The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [13]
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In most cases, at least some brand messages will have been handed down from an internal marketing group. And remember, if you’re working on content strategy and you’ve been given only top-level messages, you’re well within your rights to push for more specific messages to help you shape your content. In fact, doing otherwise would be a mistake.
There’s a whole lot more to rhetoric than this tiny nibble can convey, and it’s a field begging to be examined by content specialists of all kinds. Content consultant Colleen Jones puts it this way (http://bkaprt.com/cs/8/):12
Rhetoric is the study of using language to persuade or influence. It’s been around since Aristotle. How can we ignore rhetoric—the persuasive use of words—as we try to make our word-filled websites persuasive? That would be like trying to bake a delicious cake with no understanding of flour, milk, or chocolate.
Crimes against cake are not to be ignored, and neither is the rich tradition of rhetoric. And if the modern language of marketing makes you twitchy, a good dose of rhetorical theory may be just what you need to get your brain in gear and create persuasive content. (If this subject interests you, get thee to a copy of Clout, by Colleen Jones. It’s a superb resource for content people, whether or not they’re in marketing, and it has an entire chapter on rhetoric that is vastly more sophisticated than my comic-book overview.)
Evaluation rocks
Marketing people—and especially their advertising brethren—succeed when they persuade their target audiences to act in a particular way. In other words, they can measure success by measuring how many new desired actions they’ve inspired. In the print world, this has long been a sticky problem. If you run shampoo commercials on television while also putting ads in magazines and on the sides of city buses, how will you know which part of your campaign is helping the most? This problem is why marketers invented coupons and discount codes—they’re trackable.
On the internet, things are different and just about everything ad-viewers and other web users do can be tracked and analyzed. In the last 15 years, marketers have made a science of online performance analysis, and there’s an intimidatingly large body of literature (well, maybe “literature”) on the subject, about which more in Chapter 3. For now, consider this: if you’re going to work with content on the internet, you need to make and execute a solid plan for determining whether or not what you do works.
If you’re coming to content strategy without a marketing background, it may be hard to tell the broad, genuinely useful approaches from the Google-Ad-Your-Way-To-Success stuff. I quite like Eric T. Peterson’s Web Analytics Demystified and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators, which take a more holistic approach to performance measurement than most books that focus exclusively on hit counts and click-tracking. Both books are out of print, but both are available as free downloads