In a digital-first world, your company’s content generally makes your brand’s first impression. However, in many companies, content marketing often gets delegated down to a mid-level marketing hire.
However, if your company is serious about attracting the best clients for your mid-market and enterprise technology, your content matters more than you realize.
Your company’s content strategy defines who your company is, what it wants to be known for, and the kinds of expertise it brings to the marketplace.
In this article, you’ll get introduced to six content strategy planning questions you should use as conversation starters for your next internal strategy workshop.
- Who will be reading your content? In other words, who are the most critical buyer personas that you’re creating content for in the first place? (A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on actual research and some select educated speculation.)
- What problem does your content solve? When you research and create your buyer persona documents, you should have a well-fleshed-out section on challenges and how your company helps address these challenges. Each of the challenges should be addressed in one or more separate content assets -- such as videos, podcast episodes, blog posts, or premium content, including webinars and downloadable content.
- What makes your firm unique? In a global marketplace, you can get leads from literally anywhere. However, that also means you can face competition from literally anywhere. Differentiation and competition position now matters more than ever. Make sure you’re crystal clear about what sets your firm apart from other alternatives.
- What content formats will you focus on? Depending on your buyer persona preferences, as in how they prefer to consume content and your team’s internal talent, there may be some content formats that make more sense than others. The best time to start this conversation is during your content strategy planning. Nail down focus around video, audio, or text content. Long-form content vs. short-form content. And who will play what roles in content ideation, content creation, content production, and content distribution?
- What channels will this content be published on? Just as you addressed with preferred content formats, your buyer persona research should also uncover which channels make the most sense to publish to -- especially when it comes to social media channels.
- How will your company manage content creation and publication? Who are the internal and external subject matter experts that will participate in your content creation? Who internally owns the content creation and publication process.
Does your company sell mid-market and enterprise technology? Are you currently working on your content strategy planning? If so, what are you finding most challenging? Let me know in the comments.