The traditional content marketing strategy has a few familiar components. Channels. Audiences. Objectives. These elements form a large part of the content marketer’s vocabulary, and together with other puzzle pieces like key messages, situation analyses, and sequencing, they form a set of defining characteristics that lead to a content marketing strategy.
And while effective content marketing strategies often check all these boxes, many content marketers are hesitant to expand the scope of their strategy beyond these traditional criteria.
For good reason. The traditional content marketing strategy has worked in the past — why change?
Because times change. In an era of increasing consumer savvy, skepticism toward marketing, and declining trust in media, content marketers need to prioritize different things than their contemporaries once thought to demonstrate their value to both internal and external audiences.
Want to create a content marketing strategy your CMO can get behind? Check out these tips.
Good content has value, but there’s more to the picture
You already know that creating authoritative, credible content — adaptable across channels and audiences — helps paint a picture of your product, service, organization or brand that goes beyond the superficial. A well-executed content strategy helps the consumer visualize how and where they might interact with your organization or its products, creating their own use cases and defining scenarios in which your product has value worth the price on the tag.
You likely also understand that thanks to content marketing and the situational factors that enable it — widespread connectivity, an abundance of mobile devices, the proliferation of social media — the purchase process has never been more transparent for the consumer, whether B2B or B2C. Never has more information about a product or service been available at our fingertips.
Knowledge is power, and the information you provide with your content gives your prospects the power to make informed decisions. The ability to build an adaptable, versatile content strategy that considers all touchpoints is a vital piece of every content marketer’s toolkit.
But there are other benefits to an effective content marketing strategy — ones that may not be apparent in the goals, objectives or other criteria in the content strategy itself.
Marketing teams can go further in demonstrating their value to their own organization. Beyond their posted responsibilities — generating leads, situating their product or service in the market, and finding opportunities to sell more effectively — modern marketing teams are full of creative, analytical individuals that, when directed toward a different goal or aim, can have untold benefits to organizations and the individuals and groups within them.
Build synergy into your strategy
One of the exciting benefits of creating compelling content is synergy. It’s often considered a buzzword, but it makes sense here: repurposing the content you create in multiple locations and across channels, you can make better use of your resources, better solidify your message and better meet the differing needs of your audiences. If that doesn’t meet the definition, it’s hard to know what does.
That’s why building synergy, versatility, and adaptability into your content marketing strategy should be a no-brainer from the get-go.
Consider how many uses valuable content can have across the organization:
- A sales rep reads an article developed by their content marketing team. They internalize that content and build it into their sales conversations, helping address questions and handle concerns from prospects. Not only has that content contributed to sales enablement, but the messaging the sales rep is using better aligns with brand and product messaging, creating a unified experience for prospects and customers.
- A support representative stumbles on a marketing video on how particular features of the product solve a common issue in the industry. They then use that video to help solve a customer’s concern, increasing the product’s value for the customer.
- The content team is tasked with creating a case study detailing how several technical aspects of the product helped a customer succeed. They leverage an internal IT document, originally written for the CX team, to inform the more specific technical details. The resulting case study can be used by marketing as nurture content, but also helps sales teams demonstrate the product’s effectiveness and gives support teams insight into how customers are using specific features.
While these types of situations occur every day — and undoubtedly have value to your organization — they are not always an intentional outcome of a traditional content marketing strategy. They are often happy accidents.
Content is just one way marketers can empower sales teams. Read more about marketing as your secret sales enablement weapon.
What if you could build these happy accidents into your strategy — and make them intentional?
A strategy for synergy shows your team’s value
In this context, synergy means creating a content marketing strategy that deliberately considers how content — whether developed by marketing or from across the organization — can serve multiple purposes.
This type of synergy leverages the knowledge and experience across your company, often while simultaneously lessening the burden on the content team’s limited capacity.
The information you unearth, the content you create and the way you craft your messages provides value beyond marketing. Every content marketing team should explore the ancillary benefits and added value they can provide their entire organization. This includes leveraging the unique perspectives and insights of people in non-marketing teams who have direct vantage into what matters to the target audience.
Broadening the scope of your content strategy broadens the reach of your content — and its impact. That’s why looking at your ideation and brainstorming sessions through lenses of synergy, versatility, and adaptability can make a world of difference to your entire organization — not just the marketing team.
A multifaceted, comprehensive content strategy can have benefits for the entire business. Curious how to build synergy into your content marketing strategy? Reach out.
