Keys to Developing a Content Strategy
When developing a content strategy, there’s a slew of different aspects that are integral to it, such as making sure the content itself is worthwhile and that it’s accessible. As conveyed in her book The Content Strategy Toolkit, the points Meghan Casey focuses heavily on include budget, preparing for success, and buy-in. It may seem obvious to some, but once you analyze these factors as they relate to content strategy in greater depth, you realize just how important they are.
Budget
As anyone knows, there’s not much you can do without a budget. Without money, items such as domains, workers, and what makes the content won’t be there. Beyond the basic facts though, the budget for your content strategy is an extremely wide reaching area. For example, if you’re creating a content strategy for you and your friends' new website, you not only need to determine how much it costs to get the site domain and hosting, but also how you’re going to spend to make future content. If some of the content on the site happened to be skits, you need to determine how many things like cameras, costumes, props, lighting, etc… cost, as well as how much time is needed. As you continue to go deeper and deeper into what the costs truly are, you then start ending with a budget getting pretty big, such as here.
Issues such as these are why it’s crucial to properly budget your content strategy. If you underestimate how much something costs, you’ll have to spend extra to subset that cost. Later on though, you now have less budget for the rest of your site, which either forces you to keep subsetting the cost, or simply cutting the feature. Any part of the budget can do this, so all of it needs to be planned out. Even with a well managed budget, that doesn’t mean it will remain static. Both your content and the public perception of said content will always be changing, meaning the strategy behind that content is always changing. This can affect the budget in many different ways, making it important that’s organized and well structured so that not every adjustment will kill the budget
Preparing for success
Mentally, you should always prepare yourself for success, as no one will believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself. In regards to a content strategy though, preparing for success goes beyond the mental aspect of making yourself more confident. You need to be able to prepare for success so that you can successfully mobilize and enhance your content in the future. As an example, if you make a video game, but aren’t expecting a successful launch, you’ll get caught with your tail in between the legs if it starts selling. You obviously shouldn’t over prepare, but making sure you have a plan for future content and updates in case (or in spite of a lack of) success is an integral part of making sure you have a content strategy and aren’t just making content.
Buy-In
One of the main factors of content strategy is that it’s often a way for businesses to try to better structure themselves around their content. The only issue though, is that they won’t always agree. To you, the content strategist, it may make perfect sense as to why content strategy would be great for the business, but if they don’t buy-in, it won’t matter. That’s what makes it so crucial that you have a good structure and plan for your content strategy, to be able to get the buy-in from the business.
In terms of how to increase the chances of a company or business buying-in to your strategy, you need to think like a marketer in a way. It sounds great to you because you made the strategy and know all of the intricate details, but for the business, they have no clue what you’re talking about so you need to explain it to them. A good way to explain it, as shown by number 4 in this list, is to explain the process to the company. It’s simple, but if you can cleanly walk them through the whole process of the strategy, they’ll have a much greater understanding and be much more likely to buy-in.
