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petewailes

This is not a strategy.

Strategy is planning five things:

* SMART objectives covering the next 12-36 months;

* Choices around how to compete and win in chosen areas of the market to achieve the objectives set;

* Positioning your organisation and its offering to be both distinct and differentiated to the audience;

* Selecting comms channels and messages to use to communicate with potential and current consumers/users;

* Altering your organisation to deliver the work all the above entail.

This is a not great article giving a list of things to execute a single tactic. Not a strategy.

Do not confuse the two.

I'd strongly suggest anyone interested in strategy read this: https://hbr.org/2014/01/the-big-lie-of-strategic-planning, by the excellent Roger L Martin

You can also read my far less expert thoughts on strategic thinking here: https://toughcompetent.com/dcxd/strategic-thinking/

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You seem to be describing strategy writ-large for a company, this is about "content marketing" strategy.

Strategy nests hierarchically, with each layer supporting the ones above. For digital content marketing specifically, you'd detail those questions as:

* What are your objectives covering the next 12 months (SMART format), to outline what the efforts should achieve, how they'll be measured, success/failure criteria etc.

* What's your content going to look like in terms of media, what's the rest of the market doing, what are users, content consumers and customers all looking for...

* How will the comms translate your brand positioning and differentiation/distinctiveness to the audience? What should they take away from each piece and from the overall viewing of the many pieces of content which will be created?

* What channels will be used for promotion z and how will they be utilised?

* How will that content be produced, analysed and refined? What's the production lifecycle & management.

It's always the same five questions, with subtly in the detail of the thing being planned.

Hi Pete, It’s not really intended as an overall strategy – but as a ‘how to do content marketing’. Whether or not to attach the word ‘strategy’ is perhaps debatable; I think it works with the word ‘content’ – I wouldn’t have called it ‘marketing strategy’; but I did call it ‘content strategy’.

Three of the principles within it are:

1. Getting the most out of pillar content (e.g. 20–50 pieces relating to each pillar)

2. Getting the most out of social networks (e.g. tailoring pieces across different social networks with paths to the pillar)

3. Listening to reactions and accounting for those reactions in further content that is produced

In RTS we’d call it a ‘build order’. Which is a strategic template used to guide the order in which you build or create things to support your overall strategy.

In the same way, this is a strategic template for what to build, when and in what order to support your overall marketing or customer acquisition strategy. Choosing this template yo deploy would depend on other criteria that would push you to choose this over other possible strategic approaches.

I think all that is missing from the above article is some discussion of when it’s not appropriate to deploy such a strategic approach.

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