Seven. It's the perfect number.

So, I created seven steps for the content strategy process.

Brilliant, I know I am (JK).

But why even have a process? Why not just spend an hour or two in a room and develop an effective content strategy?

Here are five reasons why you should use a repeatable process:

• Enhanced efficiency
• Consistent quality
• Scalability
• Knowledge transfer and collaboration
• Continuous improvement

By having a repeatable process, you will be more efficient in creating your strategy vs. assigning everyone action items outside of a process. You will have a roadmap guiding you to a superb content strategy rather than piecemealing it.

When you have a well-thought process, you will cover all your bases, resulting in a higher quality output. It's like baking. You need to follow the recipe correctly to create the best cake. And when you have a recipe passed down through generations, it will be time-tested and result in a refined output using the

With a process, it's easier to scale as you add team members or shift the outcomes you want from your content. You can have new team members go through the process to understand how you got to the content you're creating, making knowledge transfer more seamless.

It also allows you to tweak specific steps as you can reference the steps and see what needs your attention (think checklist). This enables regular optimization to produce the best content over time.

Before I bore you to sleep with reasons why a process is essential, let's discuss where this falls in the larger business and marketing strategy.

Where This Falls in the Bigger Picture

Your business should have strategic goals it is trying to achieve. Your marketing strategy should be designed to help you reach the goals that marketing can influence. And from there comes your content strategy. Imagine a ladder; your content strategy is two rungs down:

(1) Business → (2) Marketing → (3) Content Strategy

Your content strategy should "ladder up" to the marketing strategy, which ladders to the business strategy. Now, if you're small or don't have a marketing strategy, you can skip that rung and ladder up directly to the business strategy.

This is why if you don't know the progress your business is trying to make, you will struggle to create content that moves you forward. In this case, content becomes the goal versus the means to achieve the goal. Pause and understand the larger objectives of the business and how marketing can help. If no goals are defined, champion to create them, at minimum, a marketing strategy so you can be strategic in your content marketing.