Taina Rouhiainen • 4.9.2013 • Content • Reading time 3 min
Content strategy isn’t merely something your company should have just for the sake of having a content strategy. It can actually save you some money and effort.
Simply put, content strategy means making a plan of how your content would work best on your website in regard to your business goals. To achieve this, someone has to go through all the content on your site and decide what to do with it. The decisions aren’t easy – with every piece of content you should give it a serious thought and conclude if it’s relevant, could it be improved and who’s responsible for keeping it up-to-date and finally taking it offline after it has served its duty.
As you can imagine, reviewing content this closely can be time-consuming and therefore rather expensive. So the question arises whether it is absolutely necessary to invest in content strategy. The answer is no. Your company does not have to spend money on all that. But – and it’s a big but – if you do spend that money on a well-done content strategy, creating and maintaining content becomes a whole lot easier, and in the long run you can save a lot more money than you originally spent.
Imagine if all the content on your website, on your Facebook page, in your tweets, and everywhere else would have a clear purpose, a well-planned structure, and the right form for that particular piece of content. And that everybody in your company would be aware of the decided content principles and know his or her own role in the puzzle. Doesn’t it sound quite nice? That’s what you can get with content strategy.
Combining content strategy with website or brand renewal is usually a wise decision.
As you may already know, well planned is half done, and if you have clear plans concerning content, then designing a website or brand or anything else based on it becomes much easier.
I give an example. Not once or twice have we struggled with the situation where we need to design and develop a website without the actual content yet available. It can be done, no question about that, but it would save a lot of time (and money) for both our clients and us to have the right content from the beginning.
If you want to make the most of your business, content strategy is the tool for you
It’s no secret that without the actual content, designers and developers have to spend time on second-guessing and creating blocks and templates that aren’t actually needed just because they didn’t know it at the time. When there’s no real content to base all the decisions on, we have to predict and imagine all the different kinds of possibilities – even if they won’t all come true. And even after spending all that time on predictions, it’s not unusual to face new struggles when we finally get the real content and it turns out it isn’t quite what we had expected. Well, it’s no biggie. We just have to spend some more time to make a few adjustments. I mean, we have all the time in the world, so what’s all the fuzz about?
As I wrote earlier, content strategy isn’t something you absolutely have to have. Just like you don’t absolutely have to have an iPad or a mobile phone or a laptop or any other fancy device that makes your life a great deal easier. But if you want to make the most of your business and achieve your business goals by maximising the impact of content, then content strategy is the right tool for you. And if you ask me, investing in content strategy should be the most natural thing for any present-day company.
