The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [18]
Content strategy incorporates a wider range of processes and deliverables than do most of its sibling fields, and one thing we rarely discuss is how to choose the best approach for each project. As a result, we often stick to the same few easily repeated techniques, even when they’re not the ones best suited to a particular project. When we do that, we miss the chance to do better and more interesting work.
Every deliverable you create and every meeting you lead deals with two kinds of strategy: the one you’re developing for the project, and the one you’re using to guide your own communication with your colleagues, employers, and clients. These people usually won’t be your target audience for the project, but they are the audience for your deliverables. I’m not suggesting that we do full-scale user research and strategy for each client or document—if we did, we’d never get anything else done—but we can think strategically about our work.
By phase: when does it happen?
The most obvious way of grouping deliverables is by project phase, especially if you’re a consultant. You may have your own terms for each phase, but whether you work with an agency or alone, you’re probably familiar with a process that looks something like this (FIG 2):
FIG 2: A progression of phases within user experience and content strategy projects.
If you’re working with a design team, breaking down your work by project phase can help your colleagues in other disciplines understand how your work will interact with theirs. It can also help clients understand how your work fits into the project as a whole.
The problem with this method of thinking and talking about content strategy is that it doesn’t say much about what the work really looks like. If your teammates or clients aren’t familiar with content strategy, you’ll need to say more about your work than how it fits into the project timeline. One good place to begin is with the function or purpose of your content strategy deliverables.
By function: what does it do?
A second way to look at our work is to consider what each tool or process is meant to accomplish. Think of this as a detailed, project-specific version of developing a methodology. On a very high level, you need to know what you intend to accomplish, either with a content strategy project or over the long term in a content strategy role. Once you understand the highest-level goal, you can work backward to figure out what you need to produce.
Here’s an example. Say I’m working alongside a user experience team to redesign a website for a large consultancy. The company’s website contains more than 5,000 pieces of content, and its publishing system is distributed across a dozen divisions and locations. The project brief explains that our top three goals are to align the company’s online presence with its brand, to make it easier for potential customers to find the information they need, and to bring consistency to the website sections managed by its various divisions.
Going back to my underlying methodology, I can work out what I need to do to accomplish our goals:
Evaluate: Quantitative and qualitative content audit; traffic analysis; competitive review; user research, personas, and scenarios (in collaboration with user experience); publishing process analysis.
Design: Communication brief (explains project goals in detail); high-level and detailed recommendations on overall messages, what kind of content to add, what to get rid of, and how to communicate with the site’s various audiences; metadata recommendations (in collaboration with technology team members); editorial style guidelines; publishing workflow; content sourcing and aggregation plan; cross-channel communication recommendations; success metrics and analysis plan.
Execute: Example content for each major content type; content templates to support the development of new content pre- and post-launch; content creation and publishing workshop; editorial style guide.
That’s it. Thinking about function can help shake content work