Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

  Process: Tasks and timing

  From request to publication to archiving (or not!), your organization has workflow and governance processes for getting “all things content” done. Even if these processes aren’t standardized or documented, they exist.

  Why is understanding processes so important? Because any changes to content will create changes to the processes. So, take time to know what you’re messin’ with.

  Find out:

  • What are the existing processes for planning, creating, translating, and maintaining content?

  • Do they work differently for typical content updates versus emergencies?

  • What parts work well? Which don’t?

  • Where are the bottlenecks and stopgaps?

  • Who is overworked and who has capacity (and ability) to take on more?

  • Are there tools—like style guides or templates—in place?

  • How is content effectiveness measured, if at all?

  • Is there anyone actually responsible for designing and overseeing content tasks?

  Again, it can help to sketch out your findings by creating a current workflow map.

  In most cases, documenting a workflow is an eye-opening experience for everyone involved. Who knew there were so many steps? Who knew the editors often need to chase down missing information from subject matter experts? Why are people in four different departments reviewing content before it goes live? No wonder people hate content.

  Governance: What are the laws of the land?

  While you’re learning about content workflow, keep an eye out for governance activities. Try to find out:

  • Who makes the decisions about content standards?

  • How is content success measured?

  • Are there content policies, standards, style guides, or other editorial tools in place?

  There might not be any governance. Or every department in the organization might have its own rules. Either way, you need to know what’s up.

  Workflow and governance analysis helps your stakeholders understand the true scale of the investment (time and money) your organization makes in content. Which, in turn, leads to realistic expectations. Which then leads to workplace harmony, and probably world peace. (See Chapter 9, People.)

  External Impact Factors: Look Around You

  Knowing what the organization wants is important, but be careful not to fall victim to the “navel-gazing” syndrome. You know, the phenomenon where organizations spend so much time thinking about themselves, they forget there’s a real world outside with the power to bring them down. You need to analyze the forces beyond your control that impact your content.

  Users: Here they Come (Or Go)

  Ah, users. You know, the whole problem with users is this whole “free will” thing: They show up, sign in, or download at their own discretion. You can’t make them do anything they don’t want to do. Their actions are out of your control. So inconvenient.

  No matter how they find you, your users almost always have very specific goals and expectations. And if your content doesn’t meet their expectations—and quickly—they will leave. Period.

  Now, you may think you know what they want. This, of course, is silly. While you may be an expert about your product or service, you most certainly cannot read your users’ minds. In order to really know what your users’ goals are, you need to find a way to ask them. You also need to understand where they’re coming from, who else they’re talking to (competitors), what your audience segmentation is, and which messages will most likely convert and retain them.

  User research: Who are these people, anyhow?

  There are unlimited ways to get a good understanding of who your users are, what they want, and how they interact with you. In Colleen Jones’ book, Clout, she discusses a wealth of ways to get more information about your users—their demographics, preferences, expectations, interests, and behaviors. Her list includes:

  • User interviews: An in-depth, structured conversation with a user, usually conducted in person

  • Survey: A series of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions

  • Multivariate and A/B test: A comparison of how different versions of important pages (such as product pages or landing pages) perform on your live website

  • Website analytics: Detailed statistics about how visitors use your website

  • Social and reputation analytics: Measurements of how users are talking about and referring to you on social networks

  • Search and keyword analytics: Measurements of the words people use when they look for content through search engines such as Google (external search), and search on your website (internal search)

  • Contact analytics: Measurements of why and how users contact you (by email, call, chat, etc.) and how they respond

  • Syndicated research: Research conducted by an independent company or organization and often sponsored by several companies within an industry*

  * This is an abbreviated list. For further details, see Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content.

  We’d also add:

  • Focus groups: A moderated group discussion, where several users answer your questions en masse

  • Customer service analysis: A survey, interview, or data analysis (where call center or support data is available) about most frequently asked questions, issues, and requests your customer service or sales people get from users

  User research comes in many flavors and can work at all budget levels. If you’ve got the cash for intense studies in an official user lab, hooray! If not, you can try more do-it-yourself options, such as surveys or simply asking a few people what they think.

  Website analytics: The perennial favorite

  Web analytics is just one of the user research methods listed above, but analytics sure are popular. The ability to measure—with some precision—how people interact with our content has been one of the unique, revolutionary aspects of the Web. And it’s so easy. The analytics software just creates the data on its own. Sort of.

  Analytics, used well, can be a goldmine of information. But, they can also be extremely misleading. For example, just because a page gets little traffic doesn’t necessarily mean users don’t want to see it—they might not know it exists. Or, if your analytics system was not set up appropriately, all of the data could be skewed.

  As Colleen Jones says, “Data is your eyes, not your brain.” The data itself is not the outcome. The real value of analytics and other measurements is interpreting what they mean for the bigger picture: how your content is performing. So, work with your analytics team to understand your metrics. And remember: Analytics are only one source of information—it’s a good idea to use several types of evaluation to get the full picture.

  Usability testing: See your content in action

  Even though content is often the number one thing that can make or break a user experience, usability testing—observing people while they interact with a product or site—often fails to consider it. And it should. As Angela Colter (Electronic Ink) writes, “While usability testing watches what users do, not what they say they do, content testing determines what users understand, not what they say they understand.”

  There’s nothing quite like sitting down and watching users interact with your content. Colter recommends using standard readability formulas, moderated usability tests, unmoderated usability testing, or a cloze test (a test that removes certain words from a sample of your text and asks users to fill in the missing words). The important thing is to find a way to test not only user behavior, but user comprehension.

  If you’re working on a project in which the usability testing falls outside of your jurisdiction, now is the time to make friends with colleagues on the design or UX team. Learn about other plans and processes for user testing. Find out if, how, and when you can collaborate. Work together to get the information you need.

  Competitors: The other Guys

  In order to
make strategic recommendations that will set you apart from the crowd, you need to understand the competitive landscape. Now, many organizations make the mistake of going to their competitors’ websites and freaking out because said competitor has x, y, and z content that their website doesn’t. Inevitably, there’s a fire drill called by someone whose main objectives are to “achieve parity” and “establish competitive advantage” by adding more content to your web properties.

  Don’t audit and analyze your competitors’ websites with the idea that you need to keep up. Consider instead where you can create true competitive advantage. Nine times out of ten, this simply means optimizing your current content (in quality and structure); fixing your site search; and making smart, strategic decisions about what new content you’ll add to the site—why, when, how, for whom, by who, and so on.

  Chances are, your organization has already done some competitive research—which is a valuable place to start. But, general competitive research doesn’t usually focus on content. Take another look at your competitors’ content and consider the following questions:

  How are competitors’ websites organized?

  By looking at how your competitors structure and label their websites, you will discover:

  • Whether industry-standard labels have emerged. For example, if all your competitors are calling their technical support section “Support,” you need to decide whether to stick with the standard or go with a more differentiated option.

  • If there’s a trend toward organizing similar content by audience, by target market, or by product or service type.

  • Where you may be able to borrow intuitive, efficient taxonomies (ways content is organized, categorized, and structured) from websites that are clearly doing things right.

  What topics are covered?

  What are your competitors talking about? Again, this is not an exercise to determine what content you’re missing. Your web content doesn’t need to include every topic that every competitor includes. Instead, use this as an opportunity to identify where you can create differentiation. What aren’t your competitors saying? What content does your user research demonstrate is most important?

  What content formats are available?

  Are your competitors featuring mostly text, or do they have podcasts and video? Do they prefer FAQs or contextual help? Is there a community forum or a review system where user-generated content is helping to inform other people’s buying decisions? Are their employees blogging?

  See how other organizations are supporting the user lifecycle with their web content types. Keep in mind any options that might be well suited to your target audiences, timeframe, internal resources, and budget.

  What’s their brand and messaging like?

  You don’t want to sound like all the other guys. In fact, you may find that all the other guys sound too marketing-y, too academic, or too technical; this provides you with a tremendous opportunity to stand apart from the crowd by creating content that reflects your unique brand and is clear.

  Note things like key messaging, voice and tone, images, video production values, and so on. What are the brand attributes you’d assign to each competitor’s content? Is the site’s personality consistent page-to-page, or is it all over the map? And so on.

  * * *

  Case Study: Sizing Up the Competition

  Laura Blaydon works at Manifest Digital, an independent interactive agency in Chicago, Illinois. This content veteran has some valuable advice for doing an in-depth competitive analysis as part of a multidisciplinary discovery process: Make sure you set aside plenty of time up front to uncover every detail you’ll need before you get started.

  Laura recently worked with a major insurance company that was trying to get a handle on the content their competitors were offering. Together the team went through these steps to define the focus and scope for their analysis:

  • Select competitors for inclusion

  • Determine evaluation criteria

  • List content types/page types to be included

  • Outline scoring method/model

  They spent quite a bit of time defining what they would study and how they would study it. They came up with an impressive methodology for assessing content effectiveness. They only hit one snag: Laura’s team had nearly finished collecting data when the client decided to add another competitor to the pool partway through the project.

  Adding a new competitor didn’t simply cost extra data collection time; it also threw the other steps into question. The team had to backtrack and be sure that the content types and scoring method would remain valid.

  Looking back, Laura is glad that her team had so meticulously vetted their definitions and collection methods, which definitely set the project up for success. If they had been able to address the need for an additional competitor earlier in the process, that would have saved even more time and resources in the long run.

  In the end, all the extra time was worthwhile. Their thorough competitive analysis revealed surprising discrepancies among competitors and important opportunities for Laura’s client.

  * * *

  Where else are competitors active?

  Try to find out what other web content initiatives your competitors have underway. Are they delivering sponsored or branded content on other websites or via social media channels? Have they launched content-driven advertising campaigns? Are they working on related websites that have their own brand identity but are really owned by your competitors? (For example, Johnson & Johnson owns BabyCenter.com.) They may be creating or curating content in places you belong, or launching mobile apps.

  Influencers: The Power Players

  What’s more powerful than a website? Faster than an RSS feed? Leaps over your advertising tactics in a single bound? It’s the “influencers”: People and resources whose opinions inform and shape your customers’ opinions of your organization.

  Today’s technology landscape provides countless ways to research organizations and products. And more than ever, people rely on multiple sources of information to form opinions about organizations. What are your customers’ top influencers saying about you? Does your web content support, contradict, or include influencer content? Why? Why not?

  Here are some influencers to consider. They may not all be relevant to your organization’s products or services, but it’s worthwhile to check out the ones that are:

  • Trade journals and industry associations

  • Analyst reports

  • News media coverage and business magazines (online and offline)

  • Television news and talk shows

  • Online message boards and forums

  • Consumer watch groups

  • Bloggers and social media sites

  • Social media recommendations sites (such as Angie’s List, Guidestar, or del.icio.us)

  • Celebrity speakers or figureheads

  • Friends and family

  Current Events and Trends: Constant Vigilance

  Everything from a new social media site to swiftly changing governmental regulations can impact your final content recommendations. Be sure to keep an eye on:

  • Current events: Political changes, the economy, natural disasters, etc. can all shape your content strategy and ongoing content maintenance needs.

  • Advances in technology: New technology is introduced constantly—your content can be greatly impacted when new technologies such as devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.), programming languages, content management tools, or accessibility tools are released.

  • Trends and best practices: Being a good content strategist or content professional means being a consummate content consumer. That means you always need to be on the lookout for new and interesting content practices that you can use in your own projects. As you go through your daily activities online, ask yourself questions like: Could I use this navigational technique on my site? Infographics are popular right now, are they appropriate for us?

&
nbsp; Communicating the Results

  To make the analysis phase really worthwhile, once you’ve finished, you need to present your key findings to all of the project stakeholders and get them to align on project objectives, assumptions, and risks based on a common level of knowledge.

  In an analysis summary document, spell out everything you’ve learned, from business goals and internal requirements to user needs and competitive advantages. This document shouldn’t include any recommendations for the future content. Its sole purpose is to ensure that everyone on the content team starts the content strategy process with the same information about the complex ecosystem your content lives in. This alignment is key to collaboration and buy-in later.

  Your analysis summary document also will serve as a stellar reference guide for the project. It can help focus resources appropriately, prevent scope-creep, and identify opportunities. Finally, it helps the team remember where you started from and why early decisions were made.

  Mission Discovery: Complete

  So. Here we are.

  Your discovery phase is coming to a close. In Chapter 4, Alignment, you began the process of getting all of your stakeholders involved in the project. In Chapter 5, Audit, you did a deep-dive audit of your content. And, here in this chapter, you analyzed all the factors that have impact on your content.

  And now?

  You’re ready to set your course for the future. It’s strategy time.

  (p.s. After all this, can you believe people are always waiting until the last minute to figure out their content? Seriously. Blows our minds.)