As a follow up to Jon’s post ‘Content is King. More than ever’ I thought I’d outline the foundations that underpin a content strategy.
A content audit
Start by formulating some real clarity around existing content within the organisation. There’s no escaping it, an audit on some scale will need to take place to establish what content is a genuine asset, what content is performing well and what existing content can potentially be re-purposed for a new channel.
Understanding the current patterns of content production
Start with some key questions. How is content currently planned and produced? What resources are being spent on production? Where are the content creation specialisms within the organisation?
Defining business and user goals
Users want useful and engaging content, they also want it to be easy to find and share. The business wants to raise awareness and engagement across key products and services – and ultimately sell more stuff. It also wants to wrap it’s products and services in a brand position, point of view and tone of voice.
The challenge
The challenge of defining a workable content strategy is to mesh these foundations together and make them the foundation of the strategy. Beyond that there’s getting organizational buy-in, creating an editorial board, implementing work flow process and creating content production guidelines. Easy pips!
The reward
Developing a content strategy is potentially a really rewarding digital journey, one that if planned and executed well could put the organisation in a great place. Working more collaboratively with a renewed sense of purpose.
If you’re new to content strategy I’d highly recommend this book Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and maybe start following this new elite of digital darlings, the Content Strategist, Colleen Jones, Jonathon Kahn, Erin Kissane.
Tags: content strategy, digital marketing, planning, user generated content
