6 Ways a Content Strategy Makes You Less Crazy and More Effective

Content marketing has proven to be an effective part of a brand’s marketing mix, but doing it well requires more than creating content and putting it out there. It’s not about churning out a few infographics and hoping for the best. The secret to good content marketing is good storytelling—telling the right stories, to the right people, in the right formats. It’s about creating value-driven content that connects with people and moves them along the buyer’s journey.To do it well, you can’t rely on what you “think” that might be, unless you are exactly who it’s intended for. You need a solid content strategy to guide you.But according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2B Benchmarks report, only 37% of marketers have a documented content strategy. (Don’t confuse a full editorial calendar for a content strategy.)While not ideal, this is understandable, as many marketers feel tremendous pressure to amp up content, foregoing quality for quantity to maintain a foothold in a content-saturated world. (Many brands come to us knowing they need a strategy, but first they say they need to knock out something they can put in the market.) But this content-saturated era is exactly why no marketer can work effectively without a content strategy.Stumbling around in the dark, making decisions based on a hunch, trying a new format just because it’s new—do these sound familiar? Hopefully not, because they’re all-too-common symptoms of the most ineffective and expensive ways to create content. And if your content hasn’t been nearly as successful as you anticipated, you’re probably guilty of one or all of these things.