Focus on your marketing problems for strategic content planning 

Clients often think that they need to provide a fully formed brief to their agency partners, but in reality, the most strategic content plans come from first focusing on your marketing problems. 

You might have a clear idea of what you want from your copywriters, but the best results come when you bring an open mind to the table, rather than your own solutions. We see this time and again: a client asks for a specific piece of collateral, briefs us on the core details and expects it to achieve their objectives.  

While this can work to some degree, the most effective content plans come from stepping right back and looking at the problem you’re trying to solve in the first place.  

A great analogy for this is our very own chief wordsmith’s experience with having a new kitchen designed and fitted. While Louise and her family wanted it to look good, her analytical mind knew that it also needed to be practical. A totally fit-for-purpose solution. And to do that, they had to focus on their current problems.  

The kitchen approach 

So, you’ve got your basic measurements, have decided on your core aesthetic, and now you need to really think about the important details of your kitchen design. For Louise, this was a six-month process of paying attention to the issues they regularly came across in their current kitchen, and putting together a list of problems for their designer to solve.  

By presenting their provider with real-life problems – where can we keep the chopping boards? How can we store spices so we can see them all? What’s the solution to stop the Tupperware jumping out of the cupboard at me every time I open the door? – They ended up with a design that took these problems away. The reason the solutions were great was simple – the kitchen designer knew all the available options and was able to recommend the right one for the space based on extensive experience.  

This problem-first approach can be applied to any business activity. You simply can’t identify the best solution unless you break things down and isolate the key issues you need to overcome.  

Cooking up the most strategic content plan

This is also a compelling reason to choose a specialist communications agency over a more generalist, full-service one. If you want a kitchen that really suits your needs, like Louise, you’d choose an experienced kitchen expert rather than a general construction company. Someone with the insight and skills to deliver a perfectly finished product that solves the real problems. 

Marketing issues can become opportunities. With a specialist partner to help you uncover opportunities by asking the right questions, you’ll end up with a plan that resolves them. 

It’s not that your initial idea is wrong, but our job is to challenge your thinking and qualify that decision. By understanding the problems facing your business, we can better position your content. We can quickly spot if the project you’re proposing won’t bring the outcome you’re hoping for, recommending different types of collateral that will generate the enquiries and conversations that really count.  

We’re yet to find a marketing problem we can’t solve with strategic content plan – if you’d like to challenge the Wordsmiths team, book a free consultation to get a taste of our services.