Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

• Reuse and structured content (or “intelligent content”)

  • Single-channel strategy (e.g., mobile)

  Yes, a content strategist will often assume responsibility for the activities and deliverables associated with each of these. In many cases, there are already several solid resources available about these practices, both online and offline. We’re keeping our focus on an introduction to content strategy, so we’ve made it our job to synthesize this information and frame it up in ways that allow teams to tackle content challenges holistically.

  What’s New in this Edition

  When you set out to write a second edition, it’s awfully tempting to scrap everything and write an entirely different book. Instead, we’ve tried to strike a balance: plenty of new information for readers of the first edition, but a similar introductory flavor for our first-time readers.

  As the proud owner of this shiny new edition, here’s what you’ll get:

  • Expanded and restructured processes and tools for the research, development, and implementation phases of content strategy

  • Recent case studies examining the impact content strategy has had on a variety of small and large organizations

  • An examination of the ways content-focused disciplines and job roles work together

  • Discussion of the roadblocks you may encounter and ways the field of content strategy continues to evolve

  A Note about Content Strategy for the “Web”

  Content strategy. It’s not just for websites anymore.

  Actually, content strategy was never just for websites. In fact, it’s been around a lot longer than the web. So why all the recent attention?

  While organizations have struggled for decades—centuries, even—to make sense of their content, they were always able to keep the chaos (and the consequences) to themselves. Then came websites, which created the perfect content strategy storm. Suddenly, organizations had to put all of their content (product info, investor reports, press releases, etc., etc.) in one place. For the first time. For all the world to see. And, it hurt.

  You can redesign a home page. You can buy a new CMS. But unless you treat your content with strategic consideration, you can’t fix your website. Once people started to accept this fact, the conversation took off. It’s a pain point everyone shares, and content strategy offers relief.

  Here’s the other thing: In our opinion, focusing on the web is still the easiest way to learn about content strategy. Once you “get” content strategy for the web, you can easily see its applications across platforms and throughout the enterprise.

  All that said: Throughout the book, when we use the phrases “web,” “online,” or “interactive” content, we’re often not just talking about websites. The overarching goals and approaches of content strategy are relevant across every medium, platform, and device. As evolving technology continues to throw us one curve ball after the next, keeping a handle on our content—no matter where it is and who it’s for—has become more critical than ever.

  And Now, the Book

  Okay, that should be everything. Thanks for your patience with all of this preamble stuff.

  You can go ahead and read the book now.

  Enjoy.

  Reality

  Behold, your content. Your business needs it. Your users want it. And yet no one seems quite sure what to do with it. A website redesign? A new CMS? Whatever the case, you’re ready for a change. Let’s put your content to work.

  1. Now

  YOU LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT thinking about your content. There’s so much to fix. So much to plan for. You want to get ahead, but you can barely keep up with what’s happening day-to-day. The last time you tried talking to someone about The Big Picture, the conversation was cut short by yet another “content emergency” that put you right back in reactive mode. And the content keeps coming. And coming. And coming.

  Wow, one paragraph in and you’re already crying a little?

  Wipe away your tears, dear reader. Because, just for you, we’ve written a very short, non-scary chapter that introduces a few great ways to tackle even your toughest content challenges. (In fact, when you’re finished, you’ll think, “Gee, that wasn’t so bad!” And that is our way of tricking you into reading the rest of the book.)

  Think Big, Start Small

  Good news: you can significantly improve your organization’s content in a fairly short amount of time by taking on any of the following efforts:

  1. Do less, not more.

  2. Figure out what you have and where it’s coming from.

  3. Learn how to listen.

  4. Put someone in charge.

  5. Take action ... now.

  Don’t worry about having your proverbial ducks in a row before you dive in to content strategy. You don’t need months of planning, a new staff, and a million dollars to do it. As Lao Tzu once said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” So let’s get moving.

  (Requisite “Lao Tzu quote in a book about strategy”: check.)

  #1: Do Less, Not More

  Consultant David Hobbs once wrote, “Small websites are easier to manage than big ones. Since this is obvious, why don’t more sites choose to be smaller?”

  Of course, it’s rarely an intentional choice. A website tends to take on a life of its own, its growth fueled by new products and services, changing brand campaigns, multiple publishers, constantly-shifting executive priorities, user-generated content, and more. Beyond the website, there are company blogs, Twitter feeds, press releases, email communications, and so on. The Great River of Content flows freely, rapidly flooding our customers with too much information and drowning its keepers (web editors and content managers) in the process.

  Why do we need all this content? What’s the point?

  It seems that, in many organizations, more content is perceived as more selling opportunities, more user engagement, more help, more everything. But that’s rarely the case. Generally speaking, content is more or less worthless unless it does one or both of the following:

  • Supports a key business objective

  • Fulfills your users’ needs

  If you assessed all of your current content, how much of it would meet these two simple requirements? Ninety-five percent? Seventy-five percent? Less than half? Are you chuckling ruefully and nodding your head yet?

  Less content is easier to manage

  When we talk about content getting published online, we often refer to it as going “live.” Interestingly enough, we seem to think that our content will magically continue to maintain itself, without care and feeding. But spend 30 seconds tooling around almost any website, and you’ll find this is patently untrue. Dead blogs. Outdated product descriptions. Broken links. Irrelevant search engine results.

  The countless ways in which our web content dies on the vine are painful, and sometimes dangerous. It’s one thing to change our brand voice on one media channel but ignore our web content. It’s another to neglect content that may expose us to legal action by a customer or competitor.

  By publishing less content, you will have less content to keep track of over time. It’s a simple equation.

  Less content is more user-friendly

  Let’s say you’re ready to shop around for new auto insurance. You’ve written down a few top-of-mind insurance brands, including Geico and State Farm.

  For starters, you open a browser and type in www.geico.com. You scroll down the home page just a bit, and here is what you see:

  In the first three seconds of staring at this page, how confident do you feel that you’ll find the information you’re looking for?

  Now you decide you’ll give the Geico site search engine a try. You go to the search box and, type in types of insurance. Here are your results:

  Hmm. Pretty worthless. How do you feel now? Frustrated? Resentful? Like leaving?

  Too much content means information is harder to find, whether on the page or within your site. And that means it’s harder for a
customer to make a decision in favor of your product or service.

  By contrast, take a look at State Farm’s home page:

  Clean. Concise. No-nonsense. You’re in, you’re out. And you’re happy.

  Less content costs less to create

  How’s that for a forehead-slapper?

  By prioritizing useful and relevant over “wouldn’t it be cool” and “just in case,” you will magically dismiss at least half of your web content projects. That means you’ll free up time and money for things like planning and measurement, two content-related tasks that often get short shrift in the race to do more online.

  How can you begin to scale back on content? Ensure that your website content maps back to key business objectives and user goals. Create a web editorial calendar that specifies when and why new content will be published. And, moving forward, stop creating so much “just-in-case” content.

  #2: Figure Out What you have and Where it’s Coming From

  You may dream of throwing out your old content and starting over. Reality would like to disagree with that idea. The content you have exists for one reason or another (even if they aren’t good reasons), so before you can do anything with it, you’re going to need to look at it. And the best way to accurately assess your current content woes is to conduct a content audit. An audit is an accounting of all currently published web content, with all the details recorded in a spreadsheet.

  There are two basic kinds of audits—quantitative inventories and qualitative assessments. As information architecture expert Christina Wodtke says, an inventory catalogs “what’s there” and an assessment answers the question: “is it any damn good?”* Depending on your situation you can do one or both.

  *http://www.contentcompany.biz/articles/content_audit.html

  Many people only think of audits when they are redesigning a website or migrating content to a new content management system (CMS), but audits are valuable at any time during the life of your content. In fact, doing a content audit can be a terrific first step in building a business case for content strategy. Simply putting everything together in one big, scary-looking document and saying, “Yes, hello, have you seen what a disaster our website is lately?” can often spur people to action.

  If you’re dealing with a few hundred pages of content, you can and should take on a content audit immediately. If you’re a larger organization with thousands of pages, a comprehensive content audit may simply be impossible to take on all at once. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen.

  Ready to dig in immediately? Head on over to Chapter 5, Audit.

  #3: Learn how to Listen

  In our experience, most content problems exist simply because no one has ever asked the right kinds of questions about it: specifically, questions that focus on the people and processes that have an impact on its lifecycle. But even when organizations are asking the right questions, it’s still only half of the equation. If you’re going to get the right answers, you need to learn how to listen.

  So who should you listen to? Your boss? The “experts”? That guy in the cube next to you who keeps reading over your shoulder and making comments about what you should do?

  Generally speaking, we encourage you to...

  • Listen to your colleagues. When it comes to content development and maintenance, people have specific needs and challenges that deserve to be acknowledged. Content ownership spans several roles and responsibilities: requesters, providers, creators, reviewers/approvers, and publishers. Their skills, tools, and perspectives must be assessed and considered as you develop your content strategy.

  • Listen to your users. It’s such an obvious statement, but it bears repeating (and repeating, and repeating): No one knows better what your customer needs than your customer. Although many of us truly believe we know exactly what our end users really want from us online, we can’t know unless we ask them.

  The best thing you can do is simply to stop assuming you already know the answers to the questions you’ve been asking. The harder you listen, the better you’ll understand the rationale, politics, emotions, and motivations behind the reasons content-related decisions are (or aren’t) being made. After all, you’re not creating plans for some alternate reality in which everything perfectly unfolds according to The Strategy. You’re planning for human beings and their ever-shifting needs and desires—also known as the real world.

  For more information on how to craft the right questions for your content discovery process, see Chapter 4, Alignment, and Chapter 6, Analysis.

  #4: Put Someone in Charge

  So. Who owns your web content?

  Because we are psychic (we’ll get to your love life and money issues later), we predict you will answer one of the following three ways:

  • Lots of people.

  • One person, except that person is mostly just in charge of fulfilling other people’s content requests.

  • Huh. I have no idea.

  In other words ... no one. No one owns the web content. That means no one has a real sense of what’s out there: Is it up to date? Accurate? Still relevant? Most importantly, though, there’s no one who actually gets to say “no.” And that, dear reader, is bad.

  Here’s where we turn to the world of print publishing for some insight. Have newspapers been coming together day after day, year after year under distributed publishing models with no executive editorial oversight? No. Does a magazine make it to press thanks to a staff of writers whose marching orders are to acquiesce to every “emergency” content request? No. Also? No.

  Your organization needs to have a person—or specific people—offically In Charge of All Things Web Content. This doesn’t mean they need to be solely responsible for all web content creation, delivery, and governance. It means that they are charged with the same duties as an editor-in-chief (or executive editor) is for a print publication—overseeing high-level processes, budgets, and policies.

  In a larger organization, it’s likely that a team will work together to oversee content production and maintenance. The most important point, here, is that specific individuals or teams must be empowered to make content-related decisions ... especially when it comes to saying “no.”

  For more information on content workflow and ownership, see Chapter 9, People.

  #5: Take Action ... Now

  Still feeling overwhelmed? That’s okay. But we’re going to ask you to take a deep breath and get ready to “fake it ’til you make it”—that is, to dive in and start swimming.

  You have to start somewhere, sometime, so you might as well start now. There are lots of things you can do to get the ball rolling, whether or not you have approval or budget. For example, you can:

  • Ask your boss which part of the website drives her craziest, then talk about how to approach improving it.

  • Start asking specific questions about content—its purpose, the people who own it, and so on.

  • Educate yourself. Read articles, participate in group forums, and listen to podcasts to better arm yourself with the right ammunition when your ideas come under fire.

  • Take colleagues to coffee or lunch. Ask questions and listen carefully. Let them know you’re on their side, even when they’re at odds with each other. Start building trust by focusing people on the outcome: better content, less pain and suffering.

  Most of all, don’t be afraid to “fake it til you make it.” You don’t need to be an expert in content strategy to dive in and start getting things done.

  You Can Do It!

  Hey, check you out! Just a few pages in, and already you’re acquainted with some of the tried-and-true methods of successful content strategists everywhere. Do you feel smarter? You look smarter. Go walk around and see if anyone notices.

  Now comes the caveat. The reality is that, within most organizations, content has always been an afterthought—it’s considered a byproduct of people’s everyday efforts, rather than an asset that requires strategic consideration. No one accurat
ely plans for it. No one has time to slow down and think about it. It’s last on the list of things to spend time, money, or effort on.

  You can handle this. You can make things right. But first, you need to understand what’s wrong.

  2. Problem

  GREAT CONTENT MEETS USERS’ NEEDS and supports key business objectives. It engages and informs. It’s well-written and intuitively organized. It keeps people coming back for more. But when content sucks—when it’s overwritten, redundant, hard to find, irrelevant—people come, look, and leave. And, sometimes, they never come back. Most of the content we find online is simply in the way—even outdated or straight-up inaccurate. It’s not doing what we need it to do. And somehow, we can’t seem to get it fixed. It’s always the elephant in the room, the one thing no one really wants to talk about. And man, that is one ugly elephant.

  So whose fault is this content crisis, anyway? And who’s going to clean up this mess?

  No Finger-Pointing Allowed

  It’s very unlikely that your content challenges are caused by a single person or department. Content is a complex, hairy beast that depends on myriad people, technologies, and processes. When you can find a shared language to discuss your content challenges, you’ll be better able to collaborate with your colleagues and identify solutions.

  In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the most common obstacles that keep us from turning bad content into better content:

  • We treat content like a commodity.

  • We don’t have time to make a plan.