Creating a Content Strategy Statement for your SME

It’s the guiding light behind all your content decisions; it’s the declaration you can always refer back to for clarity; it’s the destination you’re working towards. The content strategy statement helps your team decide the how, what, why, when, and where of marketing content.

I cannot overestimate how effective a good content strategy statement is, especially for small businesses. It streamlines the process of content research, production, and distribution, and it ensures your marketing team is focused on their deliverables. It saves money and time. It makes your content output better. 

Today I’m going to talk about creating a content strategy statement for your SME.    

The Core Content Strategy Statement… Explained!

The core content strategy statement is your marketing team’s bottom line. A single sentence that cuts through all the other noise and helps you consistently build towards your BHAG (big hairy audacious goal).   

It will: 

• Reference your long and short-term goals and your user needs. 

• Focus your efforts.

• Encompass real changes in the marketing landscape (and help you avoid fads). 

It can look something like this: 

Create an entertaining resource channel that helps a-level students reach their first-choice university.

Creating Your Core Content Strategy Statement 

Start by answering these questions: 

What does content need to do for your business? 

If you’re an unknown in your industry, content could help establish your business as a reputable, trustworthy brand. If you’ve got a long list of leads, content can help convert. Got a new product? Content can help you get industry coverage.

You might need content to do several things; that’s fine. For our core statement, we’ll be thinking about the common underlying themes of these content goals. 

Tip: If your answer was to generate more sales you might want to check out my content strategy guide (coming soon). Content can convert, but starting with sales in mind will get you thinking about the destination before you’ve started the car.

Here’s an example answer to the question above: Our content needs to make use of our excellent, knowledgeable staff. It needs to convert our big investment in staff training into brand equity. It needs to answer the questions of potential customers in our industry. It needs to raise our profile in the market.    

What do you want to create now? What will you want to create later? 

We’re talking about audience preferences — do your followers want videos or short, snappy visuals for Instagram? Are their tastes evolving?    

Think about the common themes underlying your answers; this will feed into our core content statement later. 

Our prospective customers are looking for simple answers to tough questions. We want to create guides, checklists, and similar documents that make complex info more palatable. We want to educate the widest possible relevant audience by delivering useful content in multiple formats.  

What do you need from your company? 

Do you need a team to help you film your content? Can you set up an internal publications squad to improve the quality of what you produce? Company resources are finite, so you’ll know what is and isn’t possible. But consider what you would produce if you had bottomless pockets.

Our sales team knows our customers best; they’re also skilled in communicating what we’re about. For our content, we need more input from our customer-facing team. We need video and audio equipment, along with two dedicated designers. 

Bring Your Insights Together

The exercise above is designed to get you thinking about the common themes of your content, audience, and company culture. Are there consistent themes? 

Now think about what is stopping you from moving forward — what steps can you take to get your company closer to those bigger content goals? 

Share the content work with sales. Increase the size of the team responsible for content. 

And finally, what would you do if you achieved everything? What would be your next step?

Retire. But really, we’d keep answering relevant questions and creating even cooler content that appeals to our potential customers. Perhaps we’d become a training centre offering industry accrediation? 

Your BHAG

Think big, then think bigger. If your company grew and grew, what would you want the content to achieve? Be the global resource for information on your industry? Make your product a household name? 

We will be the UK’s leading resource for information on our industry. We’ll become the standard for quality through training programmes.   

YOUR Core Strategy Statement

Now it’s time to combine our work: content objectives; deliverables; content production; company resources; culture; BHAGs — we need to pick words that carefully account for each of these factors. It will help to get multiple perspectives on this, so include members of staff from different areas of the company. 

List the keywords from the research exercises above if that helps, then get writing:

Resources; internal team; presenting; making complex info simple; multiple formats; raise company profile; value. 

1) Create a resource hub of relevant information that answers our prospective audience’s questions. 

2) Present our customers with a distilled hub of multi-format information that adds value.

3) Host a industry-leading hub of accessible, multi-format content that supports and trains customers. 

As a final test of our statement, to ensure it accounts for the points raised above, we can annotate it. 

And there we have it. If everyone agress, this statement can be shared around both internal and external content teams as a tool for delivering appropriate content. 

If you’ve found this guide useful, consider hiring me to help you develop a core strategy statement for your SME’s content marketing.