Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

  No Time or Budget for Analysis? Find It

  When you’re constantly being asked to deliver projects in less time with fewer resources and smaller budgets, how can you possibly slow down for content-focused analysis?

  The real question is ... how can you not?

  Analysis uncovers unrealized challenges, risks, and opportunities. With your analysis in hand, you can base your future recommendations on reality. And that’s not just a good idea, it’s crucial. It’s a step you can’t afford to skip.

  Bite off Only What You Can Chew

  Analysis doesn’t have to be some megalithic effort. Your analysis activities can be scaled according to project size and resource constraints. Please note that we said scaled, not skipped.

  If you’re short on time, figure out which activities and information are most valuable to your specific project. Just remember: Every hour you spend in analysis will likely save dozens, if not hundreds, of hours during content creation, delivery, and upkeep.

  Internal Impact Factors: Look Deep Within

  Looking inside the organization is an easy place to start. After all, you (or members of your client team) work there. But whether you work for an organization directly or as a consultant, it’s hard to convince people to do analysis on their own company. Why spend time, energy, and budget learning things they already know?

  Chances are, nobody’s ever sat down and taken a comprehensive look at the content’s purpose, process, and policy. And, even if someone has, how long ago did it happen? When internal analysis is ignored or out of date, entire strategies are built on un-researched assumptions and isolated opinions—costing everyone time and money.

  How Do You “Do” Internal Analysis?

  The best way to conduct an internal analysis—by far—is to talk to people inside the organization. Sure, you can spend some time digging through documentation, but at some point, human interaction is required.

  You can get perspectives from people in several ways, such as:

  • Interviews: One-on-one discussions are a great way to get the real dirt. You’re able to follow the interviewee’s specific interests and ask lots of follow-up questions. As an added benefit, interviews are a great way to start a personal relationship and develop trust. That’ll be helpful later, when you develop recommendations and try to implement them.

  • Group discussions: Talking to several people at once will get you more general information than interviews. However, it’s an efficient way to get information and help people learn about each other’s perspectives at the same time. Be sure to keep groups to a manageable size. Fewer than eight people is probably best.

  • Questionnaires or surveys: These aren’t ideal, but they can help you gather information from large groups of people, and help them feel included. Questionnaires and surveys work particularly well if everyone you’re surveying does the same job. (For example, a well-done email questionnaire to a group of sales reps could provide you with a lot of information about how they use content during sales calls.) Just be sure the questionnaires are short and easy to complete. It’s also helpful if someone with authority encourages participation.

  No matter what method you use, be sure to really listen to people—even if their perspective is different than the majority’s. There is nearly always something you can learn from everyone.

  Once you’ve completed your conversations, summarize the big themes and note discrepancies. You’ll want to include your interview results when you share your research later. (It probably goes without saying, but be careful not to betray any confidential information when reporting your findings. Nothing kills trust like telling tales out of school.)

  * * *

  Listening: The Content Strategist’s Most Important Job

  Brain Traffic’s Erin Anderson says that when it comes right down to it, our most important job as content strategists isn’t content strategy. It’s listening.

  This means the kind of listening that demands our active attention and participation. The kind that leaves us with the information we need to recommend truly smart, thoughtful content solutions. The kind that requires complete focus on the content challenge at hand.

  Whether you’re scoping a project, clarifying user goals, or managing rounds of client feedback, Erin suggests holding fast to a few rules for active listening:

  1. Act like a journalist.

  “Open questions” start with “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” “how,” “how much,” etc. If we’re only getting yes/no answers from a client, it means we’re being lazy reporters. And it means our conversation can only scratch the surface in terms of uncovering user needs and business goals.

  2. Get comfortable with silence.

  If a question we ask makes the interviewee pause or react emotionally, it’s natural to want to lighten the mood. But jumping in to fill the silence can kill a potentially illuminating discussion. Uncomfortable silences often signal an imminent breakthrough or moment of truth. It’s worth letting your interviewee collect his thoughts and respond candidly when he’s ready.

  3. Ask silly questions.

  We wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor by pretending we have all the answers. More to the point, asking “stupid” questions quickly exposes the big, ugly, chronic content problems nobody wants to tackle. A good goal is to ask at least one such question in each client meeting.

  4. Check your work.

  So we’ve done our job, asked our questions, and listened carefully to the answers. But only after we’ve agreed on the issues at hand can we proceed with a meaningful plan. That means organizing the resulting data into a document that can be discussed, aligned and signed off on, and used to guide the way forward.

  * * *

  Factors that Matter

  When you start peeking under the covers of your organization, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Seriously. It can be ugly in there. But you don’t have to tackle everything at once. When you’re designing your interview questions, start by focusing on these four topics:

  • Target audiences: Who do you want to engage in conversation? Why? (We’ll talk about actual users a little bit later.)

  • Messaging: What do you want those target users to know, learn, or “get” from your content?

  • Channels: What channels (on- and offline) are used to deliver content? How are they all connected? What is the business purpose of each one?

  • Workflow/Governance: How is content created, maintained, and managed? Who’s involved?

  In our experience, when you have answers to these questions, everything else gets a lot clearer. And although they might sound easy, answering these questions is deceptively difficult. Even if you can answer them off the top of your head, it’s likely that people in your organization will have different perspectives. And that’s where the fun begins.

  Let’s take a closer look at the “big four.”

  Target audiences: Who are you trying to reach?

  Who is your web content for, ideally? As you ask your stakeholders this question, people will have lots of different opinions. The marketers will say, “It’s all about the customer.” Human resources will want to please job seekers. Investor relations will want to talk to—surprise—the investors. This is to be expected. For right now, just find out as much as you can about each audience. Ask stakeholders to:

  • Define their target audiences clearly. For example, ask, “When you say ‘customers,’ which are you referring to: prospective customers, existing customers, or both?”

  • Describe why the audiences are important to them (the stakeholders) and to the business. It may seem obvious why an audience—like investors—is important, but hearing the stakeholder specifically answer this question can be pretty informative.

  • Arrange the target audiences in order of importance to them and to the business (and if the lists are different, have them explain why).

  Compile all of the information you gather in your analysis findings document s
o you can share it later. During the content strategy recommendations phase, you’ll need to get everyone together and negotiate some priorities and parameters. (See Chapter 8, Content.)

  Messaging: What are you saying?

  “Messaging” is one of those words that means something different to everyone. To some, messaging is about creating specific words and phrases in an approved copy bank. To others, it means defining a “brand promise” or voice and tone (e.g., “We want to sound friendly but sophisticated.”).

  To us, messages are simply bits of information (thoughts or ideas). Messaging is the art of deciding what information or ideas you want to give to—and get from—your users. Needless to say, messaging is an important part of defining your content requirements. You can use messaging to:

  • Prioritize content needs

  • Keep content consistent (over media and time)

  • Align content owners on content requirements

  During your analysis, you don’t have to define the messages you will use in your content going forward. But you do need to understand what messages exist in content today (whether it’s on purpose or not) and how (or if) stakeholders would like messaging to change in the future.

  If you’re in a large organization, there might be multi-million dollar projects devoted to creating established messaging hierarchies (present and future). If you’re in a smaller organization, a web project might be the first time anyone has really thought about messaging. Either way, you need to get input from all of the key stakeholders about what they want to say to their target audiences.

  Then, when you create content strategy recommendations, you will work with the stakeholders to narrow the field of possibilities—and choose the right combination of messages for the content.

  Channels: Everything’s connected

  A channel is a medium through which content is delivered. Users are likely going to use several channels (on- and offline) over the course of their relationship with you, so it’s important that everything is consistent and complementary. That means all of the content creators in the organization, regardless of the channels they focus on, need to work together. The first step to that collaboration utopia is just identifying what’s out there.

  What channels exist?

  Organizations are often stunned to realize how many content irons they have in the fire. It’s not uncommon for a large organization to have hundreds of websites all pointing to each other with no master plan. And don’t get us started on print materials or social media or mobile initiatives or SEO-focused content or ... are you cringing yet? Because we are.

  To get a handle on what exists, you can:

  • Talk to communications producers (marketing, PR, advertising, technical communications, etc.) and find out what they have and how it’s related to your content. For example, is someone creating a print brochure that will tell the user to go to your website for more information? If so, the website needs to have more information. Good to know.

  • Ask your friendly IT people for help compiling a list of all the URLs the company owns and stats on the traffic to each one. Are all the URLs still active? Have any sites been ignored or forgotten? How much traffic goes from one site to another?

  • Follow the links on your corporate website and see where they go.

  • Search for your organization on search engines and social media sites—you might be surprised at what you find created by (and about) your organization.

  Common channels you should watch for include:

  • Public website(s): What are all of your organization’s public websites? (There are likely more than you think.)

  • Social media activities: Where do you have active accounts? What types of content are being shared among social media participants, and where?

  • Mobile: Is there a mobile version of your website? Do you have proprietary applications delivering content to your mobile users?

  • Intranets/extranets: Are there intranets/extranets associated with the organization that your users may access?

  • Public relations and awareness: How does the PR team work? Are there other awareness campaigns or tactics? (For example, does your boss do a lot of public speaking?)

  • Print media: Do you communicate to your users with brochures, spec sheets, or similar? If so, are users likely to see those materials before or after they see your web content? Do they refer to your project content?

  • Email campaigns: Do you communicate regularly to your users via email? Will those emails link to your project content?

  • Advertisements/SEM: Are there advertising campaigns currently underway? What about paid search placements? Do they link to your project content?

  This undertaking, of course, is easier said than done in midsize to behemoth-size organizations. If you can’t get the whole picture, start with your highest priority channel or area of focus. Find out what it is connected to. Repeat with the next priority channel when time and resources allow.

  Once you know what exists, mapping everything out can help you (and your content partners) understand how things are interconnected. A map sheds light on how important it is not to publish, revise, or remove content without understanding what other sources may point to that content as a solution or reference for potential customers.

  Here’s a simple example. AwesomeCo is a growing software company. They’re planning to redo their website, so they’ve created a channel map with the website as the focus.

  How do users (ideally) interact with each channel?

  The next step is to define the role each content delivery channel plays in your target audiences’ relationship with your organization. When you understand why (and when) the target users access each channel, you’ll have a better grasp on what content belongs where.

  One way to do this is to compare your channels to a “user lifecycle.” A user lifecycle provides a step-by-step explanation of how the user relationship would work in an ideal situation. The most common lifecycles focus on a consumer purchase path (how we get a customer to buy something). But, you can also create lifecycles for other objectives, such as knowledge acquisition (how we get an audience to learn something) or loyalty (how we entice an audience to return to the content regularly). Check with your business strategy, communications, and marketing teams to see if any of these lifecycles have already been developed.

  When you’ve established a lifecycle, you can see how your content delivery channels fit into the overall process by assigning each channel to one or more lifecycle steps.

  In this example, AwesomeCo has already established a five-part lifecycle for clients:

  • Learn: Prospective client hears about us for the first time.

  • Consider: Client looks to see if we have the services they need.

  • Try: Client decides whether the solution is a fit by looking at demos, case studies, and other documentation.

  • Buy: Client makes a purchase decision and negotiates with sales representatives.

  • Use/Maintain: Client uses software and requires support and maintenance.

  Here’s how the channels look plotted next to the lifecycle:

  Because AwesomeCo tailors each piece of software to the client’s needs, the goal of channels such as the public website and print materials is to drive clients toward a negotiation with the sales team. But, because their primary prospect acquisition tactic is referrals, they also spend a significant amount of time on social media and content for existing clients.

  When you take a close look at all of the channel connections and user relationships, you are able to better focus future content efforts—avoiding duplication and improving the overall user experience. And, that makes everyone—the business, users, and you—a whole lot happier.

  Workflow and governance: How does content happen?

  It seems like everyone has an opinion about web content, but no one is really sure whose job it is to assess requests and implement changes. So, it’s best to find out who’s in
volved and how the content process currently works.

  Roles: Who’s doing what? (And why?)

  In most organizations, even small ones, roles that include responsibilities for web content are somewhat of a moving target ... or, in some cases, an unsolved mystery.

  There are more than a few people who may be involved with your content from concept to publication. Some people may play multiple roles. Here are a few examples:

  • Requesters submit requests for web content to be created, updated, or removed.

  • Providers are subject matter experts who own and manage source content—or who have the necessary information in their heads—that will be used by creators to develop web content.

  • Creators are responsible for actually developing the content (text, graphics, audio, and video).

  • Reviewers/approvers must be consulted about some or all of the content prior to its publication online. (Note: Not every reviewer will have the same clout—do your best to understand who needs to be involved and how.)

  • Publishers get the content online, via coding, a content management system, a wiki, a blog, or other technical wizardry.

  During your analysis, you need to find out who these people are. Which department do they work in, and who do they report to? What are their skill sets? Is content part of their job description or an afterthought in their already busy schedule? Are there interoffice politics involved that may affect content recommendations? This can be a tricky topic to navigate, especially in larger organizations. But, the answers to these questions are essential to understanding how the content process works today—and how you can get it to work better in the future.