Welcome to the third installment of our Essential Ingredients blog series, where we delve into the crucial aspects that drive successful adoption and results from the Seismic enablement platform. In this post, we focus on Content Strategy, a cornerstone for ensuring that your organization’s content is not only created with purpose but also effectively managed and governed throughout its lifecycle.

Today’s buyer-centric world demands a new way of considering how content is developed, managed, and delivered; we call it Precision Marketing. In the past, it was all about us and our offerings, but now it is all about the customer and we must deliver obvious value and relevancy to their specific situation. It must be easy to find, easy to consume, and also meet their needs. It must start with the Outside-In™ view.

Understanding Content Strategy

A content strategy is more than just a plan to create and distribute content; it is a comprehensive approach that aligns your content efforts with your organization’s overall objectives and the needs and interests of your target audience. At its core, a content strategy answers key questions: What content will be created? Who is it for? How will it be distributed and measured for effectiveness?

The Content Lifecycle

To understand the impact of a robust content strategy, it’s important to distinguish it from the content lifecycle. The content lifecycle consists of five stages:

1. Plan: Determining the content needs and setting objectives. What content will be created, and why?
2. Create: Developing the content.
3. Publish: Distributing the content across appropriate channels.
4. Maintain/Use: Ensuring the content remains relevant and up to date.
5. Retire: Removing or archiving outdated content.

While the lifecycle focuses on the journey of individual content pieces, the content strategy provides the overarching vision and framework that guides this process.

Content Strategy vs. Governance

Content governance is the framework that ensures your content lifecycle aligns with the established content strategy. Governance involves setting policies, standards, and roles to manage content consistently and effectively.

Developing a Content Strategy

Creating an effective content strategy involves two critical components: Content Architecture and the Content Map.

Content Architecture

Content architecture outlines the universal principles that apply to all content within the organization. It encompasses several elements:

• Brand: Ensuring all content aligns with the company’s identity, style, and regulatory requirements.
• Audience: Understanding the target markets and creating content from an Outside-In™ perspective—focusing on delivering value to the audience at each stage of their buying journey.
• Market Engagement Strategy: Defining how to engage with the target market throughout the buying journey, including triggers, touchpoints, personas, value drivers and concerns.
• Market Messaging Matrix: Identifying the key message themes for different personas, stages of the buying journey, and delivery channels.
• Content Required: Describing the types of content needed to support the engagement strategy, tailored to personas and stages of the journey.

Content Map

The content map translates the high-level architecture into specific, actionable plans for each market, campaign, or program. It details the content assets required and their attributes:

• Consumer: Identifying the persona and their stage in the buying journey.
• Purpose: Defining the objective of the content, whether informational or transformational (e.g., to trigger, accelerate, complete, or augment the buying journey).
• Delivery Channel and Usage: Specifying how and where the content will be delivered, and how it will be utilized by sales teams, partners, or other channels.
• Style: Determining the optimal style for the content, whether static, customizable, guided assembly, or dynamic. All content should be modular in nature.
• Lifecycle Management: Outlining who owns the content at each lifecycle stage and how it will be managed.
• Linkages: Identifying connections to other content pieces.
• Target Performance: Setting key performance indicators and expected outcomes.

Conclusion

A well-developed content strategy is integral to maximizing the potential of the Seismic platform. By ensuring that your content is aligned with both your organizational goals and the needs of your audience, you can create a seamless, effective content experience that drives engagement and results.

Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we will explore the two primary aspects of Governance and how to effectively manage both the content through its lifecycle and the platform.

For more insights and to see how our Essential Ingredients program can benefit your organization, feel free to reach out to our team. Together, we can unlock Seismic’s full potential.

Contact Us:
Market-Partners Inc.
800 Shiloh Canyon, Santa Rosa, CA 95403
+1 707 575 4712
[email protected]
market-partners.com

Back to the Essential Ingredients Cookbook