“What’s content strategy” is a tough question to answer concisely. You want to describe the process without making it sound like copywriting, or marketing, or (God forbid) a buzz word.
This is the struggle I face each year when I lead Atlas Workshops trips. The students are like adults in that they want to connect new ideas to their old, preconceived notions, and yet they have much less business experience than their adult counterparts, making it even more difficult to explain the concept of strategy – and content strategy – and experience strategy – as it relates to anything they know.
That’s what makes it all the more magical when mutual understanding happens organically.
It happened in Dubrovnik. We had asked the students to come up with titles for their projects, titles that could then be printed on brochures or cover pages for their final deliverables. One student was particularly excited. She was hoping to work on marketing in the future, and she was an excellent writer. As we walked to lunch she began telling me her title ideas: Island of Beauty, A Vacation to Remember, Celebrating Luxury, and so on.
All of her titles were similar in that they were catchy and memorable. I struggled to identify what was wrong with them.
“These titles all sound great, and people will certainly like them, but they don’t tell us anything in particular,” I hedged. “Can you come back with 5 titles that don’t just sound nice, but also have some meaning behind them? We want to communicate a specific message to the people who read this – what is that message?”
This is also the purpose of content strategy. Too many marketers focus on the same things as my student: catchy titles and memorable terms. A solid content strategy puts meaning behind those catchy titles, and the best marketers use content strategies to create content that is both memorable and meaningful.