Who should you partner with for your 2025 content strategy?

If you’re reading this, it likely means you already know how to evaluate your team’s content performance.

But as you strategize for 2025, there are key people who need to be part of this effort before you finalize your KPIs. After all, content leaders don’t operate in silos, right?

These conversations often take place in Q4 or early Q1, but a strategic content leader meets with these leaders throughout the year. The last thing you want is a surprise project that throws off your planning or has your team going into breaking news mode unnecessarily.

Yes, last second projects happen, but don’t let it be because you didn’t execute your stakeholder engagement plan.

I suggest a quarterly cadence, but utilize a frequency that’s best for your team and the stakeholders you work with. This allows your team to be adaptive reactive so by the end of the year (or any other time), there should be very few surprises due to the established cadence of communication.

Strategic Question

Should you schedule meetings if you’re already working on projects with these leaders?

Absolutely. Project efforts are singularly focused, but you don’t know what else your stakeholders are working on.

As a content leader, I get frustrated when learning about projects after the ship has left the dock. We want project sponsors to have realistic content expectations and deliverables while the project is being formulated, not after it’s kicked off. The best way to ensure this is by utilizing your engagement plan to stay top of mind with stakeholders.

Your Key Partners

Sales Leaders

These is one of your most important stakeholders because nobody wins (or stays employed) if the money isn’t coming in. I suggest scheduling an hour for this conversation.

If you’re unable to schedule a sit down with your organization’s top sales leader, don’t panic. Aim for someone who is high enough to know the sales strategy and priorities for your company. If possible, I would suggest having separate conversations with both people. Your sales leader may create and oversee the vision, but their deputies are in charge of executing it. This provides two very different - and critical - views on the same concept.

Here’s some key questions to ask:

Is there any collateral that needs updating?

You do not want your company’s sales reps armed with outdated information. It would be embarrassing if a potential customer knew more about your product or the problem it’s trying to solve than the sales rep selling the solution. Make sure your sales team has the latest and greatest information.

What are sales reps saying about the collateral?

Customer feedback is critical towards the advancement of any product. In this case, the sales reps are your customers because your team is creating the content for them.

I suggest not waiting until the end of the year to ask this question. Your stakeholder plan will help ensure any content issues are quickly addressed.

What is the 2025 sales strategy and how can content support the strategy?

It’s important to know that the company wants to increase YoY sales by 25%, but how does sales leadership see that happening? New markets? New products? Additional target audiences? How is the company doing with its current target audiences?

It’s critical for content leaders to understand what success looks like to their stakeholders, which creates seamless opportunities for you to flex your content muscles and gain alignment on content strategies.

Director of Government Affairs

Whether you work for a nonprofit or corporate entity, legislation is crucial to your organization’s ability to do business. This is why understanding your legislative priorities is so important. I would suggest devoting an hour to this conversation.

Every organization I’ve worked for (and many others) has at least one person devoted to state legislatures and another for federal lawmakers. You need to have conversations with both these teams because the laws and the people who create them can be different at each level.

What are the legislative priorities for 2025?

Content leaders need to know the legislative environment their organization is operating in. Is there a new legislative majority? New leadership? New laws being enacted?

Knowing these answers heading into your meeting with your company’s lobbying team ensures a more strategic and productive meeting.

In my experience, the chief lobbyist already has a sense of what’s to come because they’re in regular communication with lawmakers and those in their orbit. While I was a nonprofit communications director, we were trying to create an education program that the majority party supported but were getting heartburn from the other party.

Our response was a first-of-its-kind report that broke down those concerns county-by-county. This gave the majority party the ammunition it needed to create the program.

Are there specific areas or legislators that are a priority?

Not every lawmaker is the same, and not every area is the same.

It is your job to understand those nuances and create content that’s reflective of it.

Is there a particular legislator who isn’t supporting your cause? Maybe an op-ed is part of your strategy (yes, people still read newspapers!) An opposition group is making noise? Perhaps invite them to a television debate. Need numbers to show the demand for your legislation? News cameras love large rallies.

Any legislative communications plan will have overall messaging, strategy, and tactics, but that can can’t be rigid to where it can’t adapt to certain lawmakers, communities, or legislative actions.

What are the legislative goals for this year and how can content support those goals?

Organizations can increase their annual revenue much easier than they can change  legislation.

State and federal laws have  a permanency that requires any organization working to establish or change them to get it as right as possible the first time. Content leaders play a critical role in this because our work convinces or changes minds.

As a member of communications leadership within a healthcare nonprofit, I was tasked with creating a communications plan to expand Medicaid in North Carolina. To sum things up, expanding Medicaid did not have favor with the Republican legislature but was supported by the Democratic governor - yet it happened.

I’m going to be a broken record with this: It’s critical for content leaders to understand what success looks like to their stakeholders, which creates seamless opportunities for you to flex your content muscles and gain alignment on content strategies.

Do you believe our content is having a positive impact on legislators?

I’ll admit this: Sometimes a lawmaker’s opposition to your measure has little to do with the measure itself and more so to do with the will of their party or protecting their political future.

So don’t be surprised if the answer to this question is mixed.

When you have lawmakers who are going out on a limb to support your cause, you have to have content that returns the favor. As a nonprofit content leader, I’ve created content that provided cover to legislators during and after the legislative session.

Customer Engagement Lead

Your brand content is nothing if it does not connect with target audiences. This is definitely an hour conversation.

This is similar to the conversation with sales leadership. Short of conducting focus groups, you want to engage with the people who best understand how your key audiences think and act.

What are you and your team hearing out in the field that can help enhance our content?

There’s value to understanding things from the top floor, but a great content leader also has their ear to the street. Leadership only knows what you tell them, and rooting your content efforts with target audience insight makes you the most strategic person in the room.

How can we enhance our content so that it better connect with our target audiences?

Your groundbreaking content idea means nothing if your key audiences aren’t engaging with it. You need to figure out what works and go from there.

What are your 2025 community outreach goals?

Creating content that gains the hearts and minds of your target audiences will make it easier for your team to create content that influences lawmakers and anyone else.

CEO/President

This one’s pretty simple. You need to know where the organization is going and how it plans to get there. This is, at minimum, an hour conversation. Don’t be surprised if you have to split this conversation into a few meetings.

If you’re a strategic content leader, then this conversation is the last of your stakeholder conversations. Due to your conversations with the aforementioned leaders, you’re already walking into the CEO meeting with a content vision for 2025.
I would attack this meeting as a high level overview of your thoughts for 2025 and gain initial alignment on your direction.

Remember, you’re a thought leader that the CEO depends on for thought leadership. So make sure you lead the meeting with some thoughts on 2025 content direction. The last thing you want is for the company’s leader to think they’re doing your job for you.

What about your boss?

I purposely left out having a conversation with your boss because a strategic content leader comes to their boss with a plan. (Plus you’re gonna talk to them anyway, right?) And if your plan is a result of conversations with the aforementioned strategic leaders, then you look well prepared for success in.

But don’t be surprised if your boss blows up your plan, lol. At least they’ll appreciate you coming to them with one.

Don’t forget to end every stakeholder conversation with this question: Is there anything else you would like to say or add or is there anything that I didn’t think of?

Any conversation with  open ended questions not only ensures that little is missed, but helps validates the thoughts and opinions of the person you’re talking to by giving them space to double down on what’s important to them. This is critical when you want leadership buy-in for future content efforts.

The Wrap Up

While this post highlights specific people to talk to, my point is for you to regularly engage with the leaders of your organization who are responsible for your organization’s business objectives as well as those your team is regularly creating content for.

Remember: Content leaders serve as strategic, proactive thought partners to senior leadership.