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

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.

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.

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.

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.