a Content Strategy for your company might be more than you are prepared to handle right now. We at VANTRUM would love to help you develop one. Our team can work with you to create a strategy for your company, but we can also implement this strategy as well. We have an experienced Content team that can write content for you that will align with this newly created strategy. Let us know how we can help you streamline your Content!