What is a Content Strategy and Why Does It Matter?

Imagine you and your sibling run a delicious Italian restaurant, but business isn’t going so well. What will turn everything around? A big night of the finest Italian feast that will make it clear to everyone that your restaurant is far superior to the competition. 

How will anyone know about your Italian feast of feasts? Why should anyone care about your restaurant? How will you reach people who want exactly what you’re serving, but don’t know you exist?

Let’s bring this hypothetical situation to reality: Your product is your restaurant/meal. You’re passionate about what you do, and you know you’re the best. Are you just going to put your proverbial meal on the table to cool and hope some people walk in?

No. That’s where content marketing comes in. First, let’s establish the basics.

What is content marketing?

People will only buy your product if they:

1. Know it exists

2. Can be convinced it will solve their problems

3. Can afford it

Content marketing addresses the first two requirements. Restaurants need advertising, content marketing writes those ads. Restaurants should have a website so people can explore and have their questions answered; content marketing writes a website. Restaurants need menus, content marketing writes those menus. 

Content marketing is a marketing strategy, but one that focuses on creating and sharing content that is relevant and valuable. Its purpose is ultimately to drive customer conversions and make your business money, but it must be truly helpful to those who seek it out. 

Content marketing is not a buzzword, but a natural byproduct of the internet. As search engines served up content to people online, businesses realized that they needed something — a blog post, some social media, or video ads — to reach that ever-growing online audience.

Digital marketing vs content marketing vs social media marketing

It’s very easy to conflate some digital marketing, social media marketing, and social media marketing. In truth, they work in tandem and are distinct practices.

Content marketing is an overall strategy that relies on different types of content like videos, blog posts, articles, ebooks, etc. While it relies heavily on search engine optimization and social media distribution to be visible, it tends to be educational and informational. Content marketing helps brands generate and nurture leads, build trust, and elicit conversions.

Digital marketing is promotion through online channels. This includes SEO, PPC and digital ads, and email marketing. Digital advertising focuses on promotion and sales and takes up the mantle of traditional marketing like billboards or direct mail. It’s great for increasing reach, moving leads through the funnel, and pushing conversions.

Social media marketing requires a different context and approach for each channel. People behave differently on Instagram than they do on Twitter, and brands must adjust to fit each channel, rather than calling all the shots like they do with the content they post on their site. Social media marketing is also often a direct conversation with a community, while content marketing lets you share expertise or advice as a monologue. 

Social media marketing is well-suited to increasing brand awareness, building and interacting with a community, and turning that community into potential customers.

It’s important to distinguish these three areas because while they are all integral to marketing, you have to know what kind of marketing will help you achieve your specific goals.

So what is a content strategy?

A content marketing strategy takes your business goals (i.e. grow our new customer base by X% or decrease churn by Y%) and addresses how different kinds of content and marketing can help achieve those goals. Here are the items you should have before you build your strategy, with some examples from the above restaurant analogy: 

• Audience understanding: This includes demographic data as well as detailed buyer personas. Does your restaurant cater to dedicated foodies or fans of Sbarro? What kind of diner comes back time and again? 

• An up-to-date buyer’s journey: Understand how your buyers find you and their lifecycle with your product or service so you can tailor pieces of content to those stages. Do you get repeat diners or rely heavily on visiting tourists?

• Solid business goals: If ever there was a reason to complete your annual planning ASAP, here’s another really good one. It’s difficult to concoct an impactful content strategy if you don’t fully understand your business goals. Perhaps you want to open a second restaurant or increase takeout orders.

• Clear channel distinctions: B2B SaaS companies don’t need a Pinterest or an Instagram and B2C cosmetics brands might not need a LinkedIn. But this goes beyond social channels; will you write on a blog or a branded Medium channel or both? How will marketing emails connect with your gated ebooks? 

• A full picture of your product’s value: This is harder than it sounds. Features are not value. If you want to speak to your audience and influence their purchase decisions, you have to know the value you provide and how to speak to it across content and channels.

Who is part of a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing does not fall solely on a marketing team or agency, especially if you are a B2B and extra especially if your product or service is remotely technical. Often, career content creators can’t write a nuanced piece of content on software testing cycles because they are marketers, not developers. That means that if your content roadmap requires technical content, you need the buy-in of SMEs to share their expertise and guide the writer.

(Side note: Do not ask your technical teams, sales reps, or CEO to write content for your blog, etc. They often lack the time, desire, or ability to do so.)

Set reasonable goals

If you don’t have a blog, do not expect 10,000 hits a month (or even a year) within a month or two of starting. Don’t expect to gain 5,000 Twitter followers in a month tweeting once a day if you’re starting with 37. The inbound leads will not come flooding in.

Especially if you’ve only just begun your content marketing journey, your first year or even two of work will be about getting started and benchmarking. After that, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions to grow in key areas.

Here are some signs that your initial work on content marketing is going well:

• Your sales team feels good sharing new content with leads and prospects

• People spend longer on your site 

• Visitors are following through on CTAs (calls to action)

• You start seeing patterns in the kinds of content people engage with

• You acquire new relevant keywords or see that your rank is increasing on existing relevant keywords

• A lead or customer directly references a piece of content as being helpful or persuasive 

A content strategy is necessary for every business, not just Italian restaurants. You could have the world’s best, most user-friendly, groundbreaking version of your product or service, but if no one knows about it or trusts that you’re real, it doesn’t matter how good you are. We love helping businesses put together and execute on content marketing strategies that help them grow, and we’d be happy to help you do the same.

We also like Italian food, in case that sways your opinion.