Seven Things Content Strategy Is Not

Few things grind my gears more as a content marketer than seeing content strategy defined or explained incorrectly.

And I see it a lot. In blog articles. Here on LinkedIn. Even by famous people who oughta know better.

Why does this happen?

Mostly because content marketing is the Wild West. There are no dominant theories or models that most of us know and agree upon. No 4 P’s. No nothing.

It’s just every content marketer and strategist for themselves.

It also doesn’t help that there are nine types of content strategy and they’re all somewhat different, creating even more confusion.

But the mistaken identities I see for content strategy (or more specifically content marketing strategy) largely fall into seven categories.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing and content strategy are frequently confused for each other. Which is unfortunate because content strategy actually has no implied marketing function.

A content strategy is a planned journey using content. That journey could be a buyer’s journey, or it might not. It could be a journey through an online matchmaking questionnaire.

If you need a handy metaphor for keeping content marketing and content strategy separate, think about it like this.

Content strategy is what the generals do in their tent, while content marketing is the actual war being waged.

2. Content Creation

You can be the most strategic or experienced content writer in the world, but the engineering of a single piece of content isn't content strategy, because a single piece of content isn't a journey, even if the goal is to convince the audience to download a whitepaper or take some other conversion action at the end of it.

And if you're still not clear why this isn't content strategy, think about it this way. An individual piece of content is an individual fight or battle. And someone who's great at fighting isn't necessarily a great general.

3. Content Tactics

It’s almost a marketing cliché to say that tactics are not strategy. But the truth is, most content marketers are forced to focus on tactics, because they couldn’t run a content strategy even if they wanted to.

There are two big reasons why.

First, content people only rank slightly above janitors in most organizations and often have no authority or dedicated budget to run a content strategy, while also being under the thumb of too many stakeholders (there is no strategy if you can’t say no).

And second, a content marketing strategy should serve an overall marketing or digital marketing strategy. But if you don’t have one of those to serve, then there’s really no point in having a content marketing strategy, since no stakeholder will listen to it or respect it, since it won’t serve any KPIs they're bound by.

4. A Content Distribution Plan

This is one of the more common mistakes that I see. Many people think having a list of channels and maybe some KPIs for each channel is a content strategy, but it isn’t.

Because there’s no customer journey implied in any of that. It's backwards thinking, because it starts with you instead of the customer.

5. A List of Keywords

There is such a thing as SEO content strategy. But this involves planning a content journey where a web search is part of it.

If your goal instead is to get your website to rank for certain keywords, while not really giving a s**t about the journey, this is not content strategy. This is just plain old SEO.

6. A Content Checklist

Filling out a checklist of content and marketing assets for a product launch is not content strategy. For the same reason a content distribution plan isn’t one.

These assets largely exist to tick boxes and fill channels. Nobody’s really thinking about the user journey. And this type of approach starts with you and not the customer.

7. The Marketing Plan

Some businesses treat content marketing and marketing (marcoms in this case) like they’re the same thing.

I do content marketing for a living. I’m supposed to love this idea.

But putting all your marketing eggs in the content basked is dangerous AF, even if you’re in a business or industry where everything happens online and everyone in your total addressable market (TAM) is online as well.

There are many reasons why you don’t want to do this, but the big one is this.

Content marketing only works on people who enjoy your content. And no one can achieve this with 100% of their TAM. Not even Spielberg. Which means if you’re relying solely on content marketing, you’re leaving money on the table.

Especially in B2B, where half the buying committee is unlikely to have read a single piece of your marketing content before your salespeople start talking to them.

Anything you'd add to this?