What is content strategy?

Content strategy is the 'what', ‘how’ and ‘why’ for your business’s entire content ecosystem.

At a high level, a content strategy defines the criteria for and prioritizes what needs to be created, updated or binned across the entirety of customer touchpoints, including post-sale. As such it’s a cross-function strategy and not just about marketing.

In B2B, this includes (but not limited to) collateral for sales, marketing, retention/upsell, support and CX, partnerships, internal comms

Your content strategy should be born out across marketing disciplines, including content marketing, search optimization, social media marketing, email marketing and so on.

Elsewhere it steers the likes of SaaS knowledge base content, coaching handbooks, partner collateral and how you launch product updates or new services internally and externally.

Cohesion and consistency

Your business will be working towards particular goals and each function will have objectives that feed directly into the achievement of them. Your content strategy needs to be designed in aid of these objectives, leveraging a deep understanding of your audience to ensure content across touchpoints and produced across departments remains goal-oriented.

It should also provide clarity around the tone of voice and style, user scenarios and messaging hierarchies. It should be closely paired with a visual style guide and together work as the rule book for any and all publishing and communication.

Ownership and workflows

A content strategy also involves determining the governance and production processes driving the production of content, breaking down silos between content-producing functions.

It’s a complex beast, but worth investing time and effort into getting right – especially if customer experience is central to your business strategy.