Page 149 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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Looking ahead to seasonal opportunities and beginning to work on
appropriate content plans.
Developing content plans that feature a variety of hygiene, hub, and hero
content.
These are just a few of the ideas you can begin working on now. Start
developing your plan today and put the Content Code to use!
Content ignition and implications for business
strategy
When I was starting out in business, my company required me to produce a five-
year sales strategy every year. What you see how fast business changes today,
that sort of long-term planning seems useless, doesn’t it? Undoubtedly, the pace
of change is going to increase even more and instead of looking at strategy
planning as an obstacle you have to overcome every year, I’d like you to think
about your marketing and ignition strategy as a continuous process.
A more useful model for your content strategy might be represented by an
American football game. In that sport, a primary method of advancing down the
field is to hand the ball to a strong and swift player called a running back. The
idea is to create a “hole” in the defense so the running back can take advantage
of the opportunity to sprint through a pack of opponents and pick up as much
ground as possible before the competition eventually swarms and stops the
advance.
Before the game, the team has an over-arching vision of what needs to be
accomplished to win, but adjustments are made continually throughout the game.
In fact, after each play, the team regroups to consider where another hole might
be created. Their strategy flows.
This is how you need to think about business strategy today. As long as
you’re in the game, you need to be looking for holes, or points of strategic
leverage. You need to charge through those holes as fast as you can and gain
ground until the competition figures it out and closes in on you, whether that’s a
few months or a few years.
Meanwhile … even as this is happening … you need to be looking for the
next hole, the next point of leverage. Plotting a strategy becomes a continuous
flow as new research, new platforms, new ignition opportunities, and new
content forms create opportunistic points of leverage. Like the running back
