Part of having a successful content marketing strategy entails understanding where you acquire your content.

Companies with marketing departments already overwhelmed with tasks tend to outsource content production, often purchasing ready-made content to support their respective content marketing strategies.

Regardless, someone from within the company needs to have oversight of the outsourced content to make sure the content is on brand and that it addresses user needs.

Let’s dive into a few examples of content you can source for your content marketing strategy.

Original Content
Original content is what you produce in-house with your team of writers. The pros of original content is that it speaks directly to your audience, in the right tone. After all, no one understands your audience like those from within your company. But creating original content is time consuming and involves a lot of sourcing. It’s no wonder that creating original content is often pricey.

Co-Created Content
Co-created content involves linking up with external forces. This could be getting a well-known thought leader in your industry to write on your blog. It could be taking a thought leader from within your company and getting them to speak on an industry podcast. The great thing about co-created content is you gain access to not only your audience, but also the audience of your co-creator. It’s a win-win for both sides.

Aggregated Content
Aggregated content involves rummaging through the web—with support from search algorithms and keywords or phrases—to find content for your blog. This content needs to speak to the industry you’re in. Using aggregated content makes the content creation process a whole lot easier. But there are a few cons with aggregating content for your company blog. For one, you’re publishing content that doesn’t speak in the tone of your brand since aggregated content comes from disparate sources. Another downside of aggregated content is it may not speak directly to your audience since you’re basing your searches on keyword searches and algorithms. The danger there is that you may lose the attention of your audience.

Curated Content
Similar to an art curator who creates a theme for an exhibition, curated content involves a content marketer collecting content and curating it on the company website. This involves have an editorial sense, one where the content marketer can easily build content around specific content pillars that serve the organization’s audience.

Licensed Content
Some companies that don’t have the capacity to create an in-depth library of content look to license content. In the healthcare industry, where I’m currently working, you’ll see health insurers license content from WebMD or Harvard Medical School, for example. The goal here is to source content that speaks to your audience and comes from reputable outlets. A content marketer should still offer oversight of the content, making sure to pick the right posts to publish.

Understanding the competitive landscape is one of those things that gets drilled down in you during business school.
 
And for good reason.
 
If you’re looking to make strategic recommendations that set you apart from the crowd, you need to understand the competitive landscape.
 
In the realm of content, that means content marketers may scramble to a competitor’s website and try to mimic all the content the competitor is publishing.
 
Avoid this frantic state. Instead, take a deep breath.
 
And consider these four questions as you measure up your competitor.
 
How Is Your Competitor’s Website Organized?
 
Here, you want to think about structure and labels. Are they calling their blog space ‘articles’ or ‘blog’?  Is the technical support section just ‘support’ or ‘technical support’?
 
Take a look at how the competitor categorizes content. This will help you get a good idea of who their target audience is.
 
What Do They Talk About?
 
This is a great way to figure out what your competitor is NOT talking about. You read that correctly. Again, the goal isn’t to mimic your competitor’s content. You are, dear content marketer, from a whole different company after all. But think about the stories the competitor isn’t discussing. Is there an opportunity to avail here? This is one way to create differentiation.
 
What Content Formats Are Being Used?
 
Are they using blog posts? Podcasts? Video? Are employees blogging? This may help you develop content formats well suited for your own target audience. Remember though, audiences digest content differently. It’s important to recognize how your audience is taking in content. But seeing how your competitor does it may inspire you to consider new avenues to sharing your own content.
 
How Do They Showcase Their Brand?
 
You can get a general idea if a company has it together by looking at how they present their brand assets. Is there a consistency in tone when it comes to content? Are the design assets aligned? Keep an eye, and ear, out for key messaging, voice and tone, images, quality of video production, and so on. Is the brand consistent? Or all over the place?
 
Final Thoughts
 
Having answers to these questions will give you a better idea of how your competitors compare to your company.
 
It’ll also give you an opportunity to develop a distinctness that positions your organization a step above the others.

 
Developing a content marketing strategy for your organization can get overwhelming really fast.
 
After all, organizations are made of multiple stakeholders, an array of teams, and people with varying perspectives.
 
Here’s a method you can use to sift through the complexity of a company as you develop your content marketing strategy.
 
It involves answering four questions.
 
Who is your target audience? What is your messaging? What channels are you using to share your content? What is the content creation workflow like?
 
Knowing the answers to these four questions will help you shape your content marketing strategy. Let’s take a deeper look.
 
Target Audiences
 
It’s important to define your target audience in depth. Marketers often create brand personas around customer segments. This could look like a fictional character who represents a typical targeted customer—Aliyah is a 38 year-old chief technology officer at a new start-up, for example.
 
Speak to various stakeholders in your company. They might have different ideas around who your target audience is, but getting this information down from the start will help you create the right content for the right personas.
 
Messaging
 
Messaging is the information you want to share with and get from your audiences and users. While companies often send out a tailored message, customers often see the messaging through their own lens. That’s why it’s important to get your audience’s take on how they view you as a company.
 
Messaging is also about creating a consistent narrative and tone in your content. It’s necessary to align on messaging with stakeholders across your company.
 
Most mid-sized and large companies have brand guidelines around messaging that will help you kickstart your content marketing strategy.
 
Channels
 
Channels are mediums through which content is shared. Depending on how your audience digests content, you might consider using one channel over the other in order to share your content. For example, in 2020, we saw more people take in video and audio content. In turn, companies began telling their stories through podcasts and short video snippets.
 
There are also various social media channels you can use to share your company’s story. Again, depending on what industry you’re in, certain social media channels may work better than others.
 
Workflow
 
Creating content involves many people from different teams and various levels of an organization. It’s why understanding the content development workflow is important as you craft your content marketing strategy.
 
It’s necessary to develop roles for various individuals in the content develop process. Who publishes content? Who provides the exert advice for the blog posts and podcasts? Who approves the content before it’s published?
 
Who designs the assets for storytelling? Understanding who takes on each role will help you create a workflow that runs smoothly as you execute your content marketing strategy.