Four pillars for a successful content strategy

This makes content a service delivered to your audience and that is the first pillar to be successful. The strength of content marketing resides in building a relationship with your audience by listening, helping, learning and entertaining. Putting your audience first enables you to establish a long-term trust relationship with a ‘free audience’. Or vice versa, if you don’t know how content benefits your audience then don’t send out a newsletter, don’t publish magazines or don’t write blog articles.

That means: non-stop, always-on. In other words, you need to plan and make adjustments while always keeping the longer term in mind. Nevertheless, you still need short-term actions that focus on drivers, advantages and emotional needs. So learn to drive at two different speeds.

It is important to give data the right place in your marketing strategy. Start by defining your overall goals and objectives. Then translate them into KPIs for every stage of the customer journey. Next convert all marketing efforts by the different silos into one large dashboard: advertising, email, web, social, paid, earned and owned. Make sure that the data is reliable and useful. And guarantee that everyone involved speaks the same language and uses the same definitions. Only then is it useful to verify whether the KPIs have been reached, which part(s) of the strategy is/were succesful, which channel yielded the biggest conversion ratio and what aspects you need to tweak.

Communication is no longer the prerogative of the Marketing & Communication department. Every member of your organisation is potentially a ‘publisher’ of your brand, your products and your services. Incidentally, this also goes for everyone outside your organisation. Build an internal framework to manage the content supply chain: assign roles and responsibilities and define and document work processes. Help your employees communicate ‘accurately’.