Carving out time to formulate a long-term strategic vision for the evolution of an integrated content program — while delivering on all aspects of that complicated program — is no easy task. It’s also nothing new, really.
Documenting your content marketing strategy is a long-standing best practice, with countless examples from brands and agencies who’ve successfully done so and dozens of articles, blog posts and how-to resources to help you get started. We’ve documented ours a few times.
Here’s how that typically plays:
- We talk through all the important questions, from the strategic big-picture business objectives our client is striving to meet, to the more tactical activities we can deploy to achieve those objectives.
- We create a beautifully polished deck that documents our content strategy, and we pat ourselves on the back for having a documented content strategy, which in itself is an accomplishment.
- We walk our client, our team and our leadership through our beautifully polished deck, impressing them with the strategic thinking and forward-looking innovation contained within.
- We likely go out to dinner and celebrate over drinks!
- We save the deck in a Box folder, and maybe reference it from time to time just to ensure we’re not completely off base with what we are delivering versus what we promised.
We’ve probably all gone through some version of this process — to varying degrees of success. This time we wanted to do it slightly differently. We love having our strategy documented but felt that the documentation wasn’t guiding our work.
Why Adopt a Content Roadmap
We had a strategy, and we thought about it, thought we acted on it, but we weren’t intentionally moving our program from Point A to Point B, and that’s what we wanted to do.
Hence, the roadmap. We wanted to create a step-by-step guide that would help inform big-picture strategic shifts to our program and help guide our day-to-day work too.
This meant having to answer different questions than the ones we addressed in documenting our strategy. We had to be specific and create something actionable. To do that, we had to answer one main question first: What’s Point B? If our goal is to get from Point A to Point B, we needed to define that destination and understand how we’d know when we reached it.
That’s what we’re excited to talk about at Content Marketing World in Cleveland. I’ll be joined by our client lead, CDW’s Ryan Petersen, and our creative lead for CDW, Ricky Ribeiro (vice president of creative at Manifest).
We’ll be there on Sept. 4 for a lunch ’n’ learn session about building a content marketing roadmap. We’re excited to share our experience and determined to make the session not only relevant but also actionable. You can get the details here.
Hope to see you in Cleveland!