Tag Archives: content strategy
Derek Phillips and I presented a webinar today entitled “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting like a Publisher.” In it, we outline the six key elements of great content plus the three phases your company needs to include in their publishing plan.
You might notice that we won’t talk a lot about social. It isn’t because we don’t value social media; we have three experts working with clients in our Chicago office alone. So in this web 2.0 world, why didn’t we focus as much on social?
It reminds me of a recent Joe Pulizzi interview with Jay Baer. During the interview, Jay reminds us that strategy must come first.
“You have to focus on how to ‘be’ social first, and worry about how to ‘do’ social second…If you and your company are worrying specifically about your ‘Facebook strategy’ then you really don’t have a strategy at all…”
I don’t think Jay is saying that you shouldn’t have a Facebook strategy, period, but that you should come up with your overall strategy and then determine how you want to use to distribute your message.
Our webinar focused on a publishing strategy; social can and should be baked into that strategy. But social is more complex than you’d think. As we discussed editorial calendars and governance processes, many organizations have these things in place solely for their social strategies. While I love the commitment around these channels, I think it’s always best integrated.
Content strategy isn’t just about audits or aligning with information architecture. Directly supporting copywriters is a primary goal of content strategy as well. It falls to content analysts to distill insights and create an appropriate plan (based on business objectives, user needs, etc) – a plan that gives your copywriter enough to succeed.
Without content strategy, you create an unjustified delay; your copywriter is forced to research, analyze and strategize before they even start crafting the language that will entice your customers to convert. It’s unfair to your copywriter and is poor stewardship of your client’s resources.
After all, content strategy at the start of a project makes the creative process run faster and more efficiently, thus saving money for your client. Like information architecture and planning, content strategy work done up front will ensure that the best possible creative is produced…and that the entire project aligns with the given business objectives.
Image credit: www.jonessnowboards.com
It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
You don’t want to present an adequate content audit. You don’t want a sorta decent audit presentation.
But a content audit is a funny beast. It’s an amazingly in-depth analysis of content – everything published on a particular website, usually. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of pages. Pages that have often been overlooked for quite awhile. And now it’s your time to present the results and insights from this detailed analysis.
You worked hard on this content audit and you obviously care a lot. But there are some critical, often-overlooked tips that can mean the difference between an engaged audience and one that needs woken up at the end of your audit presentation.
Here are 7 proven ways to ensure your content audit presentation kicks serious tuckus.
- “Perfect” means it’s all about THEM. Know thy audience. Ensure that every word, paragraph, and idea is framed in a way that particular audience understands. Make each slide highly relevant to your audit †and make certain that it supports the story you are weaving with this report. Every element of your perfect presentation should be unique to the audience in front of you.
- Never, ever, ever, ever present just a spreadsheet. Content strategists tend to live in spreadsheets; they allow us to analyze loads of complex data. But most people donít care about that – they are interested in the insights you found. If you called a travel agent to book your dream vacation, you do not need a schematic of the airplane. Get them to the beach already.
DJ Francis | Critical Mass Chicago
“Content strategy is brand new and we’ve been doing it for 15 years.”
This was the seminal quote from†the Web Content 2010 conference held a few weeks ago here in Chicago. People (read: clients and bosses) are giving our work credence, despite an ever-evolving struggle to plan for, create, monitor, and evaluate online content.
This sentiment gives voice to both a frustration and excitement surrounding content strategy.†And thus practitioners of library sciences, taxonomies, copywriting, sociology, psychology, and content strategy, itself, came together – to learn, commiserate, and plot a way forward for our burgeoning profession.
Smart Folks, Smart Lessons
Learning was central as it should be, with insightful presentations by content strategy notables like Kristina Halvorson, Rachel Lovinger, and Jeff MacIntyre. A few of the lessons that impacted me and the work we do at Critical Mass included:
- A content strategy methodology is beginning to firm up. Whether you call it “Plan, Create, Govern” or “Audit, Plan, Build, Grow” or another variation, the building blocks of content strategy are starting to become almost universal (pointing to the maturation of the practice).
- Content governance is a huge missing piece, especially for agencies. While it’s getting easier to sell the planning and creation elements, content maintenance seems to still be getting short shrift.
- There is a great opportunity to bring in younger content strategists. Spending my 32nd birthday at the first day of the conference, I was one of the youngest attendees and most certainly the youngest full-time content strategist. It will be interesting to watch an influx of Millennials†during the next few years who come naturally to social media channels and distributed content, but perhaps lack the “publishing” experience brought by the Boomers (and the potential sweet-spot offered to Gen Xers).
Despite those learnings and many more (I will be referencing the materials shared at this conference for a long time to come), I was struck by the perfect blend of vexation and opportunity, to get back to Pulizzi’s quote.
A Time of Huge Opportunity (And What To Do With It)
We are at an amazing cross-roads where our audience is receptive to our message. Now is the time to be selling.
Conferences like this offer the opportunity to commiserate, but I thought speakers and participants at Web Content 2010 were wise to acknowledge this sentiment, but quickly get back to the business at hand (namely: growing our businesses).
Inspiration often comes from strange places.
†Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, author Scott McCloud examines how we receive different types of information and that process relates directly to design, information architecture, copywriting and content strategy.
Image compliments of Scott McCloud.
“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.
Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” (page 49)
Anyone who’s ever sat through a client review will understand this. It’s not that images or art are less important; in fact, it’s the art that usually solicits “ohhs” and “ahhs” from the clients, right?
McCloud is speaking more about our intrinsic speed of understanding. We get a feeling from a picture right away.
But we need to process words – to piece together abstract ideas. With words, it’s incumbent that we create the images ourselves, in our own consciousness; we ponder meaning, ideas and symbols. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies knows that this process ain’t easy.
What’s This Got To Do With Agency Life?
Comics and literary theory? Why should marketers care?
In the same way that images are understood before words in the human brain, so too has the planning and creative process developed in marketing agencies. The halcyon days of 1997 were critical for information architecture. IAs became a staple of the creative agency, a bridge between the client’s objectives and the designer’s creative vision.
The same thing didn’t happen for words. It was easy to understand why you’d want to plot out images. But it took another decade for us to plot out what was written on the page and why. (True, maybe astute IAs and copywriters filled this role until content strategy bloomed in recent years.)
So what’s changed? Well, SEO (based on keyWORDS) has blossomed into the main way we find content online. Search engines are ever more refining the way they surface the most relevant content. Our tastes have matured: the internet is no longer the shiny new object – it helps us complete tasks in everyday life. We now use many, many channels to access information and communicate with brands. Findable, useful, contextual, and consistent across channels…online content is more important to our lives than ever before!
It then makes sense that content strategy – a plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, relevant content – would guide many important choices we make as digital marketers.
