When building your content strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment. After all, storytelling is a creative discipline. It’s a self-fueling jet engine with ideas that spark even more ideas.
As great as these ideas are, however, they can easily transform from structured processes into giant laundry piles in which nothing gets sorted and no idea comes to fruition. That’s when content teams get gridlocked. Publishing velocity stalls, and you find yourself questioning why your content team exists within your organization in the first place.
You don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
The simplest way to ensure that your organization stays on track is to put your content strategy on paper. Just as you would develop a public relations strategy, demand gen program, or product for your engineering team to build, it’s important to document your specs. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Your Content Program is Going to Grow
Content is one of the most effective ways for companies to build relationships with their target audiences at scale. As those relationships begin to flourish, evolve, and translate into sales, you’re going to need more content. At that point, you’ll be hiring more people who need to stay aligned to your central, foundational content vision.
If that information lives in your head, it’s going to be tough to get new hires up to speed at the pace that your organization needs. Having a tangible resource for your team to reference keeps your branding consistent.
2. You Need Accountability
Creative projects are notorious for taking many twists and turns. It’s easy to get distracted, especially when you’re in the weeds of a project. When you throw yourself into your content strategy, it’s challenging to come up for air—that is, unless you have a clearly mapped out direction.
When you put your ideas on paper, you create an accountability system for both yourself and the rest of your organization. Project management becomes easier. Things get done.
3. Your Teams Need Communication Guidance
From sales to customer success, every person within your organization is a content creator. But what happens when your company begins to grow? Individual communication styles may lose touch with your company’s central narrative, mission, and vision. As a content marketer, you need to keep your brand’s cargo train on track.
One of the simplest tools to help you achieve this goal is a voice, tone, and style guide—a creative framework to help various teams communicate in a cohesive way.
The Bottom Line
As much as you’d like to coach team members 1:1, as your organization expands, your content crew will not have the time. A documented content strategy will build efficiency into your operations, ensure that your entire company communicates in a cohesive way, and enable a strong foundation for scalability in your program.
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