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Hi,
I’m going back to basics in this edition, and writing about what content strategy actually is. Somehow, I’ve never written down my definition and understanding. Weird, huh? So better late than never, here we have ‘Content strategy according to Lauren’. Even if you’re an expert practitioner, I hope you’ll find something interesting here — or something that you want to argue with me about (hit reply and come at me!).
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01
The definition of content strategy
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Let’s start with a definition:
“Content strategy is planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.”
It comes from Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web, the book I’ve bought and given away more than any other. What I like about this definition is that it highlights that content strategy is about the why and and the how, rather than just the what. If you don’t know why you’re creating the content, or how you’re going to do it, you’re doing ad hoc content, not strategic content.
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Things to remember about content strategy
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02
Strategy isn’t inherently complicated
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Don’t be intimidated by the ‘strategy’ part of content strategy. I see a lot of gatekeeping and over-intellectualisation of strategy, and that’s really off-putting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s tough to create a content strategy, but it’s not inherently complicated or difficult.
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy*, says that a good strategy is:
‘a set of actions that is credible, coherent and focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s) in achieving a particular objective’.
All you need to do is gather data and insights so you can make educated assumptions about what to do and what not to do.
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03
It’s about bringing the user and the organisation together
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A content strategy is all about finding the thing that unites what your users need or want and what your organisation has to offer. You’re looking for the sweet spot at the intersection of the two - that’s where you’ll get the best return for the lowest effort.
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A content strategy is not a document. Yes, you need to document it, but you also need to do it — everyday (well, every working day). If you just have the document, nothing will happen. You also need to share it, socialise it, talk about it, make it a part of your platforms, templates, tools and meetings. And then talk about it some more for good measure.
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05
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
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In a similar vein, you can’t knock out a content strategy and execute it in a matter of weeks or months. You might be able to pull it together in weeks or months, but executing it will take longer. Depending on the organisation and the ambition of the team, I tend to suggest looking at a 2–5 year strategic horizon.
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A content strategy isn’t rigid or permanent and it should evolve. It’s a journey — you start with an idea of your destination and move towards it with intention. But you might adjust your route or even your end point once you’ve set out, based on all the things you learn as you go.
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07
What content strategy covers
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I’m going to stick with Content Strategy for the Web for this too. The book has a model — the Content Strategy Quad — that breaks down what content strategy covers in a way that’s easy to understand. It’s made up of:
- Content:
- Substance: the kinds of content you’ll create and the messages it will share
- Topics
- Content types
- Source
- Structure: how content is prioritised, organised, formatted and displayed
- Information architecture
- Content modelling
- People:
- Workflow: how you’ll go about creating your content
- People and roles
- Tools and/or platforms
- Processes
- Governance: how you make and communicate decisions
(I know that Brain Traffic has updated the content strategy quad, but I still use the old one. See the updated quad here.)
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08
How to create a content strategy
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This is a very brief description of the long, tough process of crafting a content strategy:
1. Discover:
- Departure point: Find out where you are by doing user, stakeholder, and competitor/comparator research and writing, work out what big challenges and opportunities you’re going to address
- Destination: Set your strategic vision, the end point you’re working towards
2. Plan:
- Compass: the north star and compass points to help you navigate and make decisions, your guiding policies and principles
- Waypoints: the things you want to achieve on the way, things you need to do to get to your destination
3. Move:
- Directions: a set of coherent, prioritised actions to get you to your way points
- Learning: how you’ll gather and analyse data and feed the insight back into your strategy and plan
This is the model I use, based on Richard Rumelt’s strategy ‘kernel’ from the book mentioned above.
I've got a new toolkit available, based on this: it's called the content strategy canvas. It's £10, and if you’ve got no idea where to start with creating a content strategy document, this is the canvas is for you.
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09
What content strategists do
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What a content strategist does will vary a lot, depending on where they work and how they define content strategy.
However, Working in Content has a really useful overview that rings true based on my experience, and also links to example job descriptions:
- Define key brand messages for content
- Create and communicate a content value proposition
- Establish content workflow, management and governance
- Create and disseminate content standards documents, such as style, tone of voice, and accessibility guidelines
- Prioritise, plan, deliver, promote and maintain content for multiple channels and audiences
- Brief colleagues and delegate content tasks
- Content project management
- Conduct stakeholder interviews
- Carry out user research and usability testing
- Create and work with audience personas
- Map content to stages in the user journey
- Perform content audits and keep a detailed and up-to-date inventory
- Carry out competitor analysis
- Identify gaps and opportunities in content
- Find opportunities to rework and reuse existing content
- Information architecture: Create content models, and give recommendations for taxonomy and metadata
- Optimise content in line with SEO best practices, carry out keyword research
- Create and manage editorial calendars
- Publishing to Content Management Systems
- Use analytics tools to monitor content traffic, engagement, leads and conversions after content is published
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10
The difference between content strategy and content design
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To round things off, let’s look at the difference between content strategy and content design. Because while they’re closely related, they’re not the same thing at all.
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Content strategy
- Responsible for the overarching plan and vision for managing, creating and maintaining content
- Might not ever do any content creation
- All content on all channels
- Long-term planning
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Content design
- Responsible for designing content to meet specific user needs.
- Likely to do a lot of content creation
- Individual products, services, pieces of content
- Iterative and responsive to immediate user needs and requirements
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Content strategy
- Get all the right content to the right person in the right place at the right time to achieve the org’s goals
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Content design
- Create content that solves user problems
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That's it! Thanks for reading and don't forget to
let me know what you think by replying or
emailing tenthings@lapope.com.
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Content strategy toolkits
Tried-and-tested content strategy lessons and templates. Get a steer in the right direction from someone who’s been there.
>>> See the toolkits
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