How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business – Part 1: Content Challenges

Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your business with this free video course. Part 2 of 12.

This is Part 2 of our free How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business video course.

This lesson covers what you need to know and do before you can create an effective content strategy for your business.

You will also learn about the challenges of managing content effectively and what you need to put in place first.

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Watch the video lesson below or refer to the video transcript:

Video Transcript

Welcome back to our video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.

This is module 2.

In module 1, we introduced you to the course and looked at what a content strategy is, why your business needs one, and the benefits and importance of having a clear content strategy.

In this lesson, we are going to look at what you need to know and do before you can create a content strategy for your business.

We’ll also look at the challenges of managing content effectively, and what we need to put in place before we can develop a content strategy.

Now, there are obvious and not-so-obvious challenges to managing content effectively.

So, let’s look at some of the obvious challenges first.

These include things like:

Having too much content. The more content you have, the more content you have to manage. Without good content management systems, it’s hard to keep your content organized and easy to find, and important information can end up getting lost or overlooked.

It’s also harder to coordinate your content when you have multiple people or teams contributing to it.

Also, having outdated, inaccurate, or obsolete information can be confusing for users and harm your credibility.

Another challenge is adapting to new technologies and platforms. Your business needs to keep up with new technologies, systems, and tools to stay current and manage its content effectively.

Keeping sensitive or confidential content secure and protected from unauthorized access or leaks is another challenge.

And so is tracking and measuring content performance, which is essential for making informed decisions.

Keeping content integrated and aligned with other systems and processes within your organization is also challenging, but important to optimize efficiency and avoid confusion or duplication of effort.

And budget and resources constraints is a challenge for all businesses, especially small businesses.

Now, the not-so-obvious challenges of managing your content effectively don’t become apparent until you actually start trying to manage your content effectively.

Then you discover that effective content management is a Catch-22 situation.

If you are not familiar with this expression, think about the dilemma that most people face when they first try to get a job.

You’ve probably heard people complain that no one will give you a job if you don’t have experience, but how can you get experience if no one will give you a job?

That’s an example of a Catch-22 situation.

Similarly, when it comes to managing your content effectively, you discover that “You can’t plan, produce, promote, and manage your content effectively until you have put in place the right systems and processes to plan, produce, promote, and manage your content effectively.”

But then you are faced with the challenge of do you put content management systems in place first and then start to create and promote your content, or do you start creating and promoting your content first and then worry about putting systems in place later?

As we will see, this has a significant and direct impact on our content strategy.

So, let me explain what I mean.

Your content strategy is part of your content management system, so if we start creating and promoting content before developing our content strategy and putting systems in place to manage our content effectively, then what’s the point of having a content strategy?

Let’s go back to our definition of a Content Strategy from module 1.

A content strategy is…

A plan for creating, publishing, and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to achieve specific business goals and objectives.

A content strategy also helps you:

• Define who your target audience is and understand their needs and interests
• Create the right content to address their needs and speak to their interests
• Determine the most effective channels for distributing your content
• And track and measure performance so you can continue to improve your results.

So, without a content strategy, we are just creating content blindly with no real direction or ways to measure and track our content’s performance, so it’s all going to be hit-and-miss and guesswork and assumptions.

As we will see later in this course, eventually your business will end up with a very difficult mess to deal with and many more problems to try and sort out.

So we want to put a content strategy in place before we start creating and promoting our content.

But, this has its own challenges.

The first challenge is that a content strategy involves all areas of our business because content impacts all areas of our business.

Even writing a simple article or blog post for our website has to take into account areas like marketing and research, product development, accounting, legal stuff related to what you can and can’t say in your content, and even different types of technology like servers and different applications that are used by different teams or departments to store and send information, and so on.

You can read more about this challenge by following the link on your screen.

The point is that our content strategy has to take all of this into account.

The next challenge is that creating high-quality content and managing our content effectively requires quite a sizeable team.

There are many different roles involved in the process of planning, creating, promoting, and managing content.

So, whether you’re an individual blogger or part of a larger organization, all of these roles and responsibilities have to be met, so our content strategy also needs to take all this into account.

This leads to the next challenge, which is that it takes significant resources to create high-quality content and manage this content effectively.

You need a sizeable budget and personnel with the right skills and expertise, plus spending time doing content research, content planning, and documenting systems.

All of this is time-consuming and takes resources away from other areas of our business.

Most businesses operate with very limited resources and have very little time to devote to areas like content planning and documenting systems, so that’s a big challenge when it comes to creating a content strategy.

And finally, the last of the “not-so-obvious” challenges only becomes obvious when we try to start putting our content strategy together.

And this challenge is that all of the basic business foundations need to be in place for our content strategy to be truly effective.

Let’s think about what this means.

If the aim of our content strategy is to help our business achieve specific goals and objectives, then our business first needs to define those goals and objectives before we can put a strategy together to achieve these goals and objectives.

But it’s not just setting goals and objectives.

Before we can put an effective content strategy together, we also need to have a clear marketing plan, and this comes from having a clear marketing strategy, which comes from having a clear business plan, which comes from having a clear business strategy, which comes from having clear strategic goals and objectives, which come from having a clearly-stated business vision, mission statement, and core values.

If all of these processes are not clearly defined, then our content strategy will not be as effective.

So, let’s recap what we need to know and do before developing a content strategy for our business.

First, we need to be aware of the challenges of managing content effectively and

Then, we need to make sure that all of the basic business foundations are in place.

I’ve listed a number of articles on this screen that I recommend you read, as these cover in more detail everything that we’ve talked about in this lesson.

So, make sure to visit the website and if you have subscribed to the free email course, you will get additional information on everything that we cover in this video course.

So, that’s the end of this lesson.

In the next video, we’ll cover module 3, which is all about understanding our target audience.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next lesson.

• Go to Lesson 3.
• Return to the video course outline.

Tutorials

See the following lessons and tutorials for more information  about the topics covered in this video lesson:

• The Challenges Of Managing Content Effectively
• Digital Business Basics
• Digital Business Structure
• Digital Business Setups
• Content Management Mindset
• Content Strategy

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Image: Robin Higgins. Music Bensound.