That’s fantastic. It’s safe to say that content marketing has arrived. Remember when it was hard to convince the corner office? Now it’s an accepted practice. Given that it’s still a fairly new field (at least in the way it’s currently defined), a lot of people are still learning their way through this. But it’s great to see people taking action on forming deeper, more lasting relationships with their audience. I think it’s good for the marketer—AND good for the customer.
But I would argue that there’s more to be done. The next evolution is for brands to start thinking beyond content marketing and to embrace a more “holistic” content strategy. First, a point of clarification:
What’s the difference between content marketing and content strategy?
What is content marketing?
When you boil it down, it’s marketing, right? It’s about using content as an instrument to start a relationship with a potential customer and build trust over time until you’re in position to ask for the sale. If everything’s really clicking, you’ll have customers creating new customers for you via word of mouth marketing. The Holy Grail.
What is content strategy?
Now widen the lens to include ALL of your content. Is it all working together efficiently and effectively? Could you be getting more out of it? Consider all of the following sources of content:
- Static site content, landing pages, logos and tag lines;
- Powerpoint pitch decks, Slideshare presentations, YouTube videos;
- Social posts and forum participation, including curated content;
- E-mail newsletters and letters to investors or shareholders;
- Press releases, ads, and outbound campaigns;
- Articles about your brand, including user-generated content (UGC);
- White papers and research reports;
- And yes, even individual e-mails to customers!
Each one of these is telling a story about your business. It’s all contributing to the market’s perception of you and your brand. Let’s make sure that it’s all serving the same purpose, and is marching in step with your goals.
If something’s out of sync—or in a different voice—people will notice. It won’t have the right “feel” to it. When that happens, it can come off as inauthentic, which is detrimental to building trust. This is why it’s so important to work from a strategy for all your brand content. I see so many businesses with teams in silos, each creating good content, but not working together in concert.
Small businesses don’t suffer from this as much—usually it’s the CEO or founder, or a single marketer who’s speaking for the brand. Either way, it’s a good idea to get together as a team to make some decisions up front so that you can have everything in tune when you get out there and start creating effective content.
In the next post, I’ll get into some details of How to Plan Your Content Strategy. In the meantime, let me know your experience with content marketing or content strategy. Is it challenging to get your team on board, or is it fairly natural to the way you run your business? Are you looking at your content on the whole, or not? What changes could you make in your own content strategy?
Click here to download the tools and templates that I use regularly in my own content strategy—and with my clients too. It includes worksheets for building and maintaining your website, publishing optimized blog posts, deploying social posts, and then monitoring and measuring your progress.
