What does "content strategy" even mean?
Yesterday on LinkedIn, I may have insinuated that for many life science software marketers, their idea of content strategy is walking down the hall and asking the engineers if they have any blog ideas. And while we can all probably agree that that isn’t a great strategy, it begs the question: What is?
My thoughts on this have been evolving as I’ve worked with a broader array of clients, but they’ve been getting a bit more solid lately. So this week I wanted to share how I’m currently thinking about it.
But before we get into what a content strategy *is*, let’s talk about what a content strategy should *do*. I believe a content strategy should provide a principled and effective way to identify and evaluate content ideas, then deliberately choose which ones to pursue and when/how to publish them, to ensure that the overall effort is coherent and effective.
In other words, a content strategy should stop you from having to walk down the hall asking your engineers for blog ideas. Or scanning through lists of SEO keywords. Or anything else that hands over control to someone or something else.
To do this, a content strategy needs two main components: A collection of ideas to pull from and a set of guidelines for which ideas to pull and how to turn them into content. The collection of ideas are a mostly static foundation. The guidelines evolve over time, as your company evolves and as you build up a foundation of content.
For the collection of ideas, I still like the core stories approach that I wrote about in the early days of this newsletter. I’ve started calling these ICP Narratives because I think it’s more specific and more compatible with marketing lingo. I may return to these again here at some point, but in the meantime you can read about them (with the old name) in this white paper.
The nice thing about the ICP narratives is that they break out the ideas by components of the narrative: Context, Conflicts, Epiphanies, Solutions, Outcomes. So that gives you a way to be more deliberate about what you want your marketing content to address, before you get into the weeds of specific goals, pain points, outcomes, etc.
And that leads into the second part of a content strategy: the guidelines. And the key here is defining factors that you want to deliberately manage by defining a target distribution for each. Then you can both track whether you’re following those distributions, and use the target factors to generate content ideas.
For example, one factor you might want to track is story components - We want to address conflicts (goals, pain points, constraints) in at least 40% of posts, epiphanies in at least 30% and outcomes in 40%. (Some posts can address more than one of them.) Well, we’ve been a little light on conflicts so far, so let’s look at the conflicts in the ICP Narratives (core stories).
I’m still working on a full list of factors that I think a marketing team should include in their guidelines but here’s what I have so far:
Narrative components
Format/framing, e.g. blog post vs. case study vs. a type of relational content
Buyer stage (Problem aware, solution aware, product aware, etc.)
Target reader role/persona/stakeholder type
For the ones I haven’t written about previously, I want to explore them in the future posts. But this post is already too long.
So to end, I’ll just mention that I’m working on a template for marketing teams to create their own guidelines. If you want to check out an early version, send me an email (jesse@merelogic.net) and I’ll share it when it’s ready.
Thanks for reading the Relational Content newsletter! I help B2B SaaS companies adopt relational content strategies to maximize the ROI from their marketing. To see what this might look like for you, check out merelogic.net.