Practical Content Strategy

Lots of people, including me, have written about Content Strategy and Marketing. Often we focus on describing the concept from a strategic point of view. Last week I had the opportuntiy to guide some students through a nuts & bolts exercice that focused on what to do to prepare a viable plan.

I asked them to examine their client project and answer these six questions each cascading from the previous:

1. define your online presence and channels
2. describe the objectives to be met via each channel
3. describe the content types required to meet those objectives
4. determine the source(s) of that content and plan for its sustained publication
5. define the website structure with a focus on its integration with all your online channels
6. define your SEO and include an Adwords campaign

1) Channels
Once upon a time the Internet channel was a website -- a one size fits all solution. No longer; now you can combine a variety of channels and you'll need to choose a combination right for your audience. Marketing a service to women 34-55? You'd better include Facebook.

Go to your audience don't wait for them to find you. Achieving this goal means finding out what Internet channels your audience uses and then combining them to achieve your goals. This can include websites, social media, mobile apps and so on.

2) Channel Objectives
Again, knowing your audience will help you make decisions here. If you're selling products you may decide to use Twitter to provide customer service, but your objective is that they'll click through to your site or mobile storefront app and make a purchase. Be clear why you're using a channel and what outcome you expect from it. That could easily mean a different call to action in each channel.

3) What Content is needed?
Now, you've determined the results you wish to achieve you can work out what you need to say and how you'll say it. Your Youtube channel might focus on product demos and information and feed people to your website to chat to a service rep. Different content and goals in your channels, but all leading to your ultimate call to action. Be clear what these will be and you'll save time and money and be more effective working with your clients.

4) Budget & planning content creation
What content have you decided you need to produce or acquire? Podcasts, whitepapers, articles, bloggng, news feeds, photography, charts? It won't fall from the sky. Aligning your content needs to your objectives will answer that question for you. Equally important, you need to budget for this work and see that it gets done in a timely fashion. Someone has to write that twice weekly blog: set aside the time, or assign someone as appropriate to your situation.

5) Your website is a hub of activity, not a static lump of pages
Your website is still a tremendous resource for static content and as a hub pulling together your other channels and pushing content back out to  them. Organize your site to support these goals. For many organizations this might mean abandoning the traditional "our site mirrors our organization chart" approach and replace it with a viewer-centric approach to presenting content.

6) Gain position on Google
Our goal here isn't only to attract people who already know your brand name, but especially those who do not. A big part of this objective is a recommendation to use AdWords as well as optimizing your site for search engines. SEO is important; adding Adwords to the mix will amplify its effect. Even with a Pagerank in flux you can still buy position in front of your audience. Paul Downs tells you why: My Grand Experiment: Turning Off AdWords and  Debating the Use of Google AdWords

Summing up: The process is a series of standard marketing 101 questions: who are my audience; what do I want to say to them; what action do I want them to take? Answer those questions first and the content you need and where you need to place it will shake out for you. All of this takes time and long-term effort -- yes, they were fibbing when you overheard people say, "Internet marketing is practically free."

Why Content Strategy

A well-thought Content Strategy powers so many, perhaps all, of the Internet's success stories. In this post I'll try to introduce some of the key concepts behind of coming up with a good strategy. I'm using Erin Kissane's gem of a book, The Elements of Content Strategy, as my guide here.

What is Content Strategy? In a few words, it's understanding the needs of your audience, preparing or sourcing material that meets those needs, and presenting it in ways that are useful. I find it helpful when working on content to stop thinking like a business marketer (or Mouseketeer) and, instead, think of myself as a publisher. I have readers not customers. Answer the question, "What does my audience need to hear from me?"

I believe there's an unwritten contract between a publisher and an audience. The publisher promises to provide content of value and the audience in return promises to return for more. Think back on Groundswell's objectives, that's where you'll find value.

Kissane describes seven basic principles of Good Content:

Good Content is appropriate

• Publish content that is right for the user and for the business

Good Content is useful

• Define a clear, speci!c purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose

Good Content is user-centered

• Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users

Good Content is clear

• Seek clarity in all things

Good Content is consistent

• Mandate consistency, within reason

Good Content is concise

• Omit needless content

Good Content is supported

• Publish no content without a support plan

I hope we'll be able to examine these ideas together — in class, during one of our Tuesday afternoon sessions, or any time you catch me sitting still. Heck, use that comment link below this post!

What does this mean to us as marketing and advertising people?

We've heard it in every one of our classes now: building a community, listening to it, empowering it and talking with it are the keys to Interactive Web Marketing. Content Strategy is what we come up with after we've been listening and empowering. At some point in time we do have to get our ideas across if we're to accomplish our business goals. The process of developing our content plan, for us as marketers, means being able to provide thoughtful participation in our audience's community. Here, again, we speak to the value we offer, and I don't mean value in terms of price: it's  meant in terms of the impact we can have on someone's life.

From the information architecture side of things, we ask why are people coming to us to learn, and how do I get them that information quickly and most effectively? In class today people were talking about how difficult some business sites make it to get to a phone number, let alone one leading to a human. That's old-fashioned brand management thinking at work. To my way of thinking what we should celebrate and enable is the ability for people to talk to us about our product: often that means making sure we put a human at the end of a phone line.

All of the above is by way of introduction to the topic: It sits at the heart of publishing an effective Internet presence. To help start you on the path to a better understanding I'm pointing  you to Simon Sinek on Start With Why. A good place to start all sorts of thinking, but especially Content Strategy.

Do you think Simon's ideas apply to what we're doing? How? Why? Always why.

This is a repost from an older site; I'm archiving it here ahead of that's site closure.