Every organization is unique. Your content strategy should be too.
Content strategy with CSI
When you work with us, we get to know your business and create a website content strategy that’s tailored to you. We use research to learn about your organization and audience, and build out detailed recommendations for your unique content challenges. To do this, we:
- Analyze your business needs
- Develop a vision and guiding principles for your content strategy
- Design a content strategy tailored to your users’, organization’s, and project’s needs
- Show you how to implement the strategy, with a roadmap to evolve your content strategy practices over time
Our process
We know every organization is unique. That’s why we start every project with a custom plan tailored to your needs and audiences. We include key activities and clear project milestones, so you know exactly what to expect every step of the way.
A typical content strategy project might look something like this:
Stage 1: Discovery and strategy
We take a deep look at your organization and your audience, using research and data to identify gaps and challenges in your current approach to content.
Information gathering about your:
- Business objectives
- Employee, stakeholder, and audience needs
- Project goals and constraints
Company and audience research to:
- Review existing research and documents
- Complete new research, including stakeholder and audience interviews, workshops, and surveys
Comprehensive assessments of your:
- Current content, including how useful and audience-friendly it is
- Processes and governance, including team structures
- Technical systems, resourcing capabilities, and constraints
Comprehensive reports that detail:
- Key findings and recommendations from research and assessments
- A vision and guiding principles
- A cohesive action plan, including:
- Priorities
- Specific tasks and tactics
- Responsibilities assigned to identified individuals or roles
- A framework for executing the plan, considering budget and timeline
Stage 2: Design
At the design stage, we create the backbone of your strategy by defining your content and functional needs. We use the information we’ve gathered during the Discovery and Strategy stage to create tools, models, frameworks, and processes that will make up your audience-focused content strategy.
Things we may do at this stage:
- Map content to personas and user journeys
- Create information architecture
- Build content models
- Build a taxonomy and metadata framework
- Identify content success criteria
Detailed documentation could include:
- Audience personas and user journeys
- A proposed sitemap
- Page types and corresponding content models
- Wireframes for page types
- Sample copy
- A taxonomy and metadata framework
- Content success criteria to monitor against benchmarks
Stage 3: Validation
Our recommendations are based on research, so we test our content strategies with audiences and internal stakeholders.
Things we may do at this stage:
- Confirm with stakeholders that our strategies are realistic and simple to maintain
- Where appropriate, test our designs and plans with audiences to measure usability
Stage 4: Development
At this stage, we work with stakeholders on development.
Depending on the needs of the project, we may:
- Create detailed standards and guidelines
- Define a content migration plan
- Establish style guides or templates
- Revise old content or write new content to meet your new standards
We can also:
- Carry out all the content development work for you
- Train your in-house team to develop content
- Provide editorial oversight to ensure that the new or revised content meets standards and guidelines
Stage 5: Publication and maintenance
Publication:
We can publish, or support your team as they publish, your new or revised content through your content management system.
Maintenance:
We can work with you to create a maintenance plan so you’re ready to monitor and evolve your content strategy.
Contact us to learn more
Additional services
Need more content support? We also offer targeted content strategy services for:
