Get the latest insights on content strategy, content management, and content development.
Who do you need on your content team? Is it more important to cover every skillset with experts, or to focus on the most common tasks? We look to two content-focused industries to learn what works: media and technical communications.
Style guides are a necessary tool to align your content creators on style decisions, as well as terminology and grammar rules. Sometimes companies will put the effort into making a style guide, but not so much into making sure it gets used.
Here are six ways to increase the likelihood of your style guide being regularly used.
Your core content strategy statement is a guiding statement that connects business goals to audience and/or employee needs. In practical terms, your core content strategy statement should inspire and align your content team. It keeps the strategy clear and the people on board.
Regardless of type or format, channel or platform, all content moves through a life cycle. It’s all conceptualized, planned, created, and maintained in some way by someone.
If you’re looking at improving your content processes, we recommend using the content lifecycle as a framework. This will ensure you have processes for every stage of your content.
Leading organizational change isn’t easy. The first step is to understand whether the decision-makers actually see the same problems that you do in your content.
If content people in your organizations are dispersed throughout departments rather than on a single team, it’s really important to have a mechanism in place to ensure all content aligns to a common strategy. Enter the content strategy working group.
Content mix is all about proportions. What’s the ratio of articles to infographics? Of topics for Sue to topics for Tom? This is what your content mix answers. It helps you find the right balance of different elements of content, taking into account your company strategy, audience needs, and available resources.
Messaging can help to move prospective customers through a targeted customer journey by meeting them where they are and then guiding them to make decisions and feel good about those decisions. People make decisions both emotionally and intellectually, and you want a mix of messages that appeal to both of these decision-making needs as people move through the customer journey.
Once you have personas for your major customer segments, you can create customer journeys for them. Go back to the interviews and online survey responses and gather your data as a start. Some content elements are quite straightforward, while others will require some creative thinking and extrapolating.
The content strategy process isn’t complex.The challenge is in mustering the commitment and willpower to do it. Here are eight surprisingly simple steps for you to follow if you’re serious about implementing a content strategy.
In a job interview for a mid-level position, I was once asked “When you move into a senior role, do you see yourself as a strategist, a manager, or a practitioner?” Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that there are different paths that people can take to grow their skills and build their career. Now, […]
Audience findings aren’t useful if they’re filed away on someone’s hard drive. Gathering content insights is just the beginning. It’s time to take the next step and start building out tools for your content team. Personas are a great place to start. They’re fictional archetypes that represent your company’s distinct customer groups. These customer groups would […]
Online surveys are a great method for measuring attitudes or behaviours around content. They’re ideal for putting numbers behind the content insights you gathered during audience interviews.
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