Content marketing strategy is a little like a shepherd’s pie. For those who don’t know what a shepherd’s pie is, let me explain. It’s a baked casserole in which meat is at the bottom and mashed potatoes at the top.
What about the middle? Recipes for shepherd’s pie vary greatly in the ingredients for the middle.
So what does this have to do with content marketing strategy?
The meat and potatoes provide the structure for the shepherd’s pie: the organization, categorization and main components of the dish.
The middle is like the substance of content strategy: the story, topic, brand, voice and tone that fill in the structure and make it a delicious dish.
Content strategy puts into use a wide range of tactics, just like the middle of the shepherd’s pie can have a wide range of ingredients: canned corn, diced tomatoes, etc.
The goal of adding all these ingredients is to create a delicious meal to enjoy. The goal of a content strategy will be to successfully achieve business goals and meet audience needs.
You need to peel, slice and mash the potatoes and put together the different ingredients of the shepherd’s pie, which corresponds to the need to create posts, blogs, photos, videos, etc. for content.
The reward for your work in the kitchen is to eat the shepherd’s pie and think about how good it is or how you might change ingredients to make it better, much like you monitor content for its effectiveness and adapt strategies as the audience responds.
Then there’s cleaning the kitchen and doing the dishes, which is much like deleting inaccurate or outdated content on social media platforms.
This is why I believe content management is much like a shepherd’s pie – without the yummy taste.
Author: Joan Koehne
Once a mild-mannered reporter and editor, Joan Koehne has taken on the persona of her alter ego, Wonder Writer, saving the world one word at a time. In 2017 she went up, up and away to launch a writing services business, Writer to the Rescue, a division of Packerland Websites. A 2017 college graduate, Joan earned highest honors and the Marketing Student of the Year award.
