As an entrepreneur in the modern digital world, you know that creating and distributing high-quality content can help you build your brand, establish thought leadership and connect with your audience. However, it’s important to understand that the approach you take to the creation of your content can significantly impact your success in reaching target audiences with it.
There’s a lot of value in developing and employing a long-term content strategy versus taking a campaign-by-campaign approach. Below, 15 members of Forbes Coaches Council discuss the benefits of taking a more holistic, big-picture approach and creating a comprehensive, long-term content strategy. Read on to learn why having an overarching vision and plan for your content efforts can help set your business up for long-term success and establish you as an industry leader.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Creating A Unified Message Across Multiple Channels
For an entrepreneur, a long-term content strategy is more valuable because it allows entrepreneurs to create a unified message across multiple channels, which can help generate more leads and sales. By taking a campaign-by-campaign approach, entrepreneurs may end up creating separate messages for social media, email marketing and their website, which can lead to confusion and decreased engagement. – Jennifer Carrasco, Jennifer Carrasco EOS Implementer
2. Conveying Visionary, Growth-Oriented Awareness
Entrepreneurs are highly regarded for their innovative perspective, tenacity and mastery of their respective fields. A long-term content strategy conveys vision, awareness of future trends and personal characteristics such as resilience, as well as a growth mindset, better than a campaign-by-campaign approach. – Shruti Parashar, GOALisB
3. Building Trust With Your Audience
A campaign-by-campaign approach may generate quick results, but it can also result in inconsistent messaging and lower engagement between campaigns. A long-term strategy allows entrepreneurs to build a cohesive brand identity and deliver relevant content consistently, resulting in sustained engagement and trust with their audience. – Willena Long, Career Boss Academy
4. Staying Accountable For Meeting End Goals
A long-term content strategy is the starting point for every entrepreneur. Within this long-term content strategy, entrepreneurs can include specific campaigns that respond to the needs of the market. Even though flexibility is key in an ever-changing marketplace, a long-term content strategy keeps you accountable and ensures you have the end goals in mind. – Karina Ochis, Prof. Dr. Karina Ochis
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5. Staying Focused On Key Priorities
With a long-term content strategy, you can take a thoughtful and intentional approach to the topics and messages that matter most. It allows you to maintain a strategic mindset versus an opportunistic one that may easily steer you off course. – Cheryl Breukelman, Epiphany Coaches Inc.
6. Helping Clients Recognize Your Brand
Branding is something that is refined over time, before the brand becomes memorable and sticky for your target clients. Consistency—and a commitment to maintaining a certain level of consistency—over a long period of time will help you achieve this. This will help your target clients recognize your brand and buy when they’re ready. – Leang Chung, Pelora Stack
7. Building And Enhancing Your Brand
Any long-term content strategy should emphasize building and enhancing your personal and professional brand. Taking a campaign-by-campaign approach can result in diluting your image, while incorporating elements that support your brand identity into the content created for individual campaigns can advance and strengthen both. – Annette Richmond, Personal Brand You
8. Ensuring Consistently Relevant Content Creation
Having a long-term strategy makes sense to ensure the investment in content aligns with the brand and stays relevant over time. It is also crucial for each campaign to respond to current issues and goals. Balancing the benefits of both approaches—having a long-term strategy and having a strategy for each campaign—allows the organization’s investment in content to endure and remain relevant. – Maureen Metcalf, Innovative Leadership Institute
9. Creating A Unified Brand Identity
Your mission statement is the cornerstone of an effective content strategy. Ensuring your long-term plan supports it will encourage a strong, unified brand identity and showcase your company’s special place in the market. Taking a fragmented approach to creating campaigns can miss these opportunities while a comprehensive strategy makes sure all touch points are reinforcing one another. – Daphne Michaels, Daphne Micheals International
10. Budgeting Resources And Leveraging Opportunities
You’ll miss more than you’ll gain in marketing without a long-term content strategy. While I am all for introducing spur-of-the-moment, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot timely pieces, nothing beats knowing what you need to produce and when you need to produce it. This will let you plan and budget resources, leverage opportunities and ensure you stay consistent with messaging and visibility. – Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International
11. Meeting Milestones On The Path Toward Your Goal
Imagine you want to live on Mars. You can’t just load up a rocket, blast off and reach your destination. You need to plan out your journey and determine the milestones to hit along the way. It’s the same with content creation: You can fire off pieces of content at random, or you can use your long-term goal to focus your content and ensure that each piece moves you closer to your destination. – Claire Chandler, Talent Boost
12. Targeting More Strategically
A long-term content strategy allows you to be more strategic in terms of who you’re trying to target and when, allowing you to take an overarching approach to maintain consistency and create a more powerful, holistic brand image. Mostly, I would say it gives you some peace of mind, so you’re not constantly scrambling for new news. Give yourself some room to react and adapt to what’s happening in the market. – Julien Fortuit, Julien Fortuit Agency
13. Building Authority And Making Optimal Decisions
Externally, a long-term content strategy showcases the brand’s consistency and builds trust, positioning you as an authority on your business or industry. Internally (and maybe more importantly), a consistent long-term brand strategy provides clarity to help you grow your business, make optimal decisions and attract and retain clients that best fit your services and/or products. – Cheri Rainey, Rainey Leadership Learning
14. Measuring Success And ROI
A long-term content strategy provides consistent messaging and helps build a strong brand identity over time. It allows for a more focused and effective use of resources and better measurement of success and return on investment. A campaign-by-campaign approach may provide short-term gains, but it lacks the cohesive narrative and staying power of a well-planned and well-executed long-term strategy. – Peter Boolkah, The Transition Guy
15. Delivering Campaigns That Add Up To A Brand Story
The thinking about marketing strategy is similar to that of any strategy. By having an overarching plan, campaigns build upon each other; they have continuity and deliver a series of chapters that add up to a story about the brand and the product. Without that, the messaging is scattershot, and the results are impossible to analyze. You can’t improve what you can’t understand. – Amie Devero, Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching
