Is Your Marketing Content Strategic?

It's a pleasure to provide clients with business-to-business marketing support; business development; public relations and communications services.

It's worthwhile to examine current marketing programs, and how a team can collaborate to use marketing content to fuel business development efforts. 

One Goal in Mind

In many cases, those involved on a project agree on the goal – driving lead and demand generation.  A worthwhile focus is on how marketing content helps contribute to that effort.

First off, what is marketing content?  A useful definition is the key messages; case studies; white papers; online web copy; direct marketing content; social media; advertising content; signage; public relations; product marketing communications and other content that fuels marketing programs.

Keyword: Strategic

Instead of a one-off or piecemeal approach to creating marketing content, social media programs or other programs, a more effective technique is the strategic management of content including its design, development, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.

The key is consistency and relevancy. 

When the team is working fast, trying to keep marketing programs running at full speed, the case could be made to assign someone in the role of “Content Strategist” to oversee all marketing content.

The Content Strategist Defined

The content strategist evaluates and develops content assets for all marketing communications programs including print; multi-media; product literature; white papers/case studies; social media; web to consistently and effectively bring product and services to life.

Why Content Strategy?

There are key benefits to this strategic approach, including the following:

·      Efficient    Avoids cost and effort of rework and fixes when all communications are managed in a strategic manner.

·      Consistent   Maintains consistent voice across all programs with appropriate guidelines and tactics to ensure that marketing and online communications are strategically in synch.

·      Streamlined   Helps effectively oversee multiple language/industry versions of marketing communications across platforms.

·      Relevant    Helps create content strategies based on user needs, stage of buying cycle, business objectives, and product knowledge so each vehicle stresses key benefits of marketing proposition in user/prospect/customer-friendly way.

·      Intuitive  User-focused: Helps direct most intuitive presentation of content.

To me, that sounds like a wonderful job description! Watch for a future blog post, detailing the specifics of how content strategy can be implemented for effective marketing programs.