Plan your Content Strategy by asking the right Marketing questions

The main reason is because content for the sake of content is less relevant than content with a purpose.

That’s where Marketing comes into play. Hence the science of Content Marketing where marketing thinking comes before the production of content.

Ask yourself the right marketing questions

Marketing helps us ask ourselves the right questions first:

• About your brand: who are we? what are our purpose and our story?
• About your audience: who are we serving and who are we trying to reach?
• About your mission: what are we trying to tell our audience?
• About your relevance: how do we make sure we are useful and relevant to our audience?
• About your goals: what do we expect them to do with what we’re telling them?
• About how you get the word out: how are we going to reach them?
• About your platform: how are we going to enable them to do what we expect them to do?

Make a point to define and measure performance

Online Marketing also introduces the dimension of measurable performance.

Business objectives must have performance goals in order to measure the success of marketing initiatives against them, and so we add another layer of questions:

• Define success: how do we define that what we’re doing is successful?
• Define what you’re going to measure: what are all the steps our target audience might take to do what we want them to do?
• Define how you’re doing to measure: how to measure all the steps of the customer’s journey?
• Define success for your content:  how do we measure that the content we produced is working?

The roadmap to Content Marketing Planning starts with…

Answering all these questions first to make sure to effectively steer your content strategy towards tangible results.

Here is a great infographic to illustrate these principles: