Content Strategy: What's In It For You?
There wasn't even room on the floor during Margot Bloomstein's content strategy panel during the first day of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. I managed to squeeze into a space upfront along the wall, pulled up some carpet, and took furious notes. I'm glad I made the extra effort; this session was by far one of my favorites of the conference.
Margot is not only an expert in content strategy, but she's also a fabulous presenter. Her session covered a comprehensive definition of content strategy and why it matters, and she handed out homemade cookies! What more could you ask?
For someone like me who is always advocating the importance of thinking about content and what your organization's goals are, her words were music to my ears and definitely worth repeating. She approached content strategy from the viewpoint of all project stakeholders — from the organization, the project manager, the developers, and the designers all to illustrate that each stage of a project benefits from having thought through content strategy from the very first step.
Here are some of the key takeaways from her presentation, starting with a definition:
What is content strategy?
Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery and governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.
How do you do it?
In a nutshell, you develop a prioritized list of organizational attributes that stem from a shared vocabulary/language (often generated by a card sort). In plain terms, this means an organization considers all of the values of its brand, what it wants to emphasize to its audience, and how it will be consistent in talking about these values across its various communications. Once that is in place, the web content, design, development will more easily flow from those decisions. And, it will be right!
Why does content strategy matter?
Ensures your content supports your organizational goals
- It offers predictability: It helps you plan for copy and photos, anticipate content types, gather testimonials, and develop exact specifications in your design.
- It provides the information necessary to inform a more thorough and comprehensive site map, which subsequently highlights and optimizes brand-appropriate calls-to-action.
- It can help your organization prioritize overall communication goals to ensure consistency. Yes, even on Twitter.
- It lets your organization rally around a vision instead of personal preferences.
Reduces costs
- Fact: words are cheaper than design comps!
- It can help you save time and money on your overall project budget — in both the development and design phases of your project. As a project manager, I also see the benefits of content strategy saving me time in reducing churn with my clients.
Results in stronger web design
- It helps you prioritize key messages and feature those on your site. Content is the reason people come to the web.
- Doing it right will improve your web site search engine optimization — helping the people that matter most to your organization find you and your content!
- It allows you to use real copy in order to better unify multiple web concepts across your site.
- It helps you develop better, more usable templates for your content that not only provide a place to post it, but leverage its assets.
- It helps your organization perform a more useful gap analysis against your site plan and your message architecture.
- It informs a more cohesive and consistent user experience.
- It helps you plan for the future.
How many more reasons do you need? I'm sold. I've been on the soapbox for over a week now. Thanks Margot. :)
Examples
Margot also showed some great examples of sites that "got it right."
Harvard Club of Boston: Elite language, conservative and pretentious design. It's all "hoity toity" from imagery, to copy. They nailed their audience from the start and ensured their web site was consistent with their organizational values.
National Financial: A subsidiary of Fidelity, National Financial appeals to the younger set of investors — folks that are just beginning to plan for the future. They want to be empowered, and are ready to "take on the world."
Fidelity.com: Bloomstein compared National Finance to their stuffier parent site Fidelity.com, which appeals to data-hungry, seasoned investors. The National Financial site is cleaner, less cluttered. The copy, design, and imagery of National Financial support their company goals of reaching a younger demographic.
Join the conversation online:
- Use the hashtags #contentstrategy or #cs on Twitter
- Join the LinkedIn Content Strategy group
- Visit contentstrategy.com to find the latest content strategy events in your area
Learn more from Margot's slides:
Content Strategy What's in it for you? at SXSW
View more presentations from Margot Bloomstein.
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Photography influences how Michaela views the world and approaches life. She has visited and taken pictures on every continent except Antarctica. During a college semester abroad, she was in Bolu...
Comments
Thanks so much for stopping by!
Hi Margot,
What a privilege to have you visit our blog and thanks for the invitation to join you up on the soap box. I'm definitely going to begin carving a place for myself up there with you. Save a cookie for me!
Thanks for the clarification about the different areas of content strategy. I agree with you, brand-driven content strategy seems to be the most compelling on my end as well - it seems like it's easier to advocate for because it's so deeply connected to the other pieces of the web redesign life-cycle. So many organizations don't think about their content in strategic ways and I think this is probably a more friendly, entry-point to shift that thinking. Do you agree? I'm an information / organization geek, however, and I see the values in all areas - but I have to start somewhere! :)
For someone like me who is beginning to delve more deeply into this world, are there any tips that you'd share / books you'd recommend to nail down some of the basics?
Looking forward to following you and your work on Twitter!
Getting started in content strategy
Michaela, here are some terrific resources:
Hope this helps!
Welcome to a powerfully big umbrella!
Michaela, thanks so much for this write up--you captured so much of the stuff I try to sing from the rooftops, so it's exciting to hear you've been doing the same! (C'mon up, there's room on the soapbox, make way, make way...)
One point I'd like to add is that content strategy, as a discipline and in practice, is a wonderfully large umbrella. Some content strategists focus more on the organization of information and metacontent (see Rachel Lovinger); others focus primarily on editorial workflow in enterprise content strategy situations (see Matthew Grocki). For me, brand-driven content strategy is the most compelling and exciting venue through which to affect user experience and collaborate with others. So while my preferred tools include a card sort or other exercise to get to a message architecture, other folks approach content strategy through other processes--and that's perfectly okay.
Thanks again.
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