You can't have a content strategy before you've used your content calendar for at least a couple of months.
Put it another way, in a recent role, my goal was to boost awareness, engagement, and ultimately conversion. Based on a heady mix of content, social and influencer marketing.
The trouble is you can't build a robust strategy without data. Sure, you can wrap your approach up in fluffy words, but until you get the numbers, this is snowflake strategy. Pretty to look at but liable to melt at before the week is out.
Put together a calendar. Audit the existing content (I did). Work out what can be quickly re-purposed and published. Reactivate your social channels, start distributing regularly, enthusiastically. Measure, measure, measure.
Week on week that calendar will start delivering data gold. Double down on what works. Chuck what doesn't. It took a good three months of non-stop effort to deliver the analytics to flesh out a full strategy. (And much coffee and kindness to our BI team).
The result? An all-guns-blazing strategy for 2019 with a clear sense of purpose. And the calendar? It's still there. Fine tuned and as dependable as ever. We couldn't have done it without you buddy.
So you have an editorial calendar; but do you have an actual strategy behind your content marketing efforts? Surprisingly, as many as 63% of businesses don’t have an actual content strategy – but while that’s bad news for them, it can be great news for you if you start developing a content marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals. That said, it’s important to understand that a content strategy is not just an editorial calendar that you plan a few weeks or a month in advance. Rather, it’s a documented strategy that involves: Setting goals for your content marketing strategy, particularly goals that will align with your overall business goals so that any content you product helps you reach more business goals (generating more traffic, more leads, making more conversions via your website, blog or email and so on).
