Content Strategy for Marketers

A curi­ous aspect about the hype sur­round­ing con­tent strat­egy for mar­ket­ing is the lack of agree­ment on what it means — or clar­ity on whose bud­get should fund con­tent strat­egy devel­op­ment. Like the blind men with the ele­phant, we draw dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions based on vary­ing frames of ref­er­ence and pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence. Our per­spec­tives also dif­fer based on whether we approach the chal­lenge as a mar­keter with rev­enue account­abil­ity, or as a ser­vice provider to mar­ket­ing organizations.

Mar­keters need a multi-faceted frame­work that affords customer-relevant “mar­ket con­ver­sa­tions” and brings order to the explo­sive growth in con­tent types, con­tent objects and media outlets.

We need infra­struc­ture that flexes and scales, deliv­er­ing increas­ingly per­son­al­ized cus­tomer con­ver­sa­tions, while report­ing detailed met­rics to prove our con­tri­bu­tion to rev­enue or ROI goals.

At present this frame­work is aspi­ra­tional, due to the many oper­a­tional and cul­tural changes required of highly siloed mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines. Mar­keters need to over­haul and retool work­flows, processes, behav­iors, atti­tudes — a big­ger chal­lenge than adopt­ing new tech­nolo­gies and hop­ing for the best. For that rea­son this tran­si­tion will prob­a­bly take at least a decade to unfold.

We need to ques­tion our tried-and-true notions of what works best. We should invest in a “social savvy” con­tent strat­egy to uncover how peo­ple pre­fer to learn new skills or com­mu­ni­cate with brands and enter­prises. This means under­stand­ing how to respond to their needs and pref­er­ences. Such a con­tent strat­egy should be informed by insights that emerge from lis­ten­ing and respond­ing to buy­ers, cus­tomers, part­ners, influ­encers, share­hold­ers, etc.

It’s a far cry from con­ven­tional mar­ket­ing tac­tics: inter­rup­tion adver­tis­ing, direct mail blasts, “spray and pray” — typ­i­cal brand– or product-centric monologues.

Con­tent Strat­egy Is More Than Just the Web

For the sake of future proof­ing and busi­ness agility, mar­keters should develop con­tent strat­egy inde­pen­dent of any spe­cific medium. It’s too lim­it­ing to con­strain con­tent strat­egy to the domain of web com­mu­ni­ca­tions only. Or web plus email. Or social media like Face­book and Twit­ter. We need to take into account all the cus­tomer touch­points, through­out the customer’s journey.

Start with Peo­ple First

Mar­keters need to craft con­tent strat­egy to address and pri­or­i­tize the needs of mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers: e.g.,

• sales peo­ple or chan­nel partners
• exist­ing customers
• prospec­tive buyers
• employ­ees
• investors and indus­try analysts
• third party devel­op­ers, sup­pli­ers, etc.

Insights based on well-informed per­sonas for each stake­holder cat­e­gory should inform our plans and con­tent strate­gies. We need to pay close atten­tion to the stages of the buyer’s — or customer’s — jour­ney. A cus­tomer seek­ing self-service sup­port to solve an imme­di­ate prob­lem has dif­fer­ent con­tent needs from a prospec­tive buyer who needs evi­dence for the busi­ness case to jus­tify a pur­chase recommendation.

How and where peo­ple go about find­ing or con­sum­ing our con­tent are also crit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions when craft­ing con­tent strategy.

Given those inputs, our con­tent strat­egy should encom­pass mul­ti­ple fac­tors, such as each persona’s:

• media pref­er­ences (web vs. print vs. email, etc.)
• goals: where they are in the buy­ing (or own­er­ship) cycle, etc. — what are they seek­ing to learn or try­ing to accomplish
• device pref­er­ences (iPad vs. PC or Kin­dle, etc.)
• genre pref­er­ences (pod­cast, video, case study, demo, ROI cal­cu­la­tor, problem-solving aid, etc.)
• lan­guage (Eng­lish, Span­ish, Chi­nese, etc.)
• con­text: at work, at home, at school, etc.

There are addi­tional com­pli­ca­tions for busi­nesses that go to mar­ket via a ver­ti­cal or indus­try ori­en­ta­tion — adding yet more com­plex­ity to the con­tent strat­egy requirements.

Map Con­tent to Their Needs

For any given cam­paign or mar­ket­ing pro­gram, we need to map the con­tent com­po­nents to the buy­ing cycle, given defined goals of pri­or­i­tized buyer per­sonas. We risk slow­ing down the buy­ing cycle if we don’t sup­ply what each buy­ing role needs, at the right time and place.

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg… I didn’t even men­tion meta data or strate­gies for orga­niz­ing con­tent to enable machine-based search­ing and per­son­al­iza­tion, so each per­sona can more read­ily find things rel­e­vant or com­pelling to them.

Mar­keters, It’s Time to Get More Strate­gic about Content

The more com­pli­cated the sit­u­a­tion — frag­mented audi­ences, an explo­sion in dig­i­tal con­tent types and devices — the more burn­ing the need for coher­ent con­tent strate­gies. How else can we pro­vide intel­li­gent guid­ance to the peo­ple respon­si­ble for craft­ing rel­e­vant or mem­o­rable web-based or mobile expe­ri­ences? The web writ­ers and design­ers, infor­ma­tion archi­tects, UX / inter­ac­tion design­ers, and so on. With­out that guid­ance their work is likely to miss the mark, or squan­der pre­cious resources and lim­ited budgets.

Whether we approach con­tent strat­egy from the van­tage point of mar­keters, media execs, web devel­op­ers or infor­ma­tion archi­tects, the busi­ness imper­a­tive is the same:

“
Until we com­mit to treat­ing con­tent as a crit­i­cal asset wor­thy of strate­gic plan­ning and invest­ment, we’ll con­tinue to churn out worth­less con­tent in reac­tion to unmea­sured requests. We’ll keep try­ing to fit words, audio, graph­ics, and video into page tem­plates that weren’t truly designed with our busi­ness’ real-world con­tent require­ments in mind. Our cus­tomers still won’t find what they’re look­ing for. And we’ll keep fail­ing to pub­lish use­ful, usable con­tent that peo­ple actu­ally care about.

– Kristina Halvor­son, “The Dis­ci­pline of Con­tent Strategy”

Fel­low mar­keters, it’s time for us to step up to the challenge.

Tagged as: content strategy

Revised on April 20, 2011