What even is content strategy?

I mention content strategy a lot when people ask me what it is that I do, and I always get a look of confusion as a response. So here’s a rundown of what content strategy actually is to me, and how I use it to help businesses of all sizes.

First of all, if your business has a website, social media, traditional print content, or anywhere else that you distribute content (copy, videos, imagery), then you would benefit from implementing at least some elements of content strategy into your workflow. In very basic terms, content strategy ensures the relevant content is reaching a user exactly when they need it, exactly where they expect to find it. So what do you need in order to be able to achieve this?

Goals

First things first, you need to decide what you want your content to do. You don’t need to limit yourself to one goal, as each sector of your business most likely needs to achieve something different, but they all need to adhere to your content strategy. Think of things like whether you want to be considered a thought leader in your industry. Or perhaps you want to generate more leads and make conversions. Once you’ve got your goals in mind, we can start forming a mission statement.

Personas

These are essential to make sure you are targeting people who are actually part of your audience. For this, you need to consider all aspects of your demographic, including their interests, stage in life, their needs, and wants. Remember, you can have more than one persona depending on your business.

Style guide

To make sure your content is created in a recognisable, accurate way, a style guide is required. This guide will have everything from tone of voice through to the way you spell and format specific words, through to your preferred method of bullet-pointing. It’s useful so no matter who is writing for your brand, they can pick up the style guide and write content in a way that matches your brand’s style.

Structure

This is where you’ll also require a user experience (UX) designer. The UX designer and the content strategist work together to inform each other on the design requirements of your brand, and the content strategist will inform the content requirements. For example, when building a template for a section on the website, a UX designer may come up with a great design, but they may not allow enough space for copy that a content strategist needs to implement. Vice versa, a content strategist may provide copy that doesn’t fit any components within the design. Working together, solid structures can be created that allow designers and content strategists to be able to create pages effectively and quickly.

People

Depending on the size of your business, you may many people doing different roles that will all influence your content strategy. You need to make a plan for how these people fit into the process and decide which order they will touch content should they need to. This will help you determine your workflow for creating content for your brand.

Editorial calendar

This one is closely aligned with governance. There’s nothing worse than something appearing on a website or on social media without those who need to see it knowing about it. Or, planning to have your campaign featured on the home page of a website, but not realising someone else has booked this spot for the time you need it. Having an editorial calendar means everyone can see what’s happening when, no campaigns are overlapping, and those who need to see content before it goes live are across it.

Governance

Once you’ve published content, who’s responsible for making sure it stays accurate? Once you’ve created a style guide, who’s responsible for maintaining it and ensuring it’s adhered to? These are aspects of governance you will need to factor into your strategy.

So you’ve got the tools. What’s the process?

Content strategy is not a do it once, and forget it situation. Once you’ve built the bones and created the content for your platform, you need to make sure it is accurate and relevant into the future. This means you need to follow a content lifecycle management process.

Audit

Decide how often you will review your content. You can note this on your content calendar so you’re reminded to check on specific content. You can also run an audit. This means you can check all content on your website that, for example, mentions a certain product, and then update every page to have the new information. This is great in situations where a campaign offering changes or if a product you sell suddenly uses a different type of material.

Reiterate

Once you’ve found all the spots you need to update content, get to work. This process is something to keep running through on a regular basis and will need to include all content you create so nobody stumbles across old, out-of-date content and has a bad customer experience.

What will work for each business will be slightly different. I’ve worked with large corporate enterprises right through to one-person-run businesses to implement a quality strategy, so if you’d like a hand with getting your content flowing to your customers when they need it, and where they need it, contact me today to discuss how we can work together.