Strategy
Here it is. The moment you’ve been waiting for. It’s time to put your content to work, to transform it into the business asset you’ve always known it could be.
7. Core
CONTENT STRATEGY is a bit like going on a trip. If you’ve done your audit and analysis, you know where you’re starting from. With alignment, you’ve ensured your travel companions are ready to go. But, before you start planning the specifics of your journey—you need to answer one extremely critical question: What’s your destination?
Back in Chapter 3, we introduced the content strategy quad. Right in the middle of that bad boy is the core strategy. The core strategy is what connects all the other components of your content strategy together: It provides the all-necessary “guiding light” that keeps you moving in the right direction, no matter what might happen along the way.
In this chapter, we’ll answer three questions:
• What is a core strategy?
• How do you develop and define a core strategy?
• What does a finished core strategy look like?
What is a Core Strategy?
In any industry, things change constantly. Unfortunately, that means your content needs to change constantly to stay relevant. As a result, you may find yourself in constant content catch-up mode—always reacting to the next thing that comes down the pike and never seeming to make progress.
This is where your core strategy comes in. Again, your content strategy defines how an organization (or project) will use content to achieve its objectives and meet its user needs. The core strategy sets the long-term direction for all of your content-related initiatives—ensuring all activities, big or small, are working together toward the same magnificent future. Tactics might need to change, but your core strategy stays consistent. It helps you withstand the changes and keep moving forward.
An effective core strategy is:
• Flexible: It withstands the changing content environment, accommodating various tactics and team configurations.
• Aspirational: It’s a stretch for the organization, focusing on what you want to become ideally (not what you can feasibly do).
• Memorable: It’s an easily understandable concept that is used constantly to guide activities and decisions.
• Motivational: It’s worthwhile and somewhat exciting—something people want to be a part of.
• Inclusive: It leaves room for a wide variety of individual and team contributions.
Defining your core strategy doesn’t have to be a six-month odyssey that results in a 50-page document. Often, the majority of it can be hammered out in a series of workshops with your core project team ... but don’t exclude your other stakeholders from the process altogether. Remember, content is a team sport. Whether you invite stakeholders to brainstorm with your core team or to react to work the team has already done, the key is to take their opinions into account. Your strategies will be better for it.
How do you Develop and Define a Core Strategy?
Brain Traffic’s Lee Thomas helps organizations define their core strategy using a concept he calls “Achieve-Be-Do.” This approach helps answer critically important questions:
• Achieve: What does your content strategy need to accomplish (for the organization, for your industry, for your product, etc.)?
• Be: What “content product(s)” will we create? (In other words, what will we produce for our users/consumers? How will those content products be valuable to the users/consumers?)
• Do: What will the organization need to do to support the content effort?
Let’s take a look at how this works.
First, Get the Tactical Stuff Out of the Way
When you first consider these questions, you’ll probably find yourself jumping to tactics and solutions to immediate concerns. And that’s fine. Go ahead. Get it all out. Brainstorm all the Achieve-Be-Do tactics and solutions you can.
Then ask yourself:
• What do these tactics have in common?
• What are the business or cultural themes underlying them?
• What about these tactics or immediate concerns prohibits us from doing better, cooler stuff?
• If I didn’t have to do this stuff, what would I like to do with our content instead?
• If I had a magic wand, and I could instantly solve these problems, what would I do next?
Then, Get all Aspirational
Unlike plans, your core strategy shouldn’t be based in today’s reality. Achieving it should be a stretch for your organization, something to aspire to and build toward. So, just for this brief moment, don’t think about what “is” today, what you need to do immediately, or what you think can realistically do. (We’ll get back to that stuff in a bit.) For now, think big.
You’ll know you’re getting closer to your core strategy when your brainstormed ideas start to sound:
Nobody gets motivated by “Let’s try to keep up with the competitor” or “Let’s make our product content slightly less crappy.” Those may be the realities of your next few months, but they don’t have to be your destiny. And, they certainly aren’t your strategy.
Do not Fear the Magic Layer
Content strategist Shelly Bowen refers to something she calls “The Magic Layer.” For consultants, it’s the place between research and deliverables. If you’re inside an organization, it’s the space between your research and your next promotion.
The magic layer is where all the unique and differentiating ideas—like the core strategy—come from. It’s all about invention. And that can be scary.
In her blog post, “Just Make It Up, Already,” Shelly says:
This fear or resistance of invention—of making something up—is holding a lot of us back. It’s as if we’re looking for a book or resource or expert to point us to page 428, second paragraph, for specific and correct directions on what to do. (Then we can annotate it!)
But how did that resource come up with the solution in the first place? They made it up. Sure, they tested it and shared it and revised it. They may even have come up with the idea from a range of sources and experiences. But some individual had to invent it and write it down.
This business of “making it up” is [part of the Magic Layer] and I don’t really talk about it to many people. For obvious reasons. Invention is welcomed in the art world, but within business strategy, it’s much harder to accept.*
* http://www.shellybowen.com/2011/10/magic-layer-invention/
Do not fear the Magic Layer. You can do it. It’s okay. And, what’s more, you can’t do content strategy without it.
What Does a Finished Core Strategy Look Like?
There are no hard and fast rules for what a core strategy looks like. Contrary to popular belief, strategies don’t have to be huge documents with “thud factor.” In fact, at this stage of the game, big treatises are counterproductive. Nobody reads them, much less gets motivated by them.
Your core strategy can be as short as one sentence—as long as that sentence holds meaning for your whole team. It can be a graphic with a caption. We’ve even seen successful mnemonic devices and Top 10 lists a la David Letterman. The key here is short, memorable, and focused on your content. Feel free to make up your own format.
The Core Strategy Statement: An Annotated Sentence
The core strategy statement is one of the tools we regularly use at Brain Traffic to communicate core strategies. We use this tool as a quick, memorable summary of all of the core strategy details we provide to our clients (often presented in a several-page document, which likely can’t be easily repeated from memory).
Here’s how it works. Remember diagramming sentences in grammar school? This is kind of the same, except you don’t have to remember the differences between the participles. Instead of diagramming the parts of speech, you diagram a sentence that represents your strategy. Carefully select each word or phrase with your team, and then annotate the sentence to explain your selec
tions.
This is an internal document. So, make sure the sentence sounds the way you would normally talk to your peers—not some formal rhetoric. You might even want to go through your stakeholder interview notes from the research phase to find effective phrases your stakeholders used themselves. Seeing their own words in print will up the ownership factor.
You might be surprised by the response to this scrappy little diagram. The key is to make it short, memorable, and meaningful.
So, What’s the Plan?
We almost never present a core strategy without including a sneak preview into the first few steps of a tangible, executable action plan. The tactics in the plan that demonstrates how the strategy works in practice. We don’t want to waste all that new-strategy energy and excitement. And neither do you. So let’s keep rolling.
8. Content
OKAY! CONTENT! This is going to be an easy, breezy chapter, because as we’ve been saying all along, content isn’t really that hard to do!
Heh. Just jokin’. But it will be a fun chapter, because now we’re going to explain how to define the content components of the content strategy quad. We’ll walk you through the decisions you’ll need to make, including:
• Substance: What content do you need and why?
• Structure: How will your content be prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed?
As you read through this (gigantic) chapter, please remember: When you make a choice about one component of the quad (like substance, for example), it very likely has impact on all three other components. Connecting the content components and people components is one of the most important roles that content strategy plays in your organization.
Substance
Pop quiz: What should your content do? Okay, time’s up. Answer: Your content must help you achieve your project objectives, your business goals, your user goals, and your long-term strategy. (Did you get it right? Great! Give yourself a pat on the back. Which is actually harder to do than one might think. Anyhow.)
In the past, you may have made decisions about your content by compiling colleague wish lists, polling your users, taking into consideration what content you already have online, and so on. These efforts resulted in a content list, which resulted in a site map, and so on. Although this may have been partially effective, you likely also ended up with a lot of stuff you didn’t really need, after all.
Identifying what content you need is actually a pretty complicated process. There are lots of factors to consider, including:
• Audience
• Messaging
• Topics
• Purpose
• Voice and tone
• Sources
Let’s take a look at each of these individually.
Audience: Who are you Trying to Reach?
During analysis, you asked your stakeholders to identify and prioritize their target audiences. Go get that list now. We’ll wait.
Obviously, stakeholders have different areas of focus. As a result, you probably have a list of several “equally high-priority audiences.” For example, Paul from PR wants to target the media; Juan from marketing wants to prioritize prospective customers; Mary in HR wants to reach job seekers, and so on.
While it’s possible to create content that appeals to all of these audiences, it doesn’t serve any of the users particularly well. Your content will be much more effective and easy to manage if you set some parameters and priorities about who your content is for.
Users: Get specific
Start by defining your user groups in detail. For example, if you say “customers,” what do you actually mean? Do you mean prospective customers or existing customers? Do you mean customers for product line A or product line B? Do you mean soccer moms, punk rock fans, or soccer moms who are also punk rock fans?
Most importantly, define why punk-loving soccer moms are important to your organization and its goals. Why do you want to create content for them? What do you want them to do with your content?
Some organizations like to develop personas—fictional characters or archetypes that represent the user types. When done effectively, personas can help you define your users’ characteristics clearly. But elaborate personas (for example, Margaret, 38, is a radiologist from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who likes rabbits and Neil Diamond ...) aren’t necessary. In fact, they can get a little distracting. A bulleted list of basic user attributes can work just as well.
When you have a clear definition of your target users, you have a better chance for creating content they’ll actually use. You’ll also make sure that everyone in your organization is talking about the same thing when they talk about a specific user group. There are lots of other benefits, too, but those two alone are worth the time and effort.
Priorities: Rank and file
Now comes the hard part: prioritizing your user groups for each content channel or web property you have (or want to have). Make a numbered list, starting with your first priority user as number 1. Then, continue down the list with the second priority, third, et cetera. It may be tempting to give two audiences the same ranking, but don’t. No ties. Because of your stakeholders’ multiple “top audiences,” there will almost certainly be negotiation involved. Be prepared.
Additionally, ranking your users can identify gaps. For example, if you establish that “existing employees” are not a priority target audience for the public website—but they still need content for one reason or another—maybe an extranet or intranet is a good idea. Or, if you want to start a Twitter feed, but realize you don’t know who it’s really for, maybe you need to give the whole Twitter thing a little more thought.
Identifying and prioritizing your target users are the first steps in creating content that works for your users and your business. Not to mention, you’ll avoid the countless, constant headaches that come with trying to be all things to all people. Bonus.
Messaging: What You Want Your Users to Remember
As we explained in Chapter 6, Analysis, we define messages as bits of information (thoughts or ideas) you want the user to know and messaging as the art of deciding what information or ideas you want to give to (and get from) your users.
Messaging brings your core strategy to life. It helps you define what this specific web content needs to communicate in order to get you closer to your ultimate goal. It helps you prioritize content needs, keep content consistent, and align content owners on content requirements.
During analysis, we encouraged you to collect all the messages that exist in your content today, and what stakeholders would like added or changed. Now that you have a core strategy in place, it’s time to prioritize those messages.
Defining a message hierarchy
The key to making messages valuable and understandable is putting them into a hierarchy that identifies your message priorities. For example, a simple messaging hierarchy would contain these components:
• Primary message: The single most important thing you want the user to know after viewing your content. This message is applicable to all of your audiences.
• Secondary messages: A group of key messages that support the primary message and provide context. These messages often highlight the things that are competitive advantages or differentiators. They may or may not be applicable to every single audience.
• Details: All of the various proof points behind the primary and secondary messages.
When you put all of these messages together, you’ve got a story.
Here’s an easy way to picture this. Think of a magazine article about a business. The primary message is the title. The secondary messages are the subheads, and the details are all the sentences between the subheads.
Of course, when it comes to web content, the story’s a lot more complicated. You’ll have one major story (your primary message) and many, many subplots all linking to each other. Still, by identifying your main “stories,” you’ll have an easier time seeing the specific content you need to support, enhan
ce, or expand on those stories (rather than random stuff you add “because you can”).
Let’s return to our friends at AwesomeCo, the up-and-coming software company who is building a corporate website. Their messaging hierarchy might look like this:
Primary message: AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.
Secondary messages:
• We don’t sell products. We sell systems tailored to your needs.
• We use open source technology, so you’re never held hostage to proprietary code.
• We work with 83 companies in the Fortune 100, new startups, and everyone in between.
• We don’t do marketing; we’re too busy making software. Our business comes from word of mouth.
Don’t mistake messages for content
You don’t have to spend days wordsmithing and agonizing over the exact phrasing and wording of messages, because they’re not meant to be copy on your website; they’re rarely shown to the user word for word. Instead, you’ll interpret the messages for each audience and situation. In turn, the messages will influence the content you select and create. The primary message, for example, will be demonstrated with different content for different audiences throughout the site. And, you may never see the actual words.
For example, AwesomeCo’s primary message might be interpreted on pages for different audiences like this:
Content Strategy for the Web Page 9
