Content strategy is all about your audience not you

A lot of brands tend to be very self-centered. When you talk about content strategy, they usually go back to their marketing strategy and the products that they are going to be promoting. Unfortunately, this is the worst way of creating engagement with your brand.

An effective content strategy starts with understanding your audience. And this can be different to understanding your client. Audiences in the digital world tend to be different than in the traditional world. One example of this is for B2B companies where decision makers are the C-Suite. Targeting the C-Suite in social media, search and email is getting harder and harder because these people are usually very busy and tend to filter out lots of noise from their channels (email, social and web).

For this reason, thinking about the whole spectrum of your audience makes a lot more sense. As in the traditional sales process, it's about understanding who in the organization identifies the need, who is the influencer/recommender, who makes the buying decision and who authorizes it. It is only by understanding this that you can create an effective content strategy that addresses the needs of these audiences. Each one of them will be different and will have diverse needs and preferences in terms of content consumption.


Ultimately, the C-Suite relies in all these people to help them plan and execute, so by engaging them you are getting to the C-Suite. Specifically in social media, it has been found by many reports that most of the CXOs are more actively observing than contributing. They will follow their network, what their peers, coworkers, influencers and key opinion leaders are saying about the topics of their interest. And they will consume content, but when it has been "filtered" by all these people, so they know that the quality of the content is good and they can trust it.


Finally, content strategy is about developing content for each one of the buying decision stages. Your website and social channels need to cater for someone who has never heard of you and comes to any of your channel for the first time, as well as for a customer that has done business with you for years. They will both come to the same channels with different needs, and they need to be able to find content that is relevant for them.


Looking forward to seeing some comments about this topic from my network. Share your point of view.