The Problem With Content Is The Content

How’s Your Content Strategy Doing? Also, What Is Content Strategy?

No doubt you’ve had a marketing manager return from a conference and promptly ask “What’s our content strategy?” They’re ready to start on it. Even energized. Once they find out what it is.

Perhaps an operations lead attends a webinar with a solutions provider who promotes a viable “content strategy.” Just a healthy subscription fee! See, we solved marketing! It could even be a case study from BAI or ABA or Financial Brand who claims that a specific “content strategy” was key to a firm’s success.

I always scratch my head. When did the term “Content” become the MacGuffin? The thing we’re all searching for. It’s not a story, it’s content. It’s not a movie, it’s content. Better break up that novel into content, you know, for SEO.

And for your brand’s purpose, when did it become content instead of advertising? When did it become content instead of email marketing? When did it become content instead of blog posts, or articles, or listicles, etc? When will I start saying, I’m going to go home, put my feet up, and watch content?

I’ll stop being an old man yelling at a cloud for a couple of minutes now. Content is just semantic, and it is a placeholder. The reality is your brand and your messaging – and your customer experience – are delivered through such a wide variety of channels that “content” serves to cover any and all possibilities. It attempts to make simple what is complex, and what varies slightly through a multitude of media. A billboard is not a receipt image is not a bounce message is not a press release, so to speak.

If that’s understandable, then you no doubt understand that a consistent and variable brand message, platform, or composition tool is important. Of course it is.

You know that – and so do your vendors, and so do other consultants. (So do we!) It’s profoundly easy to offer advice that a financial brand or a fintech needs a content strategy. You’ve heard this before. Once you start on a content strategy, our widget can help it. There are advertising firms aplenty who promise to help you on a content strategy – once, of course, you produce the content. What we’re left with is everyone claiming content is important – yet no one knowing how to produce or prioritize it for customers.

We’ve lost the reins, we’ve lost the story as a marketing industry, for financial brands or otherwise. The good news? We can get it back. Here’s one way you can help.

Break down your content. (Stop using the phrase, for one. Break down your ads. Your posts. Your letters.) Stop hoping for some all-encompassing AI strategy to do all your content work for you. It doesn’t exist. Your CMO, your ad agency, your ghostwriter, your freelance network – they’ll all have to go to work. But they’re ready!

Your marketing team is ready to prioritize brand campaigns, and probably also ready to prioritize a pecking order of channels. They just need the guidance! (Don’t work on some influencer campaign you heard was good, if you don’t have any landing pages, for example). So help them. Prioritize. Start with one landing page. Then your website. Start with your team. Start with your required customer messages. And start measuring any engagement you can. Clicks, customers, views, etc. Those basic metrics represent a basic level of care.

In fact, that’s the hidden secret to any content creation. The audience has to care. The only way to do that, logistically, is to start talking to your customers, asking questions about the experience, and learning along the way. You’ll be surprised the content ideas you or your team has once you start. This is, of course, marketing. Learning from your customer experience in order to create a need and solve a problem for your customers. But’s that another content post for another time.

Originally published at Strategic CX.