Audience-focused content strategy services

Get your audience’s attention more often, and more effectively

Whether you’re moving to a new website or intranet platform, or you’ve decided that the timing is right for cleanup, talk to us. We’ll help you build a content strategy to improve your audience’s experience, so they get what they need – and keep coming back.

Making sure your content is consistently high impact

You might be seeing quality or usability challenges such as inconsistent information flow and language. Or maybe your teams are making faulty assumptions about user perspectives. If either of these things are true, you could also be seeing low engagement with your content.

Actionable content strategies

When you work with us, we get to know your business and then go deep into your content and give you actionable recommendations. We can also help you execute those recommendations, including building strategies for your:

• Content lifecycle management.
• Cleanup and migration.
• Content writing.

What you get from us: a framework and a plan

We learn about your organization, and build out detailed recommendations for your unique content challenges. To do this, we:

1. Analyze your business needs by:

   • Auditing and assessing your content.
   • Conducting content-focused user research.
   • Building user personas.

2. Develop a vision and guiding principles for your content strategy.

3. Design a content strategy that is tailored to your users’ and your organization’s needs.

4. Show you how to implement the strategy, with a roadmap to evolve your content strategy practices over time.

Working with us, step by step

Your organization is unique, including your challenges, goals, and your project’s scope. Before we start, we create a custom plan with clear stages and key activities at each point, so you know what to expect as we go forward.

1. 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.

   • Activities

     • Information gathering about your:
       • Business objectives
       • Employee, stakeholder, and audience needs
       • Project goals and constraints
     • Company and audience research:
       • Review existing research and documents
       • New research, including stakeholder and audience interviews, workshops, and surveys
     • Comprehensive assessments of your:
       • Current content
       • Processes and governance, including team structures
       • Technology
       • Resources

   • Deliverables

     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

2. 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 to create tools, models, frameworks, and processes that will make up your audience-focused content strategy.

   • Activities

     Things we may do at this stage:

     • Map personas to user journeys
     • Create information architecture
     • Build content models for similar pages
     • Build a taxonomy and metadata framework
     • Identify content success criteria

   • Deliverables

     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

3. Stage 3: Validation

   Our recommendations are based on research, so we test our content strategies with audiences and internal stakeholders.

   • Activities

     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

4. 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.

   If you would like us to, we can also:

   • Train your in-house team to develop the content.
   • Provide editorial oversight to ensure that the new/revised content meets the standards.
   • Carry out all the development work for you.

5. Stage 5: Publication and maintenance

   Publication: Your team will publish your new/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.