We’re about to take a deep dive into the principles of content strategy. But before we do that, we need to go back to basics.
What is Content Strategy?
A useful definition would be “A plan for managing content in a way that maximizes business value.”
This definition relies on the recognition that content can be an asset to a company if used the right way. This is something that businesses, and even content strategists themselves, are prone to forget.
Good content strategy relies on knowing your resources and the context in which you are going to use them. This leads to the next question:
Most Important Skill
Plan ahead: know what to do with information, no matter how much or how little you have.
That probably sounds extremely abstract without an example. “Know what to do” with information is another way of saying, “educate yourself in content models, the lifecycle of content, project management tools, how to conduct an audit, and other important theory.” This information is useful even outside of a business setting. In fact, I wish I had known it sooner and applied it to my other areas of study. The advice doesn’t just deal with gathering knowledge; it involves adaptability and resourcefulness.
For my current project, my team and I worked with much content but had very little information about its context. Thanks to learning theory and practice at the same time, we were able to strategize how to manage the content and plan our audit. As we assessed the qualities of content, we found many areas that lacked and documented these in our audit. We found common trends, such as videos with no date of recording or publication, and we determined that the company should keep a list of publication dates for all content to ensure relevancy.
Different information is useful for different reasons. Keep this in mind when conducting an audit. Subscriber rate and length of subscription give a glimpse into brand loyalty while bounce rate hints at the visual appeal of a website.
An abundance of information won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to manage it.
Things to Avoid
Do not try to generate the desired output before establishing the structure of the project.
What structure do you need?
- roles of team members
- project timeline
- tools used for completing the project
- (And it never hurts to read the instructions multiple times.)
My team had only established the project tools, and we suffered for not planning the other factors. When we fully grasped the scope of the project, we panicked, abandoned our original roles, and exceeded the required time. We submitted a solid deliverable that fit the guidelines, but we would have done it more efficiently and effectively with the correct structure in place from the beginning.
If you begin a project without clear expectations of how you will execute it, you might end up producing the wrong deliverable.
Overall Impression
I love how systematic content strategy and its cousin, information architecture, are.
The requirements and field-recognized standards do change from time to time, but there are many specific guidelines to follow regardless of topic. The content itself might be chaotic and incomplete, but the discipline of content strategy has field-wide methods for handling it, giving content strategists the necessary structure and plan to move forward.
Personality tests often ask people whether they prefer to stick to plans or to act spontaneously. I prefer neither. Instead, I feel most comfortable when working within an established system, but with the freedom to modify and expand on it at will. I find it difficult to generate ideas in a vacuum. For example, if I were asked to plan my dream vacation, I would begin by asking the prompter some clarifying questions.
Am I planning this based on my current salary and feasible savings?
How much time do I have to plan the itinerary?
During what season am I taking the trip?
Can I plan how people interact with me on this trip or am I only planning logistics?
The above prompt and questions are the kind of thinking that creative writing requires. The author creates the internal logic of the narrative from the ground up. I’ve tried that, and it exhausts me. Content strategy, on the other hand, does not.
Jennifer Goon 