Important questions to ask before you develop a content marketing strategy

 
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.