Don't Be Intimidated by that Big-and-Ugly Strategy Word. It Only Means a Plan of Action.
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” — Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles 1962
Don't be intimidated by strategy. Take the first step.
I love strategy.
The word gets overused but you can’t accomplish a thing without a strategy.
And strategy is simple.
It’s a plan of action to achieve a goal
According to marketing guru, Philip Kotler:
There is only one winning strategy. It is to define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.
YOU are developing that superior offering - whether it’s your company, product, or service.
Your winning strategy, that goal, will depend on your business goals.
If you’re a startup, the goal might be to use content to grow your pipeline. For a more established company, it might be using content to increase sales of your product.
Even though most life sciences companies produce a complex product, developing a content strategy doesn’t have to be complicated.
But you need the strategy to explain why you exist, why your product or service is superior to anything else on the market, and how you will make your target audience the hero of their lives.
Content strategy (the goal of your content) is the foundation of all the content marketing you do and it has four key elements. They are:
Your goal. What are you trying to accomplish? Where do you want to be next month? Next year? Are you trying to raise awareness? Get investors? Sell a product? Whatever your goal is, you need to be clear on your goal and how you will measure your progress toward that goal.
Your Tactics. How will you reach your audience? In the past, I’ve linked to Messaginglab’s ever-growing list of marketing tactics. The tactics you decide to use depend on whether or not they will reach your target audience. Again, you should be able to measure this.
Your understanding of your audience and their needs. Repeat after me: I am not my target audience. If you don’t know your audience, their wants and needs, then get out and talk with them.
The content you’ll create. This can be as simple as a list of toipcs you're going to write or speak about.
Once you’ve got those elements, write them down, commit them to a piece of paper. Because writing it down is magic. It forces you to focus. It allows you to share what you’re doing with your team. It will keep it real.
Writing down your content strategy puts you ahead of the majority of business-to-business marketers that have no written plan.
When we do this exercise with our clients, we always always always start with a discussion of goals.
After goals are defined, it is much easier to tackle the fun stuff - like whether you should appear on the podcast (you should) or make a video (you should) and what you’ll present on your road show.
See, I told you content strategy was simple. Let me know what you think.
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