What Content Strategy is NOT!
“Content strategy is not copywriting, websites, social media, content marketing, structured content, editing, CMS, project management” - Rahel Bailie
I recently read a book by Tony Robbins - best-selling author, life coach and business strategist, in which he wrote “150 years ago, no one would have fathomed a day when there would be a job called social media marketer....but today, new technologies have led to massive disruption in the job marketplace, causing many occupations to be at risk of extinction”.
As someone who started my career in traditional journalism and seeing how such professions have been greatly transformed by technological changes, I find myself always consciously striving to develop new skills and capabilities in order to keep up with the ever-changing market dynamics, and be more relevant (or maybe I am simply just trying to avoid the risk of extinction Tony Robbins was referring to in his book).
Whatever the case, it is a part of this quest (or fear) that led me to the content strategy programme at FH Joenneum where I had the chance to take part in my first content strategy webinar session with Rahel Bailie.
Who is Rahel Bailie?
To be quite candid, until I joined the programme, I didn’t know who Rahel Bailie was. Few minutes into our first session, Rahel introduced herself: She was the director of content at Babylon Health, a consultant, instructor and author with 15+ years of content strategy and over 10 years of tech communication experience.
What is Content Strategy?
After the introduction round, we proceeded to the main business of the day – An introduction to content strategy. She asked, what is content strategy? If you were like me at this point, you might have assumed, well, content strategy is just another term for content marketing, right? Well, as it turned out, the answer is capital NO!
According to Rahel’s definition, “content strategy is a repeatable system that governs the management of content throughout the entire lifecycle.
She went further, by repeatable, it means that “alternatives were considered, and decisions were made. Systems highlight that the set of principles are organized into a planned delivery method. By governance, on the other hand, we are referring to an established system that has some control and authority, while the management of content deals with the process of controlling how content is managed. And throughout the entire lifecycle, the system must take into consideration all of the stages, including future iterations.
Content Strategy vs Content Marketing
In a video discussing the subject of content strategy and content marketing, Michael Boezi had highlighted that content strategy deals with the process of taking all the content (videos, blogposts, powerpoints, case studies social media posts, eBooks, whitepapers, landing page copy, email marketing copy e.t.c) that you might produce, being really efficient about it, making multiple uses of these content and using them to reach out and connect with your customers.
Michael´s discussion was quite helpful to understand what content strategy deals with, but the session with Rahel made it clearer to me what content strategy wasn’t. As she puts it, “content strategy is not copywriting, websites, social media, content marketing, structured content, editing, CMS, project management”.
And while content marketing refers to a single part of an overall content strategy, content strategy itself is much more and all-inclusive. And planning how they can both work together, is one of the most important things you can do fundamentally for your business to succeed online and beyond.
At the end of the first session, I have had to take a step back to re-access my knowledge of marketing communications.
What Next?
As I look forward to the next session with Rahel Bailie, I wanted to share excerpts from the first webinar session and some of the valuable knowledge gained on day one. Hope you found it insightful as much as I did?
Cheers 😊