For those of you who found this post by searching for “content marketing strategy template,” let me be 100% honest with you – there is no such thing and you don’t need one. Is there another business in your own industry that is exactly like yours in all regards? Probably not. So we can safely assume when we factor in all businesses in all industries, there is no other business just like yours. With that said, if what your business provides in the way of goods and services, customer service, and corporate culture is unique, so too should be the strategy you use to market your brand and the content it produces. You don’t need a content marketing strategy template; you need a content marketing strategy.

I attended a web marketing event, Elevate, here in Atlanta over the last few days. Elevate is the annual user conference for Pardot marketing automation software. I could go on and on about how powerful the Pardot marketing automation tool is, but I’ll save that for another post. What is important to note here, is that Pardot allows sales and marketing teams to effectively target and nurture leads through the buying process by leveraging content, email and the Web. It also allows marketing and sales teams to track and measure the success of their efforts, both inside of the application and via a variety of innate connections it has to tools like Salesforce.com and Google Analytics and AdWords. With a tool that provides richly multifaceted marketing functionality like this, you can probably imagine that the conference sessions touched on a wide variety of web marketing topics, tactics and trends as well.

I have spent years writing and am truly passionate about the infinite power of the effective use of ideas put to words. I began writing regularly and more seriously (what I would now rather refer to as daily hard copy personal blog posts than journal entries) at about age 13, which continued for over a decade. I have worked for local newspapers, written for student newspapers and have started and made progress in writing about 3 books. Post college, my experience lies in the areas of web technology and web marketing, specifically as they relate to web content development and content marketing strategy, including SEO (obviously), SEM and social media. Strangely enough though, it was a [not-so-]chance decision to double-major in Sociology and Marketing in college that truly changed and shaped the way I feel about both writing (content creation) and content strategy and marketing.

If you’re reading this blog post, you know what marketing is, so I’ll spare you the details of my decision to choose that as a focus area while studying at Tulane. Sociology provides a unique lens and framework through which to evaluate patterns of human behavior. It allows us to observe, analyze and synthesize the ’social’ elements and patterns of humans, i.e. development, relationships,  interaction and collective behavior.

My early inclination was to pair marketing with psychology while studying at Tulane. It wasn’t until after taking a few specific courses–Sociology of Sports, Urban Sociology and Sociological Research–that I saw the obvious relationship sociology has to marketing and the potential utility of pairing the two subject matters. If marketing gives us the tools to reach and convert our target markets, in my opinion, sociology provides a framework through which to understand these markets.

I say this not to make you feel like you need to return to school, or go purchase 17 sociology publications tomorrow, but to say that it is the intersection of these fields that has rendered me uniquely passionate about and cognizant of the power of a strong content marketing strategy. Creating yours doesn’t require a degree. It requires a willingness and desire to truly understand other human beings and meet their needs. If done well, your business will be efficiently generating high quality content in its unique area of industry expertise that will in turn facilitate improved marketing reach, sales for your business, consumer engagement, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Is your business is meeting a consumer need that you believe in? Is your goal to reach and meet the needs of more potential consumers in your field? Then the right content, in the right way, at the right time is how you do it. Stay tuned for Part II, where I’ll start helping you determine what strategies and tactics might work best for your business. This shall be fun.