Content Strategy as the Future of Marketing

Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) from Brain Traffic did an amazing presentation about Content Strategy as the Future of Marketing.  It's thanks to Kristina that I've been presenting more about a greater focus on content strategy as THE critical part of a total content marketing strategy. 

My key thoughts while reviewing her presentation include:

• Relevance is key to your brand's importance to a customer.  Relevance is created through the distribution of consistent, compelling content.
• Information from a brand must be useful. It must solve challenges or entertain (depending on the brand). hmmm, I wonder what can do that (yes, content)? 
• When thinking about content strategy, think about USABLE content for your customers. That means, less talk about YOU and more focus on THEM. 
• You need a content strategist, either inside your organization or a partner for hire. Plan for one NOW.  
• Stop thinking like a marketing person when developing your content and start thinking like a publisher.  It helps if you develop content that your customers would want to share with others. 
• Your content, and thus your website, is more than marketing, it's an asset. Start thinking about taking resources out of places other than the marketing line.  It's that important.  

 

Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing

View more presentations from Kristina Halvorson.

Other Relevant Resources:

• Five Reasons Why Content Strategy Comes Before Social Media
• Kodak: Why Content Strategy is the Key to Marketing  
• Web Content Strategy: The Official Presentation  

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Comments

[Jenny Pilley]

Really good post. When writing we can sometimes take on a marketing format rather than thinking about who we are aiming to write for. It is important we always write with our customers in mind rather than thinking of what we will achieve by writing and distributing content online.

[Jonathan Kranz]

Strong points, all. But I think we need to translate this strategic direction into practical tactics: i.e. what we need to DO to make content marketing WORK.

With clients and with participants in my marketing writing workshops, I begin with two exercises that help us find focus: 1) Identifying audience/market "hot buttons," the issues that keep them up at night or inspire them to get out of bed in the morning; then 2) a two-column matchmaking process in which we make parallel lists of our (or organization) know-how/expertise and customer/prospect/audience needs -- every time these intersect, we've found great content fodder.

There are others, but these two are always a good start...

[Chaitanya Sagar, Excel Expert]

The content must be useful, innovative and interesting. It becomes popular and that will be able to accomplish the goal of effective marketing.

[Ambal Balakrishnan]

Joe: Thanx for sharing this awesome deck on content strategy. Kristina mentions one of the key points I have seen you evangelize in your blog posts i.e., to think like a publisher. Please share your thoughts on what are the 3 tactical steps that we as marketers can do to "think more like publishers". Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanx again for the sharing this interesting deck from Kristina .

[Joe Pulizzi]

Thanks Ambal...here are a few

1. Think of creating content to build relationships with your customers (readers), not to use content to sell directly. The mistake most brands make is they have to feel like they are selling all the time in their content. This doesn't work anymore (if it ever did).
2. Get some outside help. An outside perspective on helpful content is almost always necessary. Journalist or custom publisher will do.
3. Give ownership of the content. Someone has to be your content evangelist. If not, content can run a muck.

[Ambal Balakrishnan]

Joe: Thanx for the 3 tactical tips.

[Dan McCarthy]

Joe,

This is a great presentation, and your core conclusions are spot on.

I'd go further and suggest that when a brand embarks on a content strategy, they should think about three primary buckets of content through the filter of user experience: engagement, contribution, discovery.

With engagement, you want to develop content elements that invite the community to engage, largely with each other, but also with your brand. You need to define this engagement in a way that is consistent with the brand story, but not slavish to the brand message.

With contribution, you want to develop content elements that invite contribution from the community.

With discovery, you want to develop content elements that help the community discover things that are aligned with your brand story.

Defining the content through the user experience is essential to keeping the brand story aligned.

Dan

[buy darkfall gold]

Thanx for the 3 tactical tips.

[Joe Pulizzi]

Dan...excellent example of thinking about the user experience. The core of your message is creating ongoing, consistent helpful information for prospects and customers. From my perspective, that's where most brands have issues - they want to talk about themselves more than provide expert editorial content.