If you are a content marketer and you have not asked yourself some of these content strategy questions, there is a better chance you are straying really badly.
Though all the questions may not apply to every business, it is a starting point to helping you create a winning content strategy.
As published by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI):
1. Business Plan for Innovation
- What challenges are we trying to solve?
- What is our dream outcome with this process?
- What is the risk if we fail?
- Whose unique perspectives do we want to involve? If internal, what permissions do we need from their managers to participate?
- What is our budget?
- How often do we want to produce deliverables?
- If life or business issues get in the way, how can we push a “big red button” without
disbanding the idea of the business plan? - How will we execute each experimental idea, and how long will we give it to work?
2. Business Case for Content Marketing
- What is the need? What do we hope to accomplish with our content marketing?
- How big of a need is it? Do we have a big enough audience to justify a plan?
- What is the business model? How does it work? What do we have to do?
- What is our differentiating value? Why is this more important than other things we are spending time on?
- What are the risks? What’s in our way of success – or what happens if we fail?
3. Persona Development and Content Mapping
- What are the details of each of our personas?
- What does our sales funnel look like?
- What does the customer’s buying cycle look like?
- What content do we need to create based on the engagement cycle?
- What is the customer context?
4. Our Brand Story
- What does our marketing look like? Where are our competitors situated? What is the reality for our customers? Why do they currently identify with our brand?
- What would the world look like if we could realize the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) that
we set out for our brand? What is the “call to adventure” for our product? - Why hasn’t this been done?
- Who will provide guidance for our brand as it makes this journey?
- What is our new idea? How will we lead our audience into this unknown with us?
- Who will our brand align with to help us move forward? Who will be the naysayers? What
challenges can we plan for? - What will our brand ultimately achieve?
- Once our brand has changed, how will we show that differentiation?
- What ambush could – or will – our brand face now that it is different? How will we continue to move on?
