Sneaking More Strategy Into Your Content Marketing Operation

2 minute read

Upland Admin

iStock photo of man with sticky notes overhead for The Content Marketeer

For marketers short on budget and buy-in for content strategy, I’ve recommended developing a questionnaire and simplified page tables to help overcome those challenges. Here, I’ll add two more solutions: support considerations and posing hard questions. Both may allow you to sneak some necessary strategy into your content marketing operation.

Make note of support considerations while you’re writing.

After content goes live, it starts to get stale and, quite often, there’s no one to care for it.

As we’ve seen, page tables are one way to combat this issue, as they challenge you to consider support and technical considerations up front. In doing this, you’re more likely to come up with a plan for updating that content.

Yet even simplified page tables can be a challenge for some organizations. In those cases, I recommend adding support implications to the bottom of every unique page of content. Including a support note demands even less time than page tables if the notes are applied as the pages are created and limited to the most important information, such as how often or when the page should be updated, or if it will eventually need to be archived.

Follow up with the hard questions.

Even if you aren’t doing a full-scale content strategy project, you can still think of yourself as a content strategist. And you can still ask the questions a content strategist would ask: Do we need this content? Why? Is this content consistent with overall goals? If not, what can we do?

Rather than taking the time to research and solve all these problems yourself without the budget and time required, bring them up and leave them in the hands of your boss or client. And if those questions are already occurring to you, sending them to the appropriate authority via email. Even if they don’t succeed in making a case for more in-depth content strategy, asking good questions can serve as a point of reference down the road in various circumstances.

Tell us your own sneaky stories.

Questionnaires, page tables, support notes, and follow-up questions are just a few of my personal strategies for sneaking some strategy into a tight content marketing operation. How do you work content strategy into your resource-challenged projects? I’d love to hear your own sneaky stories, so, please, share them in the comments below.

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