What is a Content Strategist and Does Your Business Need One?

A robust content strategy is the pillar of any digital marketing campaign. High-quality content is behind your lead generation, conversion, brand awareness, and retention efforts. Even with top-notch products and services, a lack of a solid content strategy could put your company behind the competition. To avoid this, and to create a sustainable and wildly successful organic marketing strategy, it's imperative to work with an experienced content strategist.

"Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue," – Andrew Davis.

A content strategist develops, executes, and maintains all types of content for your website, media, and social channels. This person is responsible for planning, creating, and sharing content designed specifically for your target audience. A solid content plan will include long form (blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars, presentations, long videos, podcasts) and short form (social media posts, short videos, emails) pieces.

• Evaluation — Content strategists create a strategy based on the company's marketing and business goals. Since, from month to month, these goals can vary dramatically, these experts take a detailed approach to content management, maintenance, as well as for analytics.

• Maintenance — A content strategist handles everything from creating catchy content for your paid ads to designing a social media posting schedule. To do all the above, this professional must have an in-depth understanding of how your company works as well as what your target audience needs on an ongoing and ever-changing basis.

• Analysis — A content strategist analyzes the current marketing effort, competitor's tactics, the audience's needs, as well as the company's marketing budget to create a highly effective content marketing strategy. The continuous professional analysis makes it easy to adjust the campaign to meet company goals faster and create better content that helps connect and convert consumers.

• Implementation — Even the most useful piece of content can't bring you the desired result unless it's handled correctly. Content strategists monitor and control the entire content development, maintenance, as well as implementation process.

Without an experienced content strategist, it can be hard to achieve a high marketing ROI. And when you create content, you want to make sure you're creating with an objective and a purpose and creating content that helps drive success in your business.

Are you wondering if your business needs a content strategist, consider the following questions:

• Are you happy with your marketing ROI?

• Is your company an industry leader?

• Can you come up with content ideas regularly?

• Are you meeting your lead generation goals?

• Is your content receiving the response you are hoping for?

• Do you have a consistent social media posting plan?

• Are you happy with your conversion rate?

• Are your SEO efforts bringing the desired results?

If you answered "no" to one or more of the above questions, your content strategy is far from ideal. This could mean you need an experienced content strategist to make sure all aspects of your marketing campaign are working properly.

Content is the glue that holds your marketing campaign together. A content strategist knows where, when, as well as how to apply it.

An effective content marketing strategy can help you achieve a variety of goals while increasing your marketing ROI.

In today's noisy market, consumers are becoming more annoyed with salesy pitches and intrusive ads. Ads are also becoming more expensive for marketers, decreasing the ROI. So now what? How the heck do you sell in a way that makes others WANT to buy from you in a feel good way?

It's creating and serving up quality content that gets people wanting to stay in your world and work with you. There's a fine line between creating quality content and straight selling, and you need to stay in the middle-ground area. All selling will turn people off, but creating content that doesn't urge people to take the next step will never be a lucrative strategy. An experience content strategist will help you walk this line with ease, grace and success!

Here are just a few other reasons why your business needs an experienced content strategist:

There isn't any doubt about it. Content is king. Your team members may have plenty of valuable advice as well as information to share with your audience. However, without the right wrapper, the content can lose the majority of its value.

For example, did you know that 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a product from an article rather than an ad?

High-quality content isn't just about sharing something valuable that addresses the audience's pain points. It must:

• Be structured the right way to be readable.

• Include the right keywords for SEO and paid search efforts.

• Be posted in the right place and at the right time.

• Be consistent across all marketing channels.

• Have a sharing potential.

Content strategists don't just help you create high-quality content. They work on the structure, timing, as well as placement to make sure it achieves the best possible results.

Building authority is the key to a company's success both in the digital realm and beyond. Writing, implementing, as well as sharing the right content can help you increase brand authority while positioning your business as an industry leader.

To build brand authority, a content strategist can:

• Find out which questions your audience has and answer them with relevant content.

• Create valuable and newsworthy content like case studies, whitepapers, surveys, as well as reports.

• Take your team members' expertise and turn it into valuable, readable, as well as digestible content for the target audience.

• Discover opportunities for collaborating with authoritative brands.

In many cases, companies already have the materials to improve their marketing strategy. A content strategist can turn them into effective content and find ways to implement it across multiple channels.

More than two-thirds of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. However, content creation, maintenance, and distribution can get costly. With the right strategy, you can cut costs tremendously. A content strategist can help reduce marketing expenses by:

• Figuring out how to repurpose content.

• Supporting SEO efforts.

• Designing highly efficient paid search ads.

• Leveraging user-generated content.

• Analyzing content marketing efforts and preventing mistakes.

Overall, content marketing can become one of the least expensive marketing tactics implemented in your campaign.

Your entire marketing strategy depends on the quality, maintenance, and implementation of various content types. A poorly designed email can hurt your email marketing efforts while a badly chosen headline could boost your paid search marketing expenses and so on.

A content strategist analyzes your entire campaign to see which content fits into its elements. This expert designs and implements content with your strategy in mind, thus lowering expenses and boosting efficiency.

The strategy created by the content expert can organize your entire marketing team and give your marketing strategy a comprehensible structure.

While different goals for content may exist, the key objective is to convert and retain customers. Regardless of the position in the sales funnel, each customer needs the right content to go forward. The content strategist can:

• Study the customer's needs at every stage of the sales funnel.

• Create relevant content to address the customer's pain points.

• Choose the right style and formatting for each content type.

• Leverage the right distribution and promotional channels.

When designing and implementing content, a content strategist keeps the entire customer journey in mind, thus working toward increasing conversions and the company's profitability.

The Takeaway

Since content is the pillar of an efficient marketing strategy, a content strategist is an integral part of your marketing team. To cut costs while improving their marketing efforts, many companies choose to outsource content strategy and development services.

If you'd like to learn more about content strategists and their role in your marketing campaign, contact us any time. We love to chat about all things content marketing.