What Does A Content Strategist Do?

Look, you know you need content. But maybe you don’t know exactly how to structure your content marketing plan. Or if you do, you might not have the time to create it.

A content strategist plans, develops, and manages content across all channels. They help organisations create and execute a content marketing plan that aligns with their business goals. This involves researching and understanding the target audience, identifying the best channels to reach them, and creating engaging, relevant content that resonates with the audience and supports the business objectives.

They work with cross-functional teams to ensure that the content marketing plan is integrated into the overall marketing strategy, and they may also be responsible for managing the creation, distribution, and measurement of content.

They make sure your paid content team, blog writers, social media managers and email marketing experts are all on the same page, and working towards the same KPIs.

Ultimately, the aim of the role is to help a company effectively communicate its message and achieve its desired business outcomes through the use of content. They’re like the captain of your content ship.

As a Founder, CEO or Head of Growth, it means you’ve got a single person to express your vision to. You explain what you want to achieve with your content plan, and the content strategist makes it happen. 

Identifying your target market

One of the key responsibilities is to identify the target audience for a company's content marketing efforts. There’s no point doing fax machine marketing these days because there’s no target audience. Same goes for TikTok, LinkedIn or SEO blog posts. They might be great for your business, they might be a total waste of time.

A content strategist works that out for you.

This involves researching and understanding the demographics, interests, and behaviours of the audience, as well as their pain points and needs. It’s about finding getting super granular on the people who are best served by your product or service.

That way, you can be sure that your content marketing efforts are providing value, not just taking up space.

They may also be responsible for testing and measuring the effectiveness of different types of content to determine what resonates best with the target audience. By understanding and appealing to them, they help ensure that a company's content marketing efforts are successful and achieve the desired business outcomes.

Using the right content marketing channels

Once the target audience has been identified, a content strategist can help ensure that the content finds the audience. They’ll target the right platforms, use the right slang and make sure your content marketing budget is spent in the right places.

As part of their role in developing and executing a content marketing plan, they can help determine the most effective content formats and channels for reaching the target audience.

This involves researching and understanding the preferences and behaviors of the audience, as well as the goals of the content marketing campaign. Based on this information, they may recommend using a variety of content formats, such as blog posts, social media posts, infographics, videos, or podcasts, to engage the audience and achieve the desired business outcomes.

They’ll also recommend the best ways to distribute and repurpose the content. Some obvious examples are social media platforms, email newsletters, or online publications, based on where the target audience consumes content the most.

That way you know that the people consuming your content are more likely to be potential clients or customers. More eyeballs (or ears) that are going to potentially buy from you means more sales and more revenue.

Optimised for SEO

A content strategist can help you rank in Google, which is one of the key ways potential new customers will find you. Developing content that is optimised for search engines is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)-friendly content. This type of content is designed to rank high in search engine results and drive traffic to your website.

To develop SEO-friendly content, a strategist will conduct keyword research to identify the phrases and terms that are most commonly used by the target audience when searching for information online. They may also work with other parts of your marketing team to ensure that the content includes these keywords in a natural and engaging way, and links to the rest of your site properly.

In addition, they may help develop content that meets the technical requirements for search engines, such as including title tags and meta descriptions, and ensuring that the content is easy to read and navigate. In many cases though, this is outsourced to an SEO specialist.

A content strategist may also be responsible for crafting headlines, subheadings, and calls to action that grab the attention of the audience and encourage them to take action. This is often used as the brief that the copywriters and content writers will work from.

Social media monitoring and analysis

As part of their role in developing and executing a content marketing plan, a content strategist may be responsible for managing and monitoring the company's social media channels. This would include a social media calender, and coordinated between teams writing and designing content, as well as video production if platforms like TikTok and YouTube are being used.

They may also be responsible for monitoring and analyzing the performance of social media campaigns and generating reports on key metrics, such as engagement, reach, and conversions. They may work with other parts of the marketing team to identify opportunities for improving the company's social media strategy and to develop tactics for increasing engagement and reach.

By managing and monitoring the company's social media channels, a content strategist can help ensure that the company's content marketing efforts are aligned with its overall marketing strategy and achieve the desired business outcomes.

The importance of a content calendar

A content calendar is the home base for your content plan, and it ties all these aspects together. It’s where your whole content team goes to know what’s going out when, and who’s responsible for it. Getting this document running smoothly is the key to an amazing content strategy. And a content strategist’s job is to make it slick as hell.

This makes sense for your regular weekly or monthly content plan, but it’s also the best way to plan ahead for big events. In the finance game, this could be things like elections, earnings results or major company announcements.

As well as identifying these, they’ll also be in charge of coordinating with external partners or influencers to ensure that all necessary content is ready and posted on schedule. By creating and managing a content calendar, a content strategist helps ensure that a company's content marketing efforts are consistent and effective. 

Wrapping Up

The content strategist sets the overall content marketing plan for a company. This usually covers all aspects of content marketing, including areas like blog content on the company website, social media content, email newsletters and published pieces on media outlets.

By having a content strategist in place, a Founder, CEO or Head of Growth can have someone who helps them bring their vision for the company to life. It allows them to leave the nitty gritty, day to day implementation of their plan to a specialist who can ensure it’s done right.

Getting a great strategist in place can be a huge benefit to a business, by allowing other senior staff to focus on their own areas of the business.