Content strategy is a powerful part of the marketing strategy/planning process.

Slotting into your overarching marketing strategy, these content-based plans lay meat on its bones, by outlining specific creative, and strategically considered, content ideas.

At The Marketing Optimist, we create a content strategy for most of our clients, and for organisations with in-house marketers, who need some new ideas and a refreshed approach to shake up their marketing.

The Importance of Creating a Content Strategy

Without strategically-considered content planning to outline the main content pieces, or content-driven campaigns across your whole marketing mix, marketers are pressured to generate goal-driven content concepts that align with your overarching strategy and speak to every area of your marketing strategy, on a day-to-day/week-to-week basis.

When you consider that agency teams service multiple clients each day, and in-house marketers are often stretched trying to cover an entire marketing mix, this unplanned approach does not allow time for careful strategic consideration, and is therefore not conducive to creating content that achieves a strategic goal, and moves the needle in a tangible way for your business.

Creating a Strategic Content Plan

Content Strategy Foundations

At The Marketing Optimist, we begin creating a content strategy by listing out, as headers, the areas of the marketing mix covered by your overarching marketing strategy. This, along with the main strategic touchpoints it features, provide a strategic framework for creative content ideation.

While content planning documents will differ business to business depending on your sector, offering, operations, desired positioning, and the goals you want to achieve, marketing mix headings will typically be:

• Social media
• Website Content & SEO
• Email
• Digital PR
• Physical Collateral (including content related to physical events)
• Video Content (Though video concepts may come under social media, hero video content has a place across web, email and beyond, and therefore can require its own heading, especially for video-focused brands)

Plugging in Content Ideas

Under each marketing area heading, using the overarching marketing strategy as a guide, we begin to generate content ideas that speak to the strategic goals it outlines.

Social Media Example

In regards to social media, the strategy may dictate that a range of content types are required. These content types may feature, amongst many others:

• Educational, positioning, thought leadership content (All platforms)
• Employer Content (All platforms, but well suited to visual platforms)
• Turning leader personal branding content into brand account articles (LinkedIn)

To speak to these strategic points, our content strategy might therefore include content concepts like:

1. Turning specific blogs where you expose your expertise and talk authoritatively and credibly on sector goings on, or areas of business you specialise in etc, into video content, and provide some examples.
2. A range of video concepts. Employee-led videos, to give an authentic glimpse into the employee experience, and leader-focused videos, to better reveal the organisation’s culture, offer a view into the leader’s style of leadership and how this may trickle down into the business for those joining the team, or for suppliers/partners working with the business.
3. A multi-format, personal branding content series. For leaders of service businesses, this might be something like “10 Reasons to…” – something that offers value to social users. It would begin as 10 posts, become 10 short videos, become 10 longer LinkedIn articles where the posts are expanded on, and eventually, a PDF for download.

For creating content like this, we run regular content creation shoots for our clients, to ensure they have lots of up-to-date videos and photographs to use in their social media campaigns.

Other Examples

Under the Website/SEO header, our content strategy would outline new content opportunities that your website, in its existing form, doesn’t leverage.

For example, adding sector landing pages to a B2B website to bring in new targeted traffic via keywords, and increase lead generation in specific business areas by targeting content directly to specific industries. Covering specific research-supported blog topics to ensure you remain competitive in the search landscape for all manner of searches (including long tail questions where people are seeking specific answers/expertise).

Our strategic content plans may also cover proposed changes to your navigation to facilitate new content types and to support user journey through the website, ideas around the optimisation of content to help generate more traffic, and specific changes to your existing content to improve its conversion rate.

In terms of Email, our content strategy might propose expanding your email output beyond a monthly/quarterly email, and outline specific formats like:

• (For service businesses) Emails to organisations in specific sectors to communicate your credibility and how you can help them.
• (For product businesses) Emails to customers and prospects highlighting specific product categories.
• (For B2B organisations) Emails that use new industry regulations to capture organisations likely to transition from one supplier/partner to another.
• Emails that leverage CMS data (WordPress for example) to generate return custom from older customers.
• Emails that generate sales of event places/tickets, and facilitate communication with those who’ve registered.

When the whole marketing mix has been covered, we send the completed content strategy document to the client. When content concepts are cleared, our specialists across social, SEO and web come together to flesh out approved ideas, and begin planning their deployment.

Whether you’re seeking a marketing agency who takes content seriously, looking for an agency to create a content strategy for your in-house team to deploy, or need tips to help develop your own content plan, we hope this blog has helped to illuminate the important role of these strategy documents, and how one might be developed.

Contact our team to learn more about how the Marketing Optimist can support you with your content.