Does Your Business Need a Content Strategy?

In a word, yes. Audience acquisition for services or products that are expensive or complex is not quick or easy. These services or products can range from selecting a cloud computing service to prescribing a new medicine for an autoimmune disease, or from specialized machinery for automotive assembly to a new AI agent to handle customer service.

Driving awareness, connecting with, and building trust with your audience depends on how you communicate with them upon introduction, during the buying journey, and while they are your customer. This communication occurs via a variety of ways, wherever the audience is, whether it be via a social media channel, a GitHub repo, an online event, or your own homegrown academy. A content strategy lays out who you are trying to reach, why they need your services or products, and how to use them to accelerate their solutions. 

The Anatomy of a Content Strategy

A content strategy is essential for building a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship with your audience. To achieve this, businesses need a steady stream of content that inspires, informs, and educates. While strategies will vary based on industry, company stage, and audience type, they should all be grounded in a common set of core pillars.

Audience identification and nurturing

Your content strategy should clearly articulate why your product or service offers a better—or entirely new—way to meet your audience’s needs, while also delivering solutions they may not have realized were possible. It must contain a complete picture of your core audience’s challenges, from day-to-day frustrations to the shortcomings of their current solutions. This depth of understanding ensures your content not only resonates with your existing community but also captures the attention of those who haven’t yet discovered you.

Brand voice creation, enhancement, and extension

As with any strategy presenting a vision for the company, it should not exist in a vacuum; it is more than likely that a brand voice may have already been created by a CMO and marketing team. The content strategy should then expand upon the brand voice via more in-depth and educational content. Be explicit about how your content will reflect and amplify the brand voice while adding new layers of depth and relevance.

Thought leadership voice cultivation

As humans, we connect more readily with other humans rather than faceless companies, and as such, a content strategy should take the time to identify and work with individuals within the company who are in key communication positions. Cultivating these voices expands your content footprint, giving your outreach diversity, and is a great way to showcase how the company is moving its beliefs forward.

Audience education

Much of the content that comes from this strategy will be to educate the audience about why and how this service or product will help the audience with their problem(s), like cutting costs, streamlining workflows, or powering faster innovation. As with most technical and scientific services and products, the change is fast and furious, best practices are evolving, and use cases proliferate. Focusing on your audience’s success is key to your successful ecosystem.

Technical Documentation

The clarity, availability, and timeliness of your technical documentation is crucial. While technical documentation does not originate from your content marketing team, it needs to be considered as your strategy is built. The content strategy should include input on how to make this content available, how to expand upon it via different media, and how to implement a workflow that ensures engineers are aware of how your audience is using (or not using) this information and what is needed as the audience uses it to put their products or services into production.

Partnership & community building

Services and products don’t thrive in isolation—partners and communities can make or break an ecosystem. The good news is that an active community is a rich source of content and insight. As noted in the technical documentation section, their most valuable contribution is feedback, which must be captured and routed back to engineers and product managers to help products evolve faster and address both current and emerging needs. In addition, partners and community members can showcase how your service or product performs in real-world scenarios, lending credibility through their authentic problem-solving experiences. (Note: Open source communities have even more to give via technical and non-technical contributions to your open source projects.)

Measurement & Metrics

None of this is effective without a way to measure impact. Clear goals should be established early so the strategy can be refined as needed. By combining qualitative and quantitative data, you can demonstrate how these efforts drive key business outcomes—for example, achieving X% growth in usage and revenue through audience acquisition and active participation in your ecosystem.

The clarity of this strategy (and its execution) can make all the difference in speed of audience acquisition, its retention, and the creation of a community that spreads the word about how it has helped them.

The Punch Tape Perspective

The bias runs deep here, of course; however, pragmatically, a focus on content that will make the onboarding of your service or product easier is a clear win. While keeping your ecosystem at the forefront of this audience's mind with helpful ideas, streamlined workflows, and clearly explained improved features leads to faster growth. Content can connect the dots.