The content strategy started to become popular in the early 1990s thanks to web development. The pioneer content strategists focused on creating quality content in a consistent manner. They were also keen on ensuring the content made sense to the audience. And this is really what a content strategist is concerned about even today.
Most small businesses do not have a good grasp on what is a content strategist, what they do, or how to execute the roles effectively. With that said, statistics have shown that 78% of brands have between one to three content specialists to help them with their content. No need to say that in the last few years, huge amounts of content were created and it is more and more difficult to differentiate your business in this crowded world.
Collaborating with an expert content marketing strategist offers your brand an edge as he/she provides a high-caliber strategy aiming to turn more browsers into future buyers in the digital space. As such, your brand has the opportunity to employ a proven expert in order to capture and retain the interest of your target customer, by deploying the right information at the right stage of their journey.
This article is created to help you understand everything about the role of a content strategist.
What Is a Content Strategist?
A content strategist is an experienced marketer whose responsibility is to build and maintain a brands’ content strategy.
Or you can define a content strategist (or content consultant) to be an inbound marketing specialist with years of experience in the area and an array of skills that include identification of audience personas, content audit, SEO, content planning, editing, and promotion, social media management, and so forth. And uses all these skills to develop a brand’s content strategy.
A content strategist is most often a customer-centric marketer because, unlike traditional marketers, a digital content strategist uses a targeted content strategy to attract more customers.
What Does a Content Strategist Do? What Does a Content Consultant do?
The role of a content strategist ( or content consultant) may vary across brands and organizations. Some duties may stay consistent while others will vary from brand to brand. However, the primary responsibility of a content marketing strategist is to plan an effective content strategy that will deliver the required traffic back home to the brand and thereby increase ROI and profits.
The roles tasked include but are not limited to:
- Creating relevant and specific content for the targeted audience
- Improving content delivery and strategizing on effective content promotion
- Establishing the style, voice, and tone of the brand’s content
- Measuring and analyzing the strategies that are working and dropping the ones that are not
- Driving organic traffic
- Converting the traffic into qualified leads
- Converting these qualified leads into sales
- Retaining these buyers
With that said, it’s important to note that a content strategist can be any of these two types. A front-end content strategist or a back-end strategist. As a business, you can either opt to hire a specialist who understands either type or you can use someone in-house.
What Does a Content Strategy Team Do?
A content strategy team executes in general the same tasks as a content strategist. The team executes the above-mentioned tasks in various proportions and other supplementary ones in function of the needs. Such examples are site redesign, website migration, marketing automation, tool integration, etc.
But for medium and large companies strategies increase in complexity and one person or a few persons are not enough. In such cases, a team or multiple teams are needed.
The Specialist VS the In-house
In 2022 a report found that almost 50% of B2B marketers outsource or hire specialists for their content writing and marketing.
Why does this happen?
To be able to compete with the big dogs in your niche, your website and content need clear marketing based on relevant, error-free, and high-quality search-engine-optimized content.
As a start-up or well-established brand, you may need more than good luck juggling all the above besides the other responsibilities of running a business. The best option remains to outsource a professional brand content strategist to focus on these while you focus your attention on your core business.
Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing:
- Frees Up Your Time – Regular, relevant, stellar content most often takes an important amount of time to create. Delegating it to someone else who is a professional can free up your time for other important tasks to push the business forward.
- It’s Cost Effective for the Business – hiring an in-house content marketing strategist might end up being costly for your business as opposed to hiring freelance content strategists because, for the previous, you have to pay their taxes as well as other benefits.
- Offers Your Business Flexibility and Fresh POV – It allows your business to test with different tones, voices, and approaches with different content writers. And offers the business a chance to try out different perspectives and ideas to attract and retain new customers.
For either of the above options, the business must lean towards a model that is scalable and futuristic in terms of content generation to be able to make the best of innovative tools. A good brand content strategist must be able to leverage both the back-end and front-end approaches.
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Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
What Do the Front End and Back End Content Strategists Do?
The Front End
These will mainly focus on your brand’s content and customer experience. They plan ahead on what will work for the brand at a certain specified time. Some of their roles may include:
- Identifying the brand’s target audience
- The purpose of the content
- Type of content that will be created on a daily/weekly/monthly basis
- How to coordinate content requirements with other efforts
The Back End
These on the other hand lean towards creating a structure on how to scale the content created. They focus on technology to be used in order to achieve the best possible results. Examples of what they do include:
- Channeling ways to structure the content in a manner that will meet the audience’s demands.
- Establishing methods to organize and store data in such a way that it’ll be easier to retrieve and use on various channels accordingly.
- Figuring out ways to maximize and improve the marketing processes using the same resources for the best results.
- Guiding on ways to reuse the content in a valuable way for the buyer persona.
- Offer ways to future-proof your brand’s content for future trends.
What’s the Importance of Content Strategists in Your Business’s Marketing Activity?
An effective content marketing strategy should be able to improve your ROI thanks to a better understanding of the type of content to use, your audiences, etc. Here is why it’s important for the business:
They Facilitate the Content Creation Process
Content creation can be difficult. A business owner may have great business acumen but fails at content creation, or still be a great writer but have writer’s block. This goes beyond the ability to write itself; it’s about having knowledge of the right content to create, and this is why a content strategist is paramount.
They know why and what content is needed. It’s easier for them to come up with topics and ideas. They will know what content to use for brand awareness, and which one to use to boost conversion rates. A content strategist knows the goals and purposes and therefore he makes it easier for the business to keep flowing.
Keeps the Brands’ Consistency
You can confuse and lose your audience when you have unconnected pieces of content on different platforms. Having a content marketing strategist will keep the same tone while meeting your audiences’ expectations. They ensure consistency in quality, type of content, and tone of voice across all platforms, i.e. the brand’s website, blog as well as social media platforms. Cohesiveness supports better the content’s distribution.
Your Business Targets Better Its Audience
Each business has a unique buyer persona. And your business is no different. There is a specific set of people who are more likely to buy your product or service. The role of a content marketing strategist is to support your business in targeting the ideal audience.
A content strategist goes through the trouble of understanding your audience, your content marketing data, and creating content strategies that are relevant to their needs. They will also use the right channels, and social media networks – meaning the right content reaching the right people on the best platform. A comprehensive approach that delivers the ROI.
Improves Your Branding
How people perceive your brand impacts heavily your business. Content strategists can help you define, tell and spread the right story for your brand, the kind of stories that would be strategic for your brand’s growth.
Content Strategists Save Your Time and Energy
Creating and distributing content can consume more time and effort than what you have available. Things get worse for someone who has no or limited content marketing experience because it will mean lots of trial and error.
Now, think about how smooth and effective this process would be when tackled by a professional. They will know where to start and they would use their strategic planning to efficiently reach your audience with the right type of content.
Creates Connection
A content marketing strategist will help build a connection between your target audience and your brand. Such a desideratum is achieved when they are able to reach the audience’s emotional side through the right content.
Emotions have been found to have a heavy impact on purchase decisions. And therefore, based on the level of emotion your brand reaches; you can easily turn your potential customers into loyal customers. Besides winning customers and boosting ROI, using a content strategist will help create tailor-made content that makes your brand stand out from the competition.
Helps Educate Your Target Audience
You enhance your influence over your target audience when you engage the services of a professional content marketing strategist because they will put in place coherent, educative, and informative content strategies. With the use of the right content process, you can help the audience be more aware of their pain points while offering the optimum solutions. From here will surge your power.
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A Content Strategist Is the Foundation for Your Entire Marketing Activity
A content strategy is the basis of all your business’s marketing efforts. A digital content strategist ensures you have the right substance in terms of value offered to your customers and other targeted audiences. A coherent content strategy builds a solid foundation for your overall marketing strategy, and this is a winning recipe.
Enhances the Business Results
The most evident output of using a content strategist will be to enhance your business’s brand power and shape your target audience’s buying behavior. This is a gradual process that cannot be achieved overnight by managing content marketing campaigns and promotions alone. It’s a process that happens organically with the guidance and help of the right content strategies.
Having seen the importance of hiring a brand content strategist, what benefits does a business stand to gain?
Why Does Each Business Needs a Content Strategist?
They Will Help Your Business with Search Engine Optimization
Why is search engine optimization (SEO) important? Because it allows your audience to find quickly the right answers and solutions to their issues. This is obtained by the use of properly linked, consistently updated keyword-focused content.
You Offer Value Even Before a Purchase
This is the new paradigm shift in marketing brought to you by the inbound approach. It’s about providing and proving your value to your target audience before you earn their money.
Such an approach ends up getting you, loyal customers. It’s like gifting a person something they didn’t even expect. They will always tend to want to give back. And in the case of your brand, they will buy what you’re offering.
Positions Your Brand as the Best
When you offer quality content with relevant solutions to your customers, they will consider you the authority or leader in your domain. Content strategists use sales figures or real customer testimonials among other methods to achieve this.
They Build Loyalty More Than Traditional Media
One of the benefits of digital content strategists is that they help a business create and develop a relationship with the target audience. And sometimes it ends up building lasting “evangelical” relationships. Meaning these customers will spread the word about your business on their own, based on a great experience.
This is simply because content marketing is focused on identifying the audience’s problems and offering the right solutions using the ideal channels. The content is the first solution that’s almost as valuable as the product or service you’re offering.
Eventually, You End Up Owning the Market
As said in point three above, you will become a thought leader thanks to the quality and relevant content. Consequently, your brand identity is poised to grow, and you will own your market since you will be perceived as an established brand.
Thus, this is another major benefit of having a content strategist. Because they guide the brand in delivering the most relevant and needed content, infused with value, and know-how that stands out from the crowd.
Conclusion
Marketing is one of the toughest aspects of a business, but one that every business, young or established must overcome. Marketing can be considered an investment, but it only returns the highest benefits when an expert like a content marketing strategist is involved to guide the business through all the stages of growth.
The right content served to the right audience through the right platforms and at the right time is something a content strategist can achieve in a flawless way. When a business owner attempts to add all these to their already busy schedule of activities, they might fail somewhere.
Thus, as a business, why should you fail when you can use the specialized services of content strategists?
