As someone who sells content strategy services, you might expect my answer to always be “yes.” However, that’s not necessarily the case. If you’re a fly-by-night operator with no reputation to defend or establish, and you don’t care what people think of you, you don’t need content strategy. But if you aim to build meaningful engagement with your customers and drive relationship marketing rather than just transactional interactions, then you need content strategy and a group of people who are committed to supporting and evolving it.
In B2B markets, we often tell ourselves to listen to the voice of the customer, which is indeed valuable. However, many fail to listen to the voice the corporation is projecting to its customers and prospects. If they did, they’d often find a disconnected mess. Marketing might be saying something “big and visionary,” sales are focused on the 90-day wheel, and partners are hyper-focused on niche deliverables. A great content strategy can thread the needle and stitch together these divergent points, ensuring that your company shows up at every level of your relationship with your customers, partners, and employees with a consistent and coherent voice.
Beyond just ensuring that your content is accurate and well-maintained, a content strategy should clearly communicate where your company is making its bets and investments. These bets and investments should be core to your operations across all horizontal functions. Your customers are making bets too. Unless you effectively communicate and demonstrate that the direction you are leading them will support their bets and investments, they won’t get on board for the ride.
Content is multifaceted. It’s a marketing campaign, a sales proposal, a product specification, a project plan, technical documentation, a customer support FAQ, and more. Content is also expression, communication, ideas, emotions, and decisions. It’s the intellectual property that some are willing to steal and the gift that others are always willing to share.
My career has been dominated by the software industry, so this perspective was shaped strongly by that field. In software, content is a product—from specification through technical documentation. It includes the words on the screen and the data it collects or creates. As a product team, you have a strategy for all of that. It’s no different if that content is a blog, website, email, video, or live event. It represents your company and its products. It’s true for more than just software.
So, while not everyone needs a content strategy, most companies should have one.
How Much Strategy Do I Need?
Determining how much content strategy work you need to do depends on several factors. Consider where your company, products, and customers are in their life cycles, and how disciplined your company has been while building and growing your organization and audience.
- Starting Out: If you’re just starting out, you need a comprehensive content strategy. This is your opportunity to build the practice from the ground up as you build your company. You’ll need to make operational and style choices and implement them across your organization. How well it evolves and supports the needs of your customers and employees over time is a matter of daily practice and process optimization.
- Well-Established Company: If you’re a well-established company with a lot of content already in play, you might need strategic, project-based work to drive corrective actions or improvements in either the processes or management of your content. Whether that’s a lot or a little depends on how consistent and disciplined your teams were in the past.
If you’re somewhere in the middle (as a company or department within a larger org), trying to fire up new channels, engage with a new audience, or try out a new medium, ensure that your team can take it on and that it serves the objectives of your overall content strategy.
A lot of people like to make a gut call and experiment. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in experimentation in controlled situations with a firm hypothesis. However, you had better answer some questions for yourself and your company before embarking on something new.
- Have you built the case for resource assignment, its growth or reassignment?
- Do you have metrics and the means of recording and analyzing them in place?
- Are others in your organization ready to do their part?
If you don’t have any of that, then you’re not ready to try something new.
Your turn. How much do you think you need?
Look around your organization. Do you see where content strategy is breaking down? How about where it’s holding strong? Is there room for growth? Is there a need for change?
Then, look at organizations that serve content you consume regularly. Can you see the delivery of a consistent and cohesive statement of mission and values? Who is doing it well? Let us know in the comments.
I look forward to reading your thoughts and experiences.
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