The majority of your digital marketing success comes down to timing. Getting the right message to the right people at the right moment. Equally essential is learning when that moment is, what it represents, and why.
This is why content strategy is at the center of your larger efforts. Defining the journey you want your customers to take based on where you want them to end up. All being dictated by your organization’s long-term goals.
Despite this, Altimeter estimates that roughly 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.
Curata estimates that only 29% of leading marketers are repurposing their content.
A well-designed, well-optimized content strategy is a powerful tool not just because it lets you support the customer journey, but repurpose your content to the most out of each asset.
The Building Blocks of Your Content Strategy
The most important element of your content strategy involves laying out your business objectives and deciding precisely what marketing strategies are tied to each goal.
Attempting to implement a strategy without defining both is like knowing you want to take a road trip without deciding where you want to go or how to get there. But you begin to pack anyways. Just doesn’t make sense does it?
Once you decide on your goals and the corresponding audience and processes, nearly everything else begins to fall into place.
Learning as much as you can about what your target audience wants, needs, and dis/likes puts you in a better position to understand them and predict what they will do (and why!)
Once you know the “why,” you can get to work on filling in the “how.”
A content strategy is all about gathering as much actionable information as possible to use to make the right decisions.
It isn’t solely about finding the right time to provide someone with a blog post or white paper – it’s about why learning why the “right time” is the right time and using that data to make stronger decisions moving forward.
Preparing For the Journey
Once you know all the hows and why, next you need to map out the steps your customers take in reaching their ultimate goal.
Creating a Customer Journey Map offers a visual representation of what your customers experience at different stages of their journey with your business.
Developing a Customer Journey Map helps your employees and creative team better understand how to develop quality content that will engage and progress prospects along their journey.
This map is jointly created between businesses and strategist and also includes topic ideas for content planning that can be considered additions for your editorial calendar.
How the Customer Journey Can Help Your Business
The Customer Journey connects your sales, marketing and product/service departments. Establishing a common language shared between them that all have different (micro) processes and priorities.
The most important factor is how well each group harvests the research and integrates the data to piece together a fluid, real-time customer journey that enhances the customers experience.
From there they extract insights from the customer journey to make continuous improvements to the micro-journey’s happening in each department.
Where Your Content Strategist Comes In
A content strategist is focused on making sure all content created by your organization is always aimed in the right direction.
Ensuring your content is consistent with your long-term goals, while remaining flexible to make adjustments along the way to pivot with your industry and generate a solid return on your investment.
There are 211 million pieces of online content created every minute of every day, as per MarketingProfs. Without the clear guidance of a content strategist, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.
If you’d like to find out more information about the power of a content strategy, how it can help set your business apart, and the steps that you can take to craft the perfect customer journey, join us for the 3rd annual Content Marketing Conference.
Conference Chair and CEO of WriterAccess Byron White, will be hosting a Content Strategy Masterclass. Outlining important strategy-building objectives like where to start, how to define the right goals for your business and how to use content strategy to achieve them.
We hope to see you in April!