Content Strategy 101 - NN/G

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November 13, 2022 2022-11-13
Organizations generate content to facilitate the interaction between people (whether current or prospective customers, employees, or clients) and their products or services. Content plays a crucial role in ensuring that the experience of interacting with an organization is smooth and pleasant. Yet very often, companies waste money and resources creating and maintaining content that’s pointless for users and profitless for organizations. And that is because they lack a content strategy.
Content strategy: The ongoing practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and effective content about a particular topic or set of topics. This original definition of content strategy was created by Kristina Halvorson in her 2009 book, Content Strategy for the Web (with a second edition published in 2012).
A content strategy ensures that every piece of content in the experience serves and sustains a legitimate purpose.
A content strategy will usually specify:
People often confuse content strategy with content-related tactics, like copywriting or editing, making videos, designing infographics, and posting social media promotions. A content strategy comes before tactics. It plans, clarifies, and connects the tactics to a meaningful purpose.
Why the continued confusion between tactics and strategy? Unfortunately, many organizations still treat content as an afterthought instead of an asset (Halvorson, 2012, p. 31). They prioritize the user-interface design instead of the information that people need. Others ignore the need for the content strategy until it’s too late. Then, the content becomes so cumbersome and incoherent that users abandon the products or services entirely. In these cases, content cleanup efforts require more time, compared to taking a strategic approach from the start.
In our research, content professionals working as one-person UX teams expressed frustration at the lack of content-strategy understanding in their organizations. Many of these content professionals reported that they were expected to author, edit, and market content. The unbalanced emphasis on tactics leaves them little time to think holistically about content.
Regardless of the reason for the confusion, slow down and plan for content before it's created. Identify goals that serve the organization and its users to align efforts and form a cohesive strategy for content.
Content strategy comprises four conceptual phases:
When a piece of content reaches the maintenance phase, it continually moves back through the planning, creation (updating), and maintenance (governance) phases until it is ready for removal (or being “unpublished”).
All these continuously occur throughout the lifecycle of any piece of content. Each phase relies on different components, tools, and tactics to communicate the content strategy as a whole and keep activities, such as the following, running smoothly:
During the initial planning phase, examine the following questions and use these suggested tools to inform your content strategy:
Review existing data and test content with users to understand the questions they have and the knowledge gaps that new content or improvements to existing content can fill. If needed, consider additional research methods to help you address questions about how your content is performing. Use a content-strategy statement to summarize what the content is supposed to do. Content tactics may change, but the strategy should stay the same over time.
Reflect on whether you have the right people and processes to own and support content. Clarify roles and responsibilities and decide on a content-management model to determine who or what initiates new content or updates to existing content. Determine:
Whether it’s a few people handling these important tasks or an entire team, consider people’s time, skills, and strengths when developing a content strategy. Use an editorial calendar to plan and clearly communicate the creation, publication, and maintenance processes for content.
No more last-minute lorem-ipsum replacements. Reflect on what's really involved in content design and creation before launching into design activities. Consider the following questions and tools:
Maintenance and governance determine when and how content is reviewed to monitor quality and success. Ask the following questions to document a content-maintenance plan and process:
Content won’t govern itself. Ongoing content reviews reduce risk and ambiguity around content success. Quickly decide whether to improve, replace, or remove low-performing content. As part of content maintenance, educate others about the importance of monitoring content’s success incrementally to save time and sanity in the long run.
Content maintenance and governance help you see when it’s time to remove outdated or irrelevant content. This is a difficult-yet-important decision for teams to make. Removing unnecessary content ensures you’re directing users’ attention to the most recent and relevant information. When determining a process for unpublishing content, consider:
Content has the power to make or break the user experience: it's impossible to design a good user experience with bad content (Halvorson, 2011). People, processes, and flexible policies make good content happen.
Your content strategy defines how your organization will use content to achieve its goals and meet user needs. It's about setting overarching goals for content and an intentional plan for how to achieve and maintain success. Content strategy connects people to the information they need and connects the content to form a working system. Without a content strategy, information can quickly get out of control to the detriment of the user and employee experience.
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