There have been more posts than I can count about how to make a compelling case for a content marketing strategy. I’ve written some of them and read any number of them on this site and others. If you search on Google for “business case for content marketing strategy” (yes, in quotes), you’ll get more than 10 million results.
Examining the business case for strategic content marketing brings up value-focused terms such as “optimized brand engagement,” “better leads,” “higher shopping cart value,” “lower churn,” or even “direct revenue.” In other words, in prioritizing marketing activities, we make the case that content marketing has the potential for more value.
But what about content strategy? Google “business case content strategy” and you’ll get only 72,000 results.
Now, when I say, “content strategy,” I mean the holistic approach to using content as an asset to the business. Why should the business care about careful governance, management, adaptation, optimization, and scale of the way it uses content? What is the business case for organizing a centralized strategic approach around content as an overall business asset?
Unlike the case of a content marketing strategy, here we have no real comparison. We can’t make the case that content strategy is more effective or efficient than doing something else. It’s not an alternative strategy. Rather, the comparison is to do nothing about organizing an activity – creating content – that the business isn’t already doing.
3 inadequate reasons for content strategy
After looking up and reading through recommendations for making the business case for content strategy, I found that they tend to fall into one of three arguments.
- It’s already hurting your business. Not having a centralized method of creating, managing, and distributing content costs more, hurts revenue, impedes sales, or challenges your ability to effectively service customers. But, this argument is almost never universally true. And it’s also not mutually exclusive. The lack of a centralized approach could be costing the business, but a centralized process could slow things to a point where it hurts sales and revenue, and teams would move more slowly.
- It’s necessary for the future of customer experience. Scaling your content is necessary to feed all the digital channels that the enterprise is managing. Is it any wonder that this is the common argument from enterprise technology providers? It argues that to create better, more consistent experiences for your customers, you need a centralized content management strategy. But, the argument is self-defeating. It makes the case that all content and all customer experiences should be managed from one “brain.” It doesn’t address the real world of global differences, skill sets, talent, and technology prowess. Anyone who has had to create a nimble and agile approach to using an enterprise-class content management system to launch a simple blog will know how this argument can fall apart quickly.
- Organized is better than disorganized. Content is important (we all know that, right?) and thus having some form of organized approach for it (rather than chaos) is simply common sense. This might be the most common and certainly the simplest business case for a content strategy. But, you again run into the except-when-it’s-not cases. I worked with an organization earlier this year to implement an organized approach to its global digital content. The brand would create and manage all the content centrally and hand down “modules” of well-structured content to the regions. It mandated that the regions use these modules for everything they were creating. What the organization found was that for the content to be used by all the regions, accounting for local tastes, regulations, and brand maturity, it had to be extraordinarily vanilla. By the time the content was customized for local channels, translated, and localized into the regional languages, the content simply…
