What is content strategy? (podcast)

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In episode 44 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe take a look at several definitions of “content strategy”. Do they work? Are they accurate?

Content strategy definitions:

The purpose of content strategy is to create meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable content that attracts the company’s target customers.

– Kruse Control, Inc.

Great content is created for a specific purpose, and this purpose needs to be defined. Ask yourself if you are creating content to boost brand awareness, generate leads, convert users, attract past customers, improve search ranking results, or something else altogether.

– Neil Patel

Content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.

Content strategy delves deeper into (in Kristina Halvorson’s words) the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” Note that content strategy often goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy, as it helps businesses manage all of the content they have.

– Content Marketing Institute

Content strategy refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own: written, visual, downloadable … you name it. It is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.

– Justin McGill, Hubspot

Content strategy has been described as planning for “the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

– Kristina Halvorson, via Wikipedia

A content strategy is the high-level vision that guides future content development to deliver against a specific business objective.

– Hannah Smith, Distilled

The essence of content strategy is simple: make a plan for your content to achieve a specific result. Your strategy could be small in scope, such as targeting web copy to a specific audience or tailoring your authoring process to suit multiple delivery formats. Or your strategy could be large in scope, aligning all content with a new brand or updating content infrastructure and workflows changes to improve localization accuracy and time to market.

– Bill Swallow, Scriptorium

Management consulting is the practice of helping organizations to improve their performance, operating primarily through the analysis of existing organizational problems and the development of plans for improvement.

– Wikipedia

Content strategy is a subdiscipline of management consulting. Like management consultants, content strategists begin by identifying business problems. The key difference is that content strategists focus on business problems that the organization can solve with content.

– Excerpt from a Scriptorium article in an upcoming industry journal

Twitter handles:

• @billswallow
• @sarahokeefe