Over the last 15 years, I've helped organisations from publishers and tech giants to highly regulated financial services firms to identify effective content strategies that can deliver their desired business outcomes while engaging their target audiences.
Starting with the business objectives, current state, and past activities - through a combination of stakeholder interviews, qualitative review, and quantitative analysis of available data - we seek an informed sense of what's working and what's not, and seek to identify our assumptions so we can challenge or validate them.
This also informs choices of target audiences and competitors to analyse - both categories always likely to be broader than initially expected to deliver real results when operating in today's world of too much information.
From exploring audience preferences and the competition for their attention, we can move to formulating a strategy that should drive the desired results.
But this is just the start - next comes the hard bit: Strategic implementation.
This is all about so much more than content calendars. At least, it is if you want your content strategy to deliver.