What are the Positive Benefits of Creating a Content Marketing Strategy for a Marketing Professional?

We’ve talked previously about how creating a content strategy has an impact on an organisation.

But what about you as the marketer? In lots of businesses, lone marketers struggle to get heard and fight against negative perceptions about marketing.

And in organisations where you might be part of, or leading an established team, are you ever really sure that what you are doing is going to lead to the results expected?

That’s when having a defined content strategy helps you not only position the value of marketing, but your own value to the organisation too.

If you’re in any doubt as to how the value of creating a documented content strategy can help you build influence with your peers and improve your marketing career prospects, then check out this list.

Content strategy builds clarity and confidence in marketing

We already know that content marketing strategy helps to provide clarity and confidence in the following ways:

  • Helps a brand stand out.
  • Boosting visibility on the web and your organic search traffic.
  • Building trust through consistency and expertise sharing.
  • Allows you to educate and not just sell.
  • Supports lead development and conversion.

1. A content strategy shows you understand business

Creating a content strategy involves thinking more deeply about who your customers are, understanding more about their problems, obstacles and aspirations, and thinking about how to position as a trusted guide to help them achieve the transformation they seek.

This is always incredibly valuable work as it can impact significantly on company strategy and commercial goals. Taking this work further by including an assessment of market challenges, trends and how your competition is approaching the same market helps to crystallise how you as a business should be approaching it too.

Being an intrinsic part of driving this agenda and doing this work inevitably puts you in a more favourable light with your colleagues – especially those in parts of the business that haven’t perhaps seen the value of marketing previously.

Benefit to you: Thinking about how to attract customers by focusing on their problems and challenges and helping them achieve transformation means the marketing recommendations and activities you develop will inevitably have more clarity and more confidence. And if you are more confident, the business will be more confident in you.

2. A content strategy shows you can think strategically

By advocating for customers internally, you’re working incredibly proactively. This has the power not just to transform more than just how you market to the unaware and how you build communication funnels to help customers learn and come to choose you.

It has the power to impact on all aspects of the business including product and service innovation, product and service delivery, customer service processes, sustainability and transparency in sourcing, people and HR and much much more.

Because it is led by customer insight and real time data.

Benefit to you: Thinking strategically means you will become more valuable to your organisation. Using real customer insights and real world data to support your recommendations means your voice will be heard because it is unequivocal. You will be party to more important conversations and rub shoulders with more influential peers as a result – essentially “working up” before securing a future promotion.

3. A content strategy shows you understand demand generation

By having greater clarity and confidence in who you are serving and how you are helping them – and translating this into marketing that engages genuinely interested parties – you’ll help shift perceptions that marketing is a cost not an investment.

How? You’ll be helping to move the business from a generic, often unqualified, lead generation model to something more like a demand generation model. This means instead of focusing on simply building lists of names and email addresses and passing them off as unqualified leads to sales colleagues who often struggle to convert them, you are creating better qualified interest in your products and services because you have created marketing content that speaks to them more directly.

Benefit to you: Sales colleagues will see how demand generation inspired content marketing can help them do their job better and achieve their goals. This means you can directly attribute marketing to improvements in the bottom line and make requests for more budget and resources – and a more senior role.

4. A content strategy creates consistency in marketing and positioning

Many organisations offer a number of products and services to a wide variety of customers. This can create confusion unless they are expertly segmented and positioned.

Creating clarity in who you serve and how you help has a knock on effect to ensuring there is consistency in marketing deployment.

One of the critical elements of content strategy is your content pillars, a set of unchanging topics that all marketing content is built around. Being consistent in what the organisation (and its key customer facing people) talks about in public – what it publishes, speaks about, shares online and generally advocates for – ensures that you become expertly positioned on those topics.

You’ll always be looking for opportunities to advance your position in these areas, share your work and look for ways to get involved in the conversation.

Benefit to you: Peers, colleagues, customers and wider stakeholders will benefit from your consistency in message. As your C-suite becomes more aware of this, your career progression opportunities continue to rise as you build the brand strategy for the organisation. And if it doesn’t where you currently are, others will be taking notice for sure.

5. Content strategy creates confidence

Once you become an expert content marketing professional that has successfully built an organisation’s brand and bottom line by implementing a high level content strategy consistently and confidently in a market niche, more opportunities will come your way.

Aside from career progression goals, senior marketers often find themselves in demand by event and conference organisers, online learning platforms, community managers, podcast and online event hosts and media editors and feature writers. This opens up new opportunities to impact more businesses, fellow marketing professionals and develop other interesting revenue streams.

Taking your experience, case studies and personal content pillars outside the organisation may lead you into an even more lucrative portfolio career as a speaker, author, trainer, lecturer, coach or consultant.

Benefit to you: Successfully implementing a content marketing strategy in your organisation could be the first step in opening up future self employed career opportunities that take your earnings potential and ability to impact more people in more significant and unexpected ways.

What do you think? How could creating a content marketing strategy impact you?

Would you like to see what help is available in developing your own content strategy? Click here to start a conversation.

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Rene Power

MMC Learning’s Director of Marketing, Rene is passionate about making marketing more accessible and has an interest in businesses in the industrial and professional services sectors. Among his responsibilities as a member of the MMC Learning team are designing and delivering the company’s own marketing activities, and assisting clients with their team training.