Regularly adjusting your social strategy is good for your audiences and your organization. Put a bit of time into monitoring and measuring your activities on social media to enable your digital team to focus on content that’s relevant, effective, and engaging.
CTAs can be powerful little pieces of content, but they’re often not as strong as they could be, due to a lack of user-focus, or poor word choice, visuals, or location.
Here’s what we recommend to make sure you make the most of your CTAs.
Sometimes going completely digital with your content can seem too far. And that may be true, depending on what industry you’re in and what your audiences want. Sometimes it makes sense to keep producing those print brochures or PDF reports. But how do you know?
In the first stage of the content lifecycle, content teams determine how content can drive business goals. This includes a clear understanding of the goals of your company, awareness of audience needs, and – importantly – a whiteboard full of content ideas.
While it may be easier to come up with company-focused topics, content teams should really be trying to create content for audiences. What do your customers or clients care about? What do they want to know?
When you clearly define and communicate success metrics, you can help everyone work towards a common goal, ensure that content goals support your larger strategic objectives, and feel confident that your content will continue to evolve towards being a significant and impactful asset for your company.
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.