Take Time to Develop a Content Strategy

So you have interviewed your corporate experts and taken countless hours to write an engaging white paper. What do you do with it now? Post it on your website and hope people stop by? Invest in a landing page and SEM campaign to help drive traffic to the paper? Post it on LinkedIn?

There are countless ideas about how you can get your content out to the people who actually want and need to consume it. All too often, companies invest resources in various pieces of content, but do not take the time to think through a few key components: What does our target audience really need? What do they want? What are the best ways to deliver that information to them (or draw them to the information)?

Basically, companies forget the strategy part.

Believe it or not, it really is not hard to develop a content strategy. (And we can help!) It just takes time and careful consideration about what your audience really needs, what you have to offer and how you can connect your content with your audience.

Here are a few resources to help you get started:

1. Junta42, run by Joe Pulizzi, is our favorite content marketing website. For beginners, Joe offers a great downloadable primer (the Content Marketing Playbook) on content marketing that will help anyone make a case for why you should allocate resources to develop content and a content strategy. Other site resources include Joe’s blog, a list of other great content development/strategy blogs and a host of articles about all things content.

2. Eric Anderson, wrote a blog featured on iMediaConnection.com entitled The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing. Eric explains why content is important, offers realistic steps about how to approach developing content and a content strategy and peppers his posting with great examples about what has worked for other companies.

3. Kristina Halvorson has one of the best books on the market about content strategy development, entitled cleverly Content Strategy for the Web. The book is concise, smart, witty and packed with great information. This is a must read for anyone developing content.

Do you have any other great resources for how to develop a content strategy?