Let’s be clear: content planning is not strategy. While a content strategy includes content planning, that’s not the biggest benefit of hiring a content strategist. The biggest benefit offered by a content strategist is managing the supply chain that produces content.
The Myth About Content Planning
Good content planning is purely discipline-based. It should create a predictable, elastic and cost-effective way to attract prospects without relying on a monthly Pay Per Click (PPC) budget.
A content marketing plan can lead to operational excellence, but it must be combined with strategic insight. If the plan isn’t driven by strategy, you will have no opportunity to react to changes in the company or the customer’s needs.
The Myth About Content Strategy
Developing a content strategy is often seen as expensive, far-fetched and undefined. It conjures images of long meetings during which half the team has tuned out before any decisions are made. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Content strategy shouldn’t be something that’s defined in a long report produced after a series of lengthy meetings. Instead, your strategy needs to be updated on a regular basis and must take into account market insights from each of your company departments, from sales to production to customer service.
The Role of the Content Strategist
A content strategist is the guard dog for a company’s values. The strategist can work with every discipline within the company in order to gain insights that will drive content planning. They also have the ability to forecast requirements over a long period of time, and can build the structure required to achieve a content empire that is driven by change and excellence. In other words, the strategist funnels this insight into the right methodologies to obtain, use and communicate content.
The strategist can steer away from limited reach, device dependency and unstructured networks to create an overall cross-platform strategy. In order to reach a well-orchestrated flow of information, you need a strategist.
Content Strategists Amplify the Impact of Your Content
The most important goal of your content strategist should be to achieve core business goals such as increased revenue and growth. They do that by amplifying the impact of the content you produce.
The strategist needs to know the touch points you have with your customers better than any other person in your organization. Further, they need to know all the things that impact those touch points. A strategist needs to work closely with your marketing team and convince that team that content can get the word out quickly and effectively.
Your customer’s journey changes all the time. In order to support that journey as it goes through its different versions, you need to gather and clarify information from various parts of your company, then translate it into revised content plans.
On an ongoing basis, your content strategist needs to combine key business and customer insights into a strategy that can be flexible as the needs of your business and your customers change. This type of flexibility can only be reached when you have strong internal processes that you can combine with a sensitivity to market trends, client sentiment and a strong brand voice.
Where to Go From Here?
Some companies abandon a content marketing philosophy because they have tried a version of content marketing and it failed. Are you ready for a content strategist?