What is Content Strategy?

Every plan needs a plan before you can plan it. Does that make sense? If you work in marketing, it’s the only way you live. We are always thinking ten steps ahead and, if our schedule falls behind, everyone is catching up. It’s a weird world, but it’s how we can stay structured and on the right path. It may be through calendars or sticky-notes or color-coded highlighters, but we have a process. At the root of it all, is content strategy.

Content strategy is the ongoing process of transforming business objectives and goals into a workable plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals. It’s the plan we have after we made a plan (business objectives) for our plan (goals we want to achieve). Does the first sentence make sense now?

What is content?

When we talk about content, we are referring to all the information used to convey who you are as a company. This includes the information you share, the context in which you share it, the channels it’s shared on, and what form of media you are sharing. It’s a video posted on Instagram to your target audience about a new service you offer. It’s a blog you share on your website about a popular topic related to your business that will attract new customers. Whatever combination you use, just make sure it’s relevant to your company and your audience and relayed in your voice.

What is strategy?

Strategy is a business objective because if you don’t have a plan for this content, it’s just content. It’s the “why” to your “how.” When you started your business, you had a set idea of what you wanted to do/sell and who you wanted the public to see you as. Are you community focused? Are you a small business looking to portray yourself as something bigger? Are you professional with no fun fluff, or the opposite with info sprinkled in between your humor?

Regardless of what you come up with, it’s important to stick with the strategy. Consumers respond well to consistency in a brand, and they will gain trust over time with brands who know who they are. If you are mixing things up all the time, your potential customers won’t know what to expect from you, which in turn makes people unsure about investing in your goods or services. 

Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing

Okay, so we know what content strategy is in a nutshell, but there’s this thing called “content marketing” out there. Is that the same thing? Nope! Though there is some overlap, they are two different strategies needed to be successful. 

Content strategy concerns itself with the vision—the ins and outs of how and why your content will be created, managed, and eventually archived or updated. It looks at all of the content your customers ever encounter. It overlaps with content marketing, which is why you’ll see a lot of things in this guide that look like content strategy, but they are not the same thing.

Content marketing focuses on the tactics and execution—the actual creation and editing of content that’s specifically created for the purposes of marketing your company. This could be anything from blog posts to the confirmation page, and is aimed at building a trusted connection between a company’s products or services and the market that might end up purchasing them. It’s about creating content that people not only want to consume, but that will also help close the sale.

Not sure where to go from here? There are all sorts of tools out there, but the best tool is an expert. Let our dedicated marketing team at Rooted Web help you. We put in the hard work required to help your organization grow from the ground up. Let’s chat!