• When maintained by relevancy; and
• When backed by an optimised content strategy.

A strong content strategy can help achieve marketing and business goals. If your organisation has started 2014 without one, then the hard work you put into creating quality (relevant) content may go to waste.

Far too often, content strategy is confused with editing. Content strategy is about more than just words on a page. It’s essential to consider how the content might by distributed, re-distributed, re-purposed, and through which channels. To some extent, re-using content in this way is about taking a single, carefully crafted piece of work and putting it to use in a number of different ways to achieve a particular goal. For example, more visits to your site, brand awareness, thought leadership, and so on. But, it’s easy to get this wrong. A bad content strategy might consist of the following:

• Irrelevant, badly formed content
• Article spinning
• Blanket distribution of content

It’s important, not necessarily to limit the extent to which content is re-purposed, but also to ensure that it is used in the right manner, within the right context and then distributed to a target audience.

Content creation is, however, only one part of an organisation’s overall strategy. There are many other related activities that are equally important, all of which should come under the same business and marketing strategy umbrella. A content strategy will help align content activities to the overall strategy, providing you with a clear path to success (or an identifiable trail of improvements to make).

To that end, we’ve created a three-part article series that we hope will highlight some of the key motivations behind content strategy optimisation and outline a useable framework. This first article is an introduction to the series. Watch out for the next article coming soon…

Why not get in touch with us to find out how we can align content with strategy in your organisation?