Primary Message: AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.
Interpretations:
• For client prospects: We don’t need to advertise because all our business comes from referrals.
• For existing clients: AwesomeCo “insiders” get special treatment with exclusive resources, discounts, and perks.
• For investors: AwesomeCo stock is a hidden gem that will soon become public knowledge, so act fast.
As you might guess, messaging doesn’t always come easy. Remember trying to prioritize audiences? The very same people who had such different views on which audiences matter the most may very well have differing views of what’s most important to communicate to users. So, like anything else that involves saying “no” to someone, defining and prioritizing messages will take some wrangling. Just fall back on those listening skills (see sidebar, page 72) and you’ll do great. (Your wit, charm, and diplomacy will also serve you well. As always.)
Topics: The Subjects that Matter
Okay! Now. What do you want to talk about?
Selecting topics isn’t about brainstorming a list of interesting subjects. It’s about narrowing the field—finding the right topic areas to meet your specific set of business requirements and user needs.
Your analysis helped identify what your audience wants. Your messaging communicates what information you’d like them to understand. Now, you can select topics to focus on what will fulfill both of your needs. So, basically:
Audience + Messaging = Topics
Take AwesomeCo’s primary message: “AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.” For the client prospects audience, topics might include: case studies of problems solved for customers, solutions and services, and their development process. Of course, topics may span more than one audience. Just be sure that each topic serves at least one audience. A video of the CEO’s kid’s soccer game? Yeah, not so much.
Topic maps
You can just make a list of all your topics and call it good. But, we really encourage you to go a step further and create a topic map. A topic map shows how your topics relate to each other. It can help expedite linking strategies, metadata, and CMS planning later. And if your website or content doesn’t have a traditional navigation structure, a topic map goes from nice-to-have to necessary.
What you put on your topic map depends on how you plan on using it. In addition to showing how topics relate to each other, you can show how topics relate to user segments, messages, channels, or back-end infrastructure. A topic map can be as simple as this:
Or, a bit more complicated:
These are both pretty simplistic examples, but you get the idea. Once you figure out your topics, you’ll be able to see how they relate to, inform, and impact each other.
Purpose: Every Piece of Content Needs a Job
When people talk about “content best practices,” you often hear statements that sound like hard-and-fast rules, such as “web content should be short” or “everything should be three clicks from the home page.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Your content is a complex web of interconnected pieces of information—and each piece has a job to do. Just like you use a hammer and a wrench for different tasks, you use different kinds of content depending on the content’s purpose.
Identifying a purpose for each piece of content can help you make informed decisions about what kinds of content you need. Here are a few examples of content purposes:
• Persuade: Get the user to make a decision in your favor—such as buy your products or agree with your opinion.
• Inform: Provide the user with information about a specific topic—for example, if a user wanted to learn about breeds of dogs or the fascinating life of Jessica Simpson.
• Validate: Give the user access to specific facts, so they can fact-check stuff like the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue (1492) or the dictionary definition of flibbertigibbet (a flighty, talkative person).
• Instruct: Teach the user how to do a task, like bake a pie, find a doctor, or set their Facebook privacy settings.
• Entertain: Help the user pass time. True entertainment content is rarely on a corporate site, but on a site like YouTube or Yahoo!, you’ll see a lot of it. You know, cats playing the piano and all that.
It’s worth noting that specific content may fulfill more than one purpose. Later in the process, when you’re working with page tables (see page 125), knowing the purpose for each piece of content will help you determine what fits and what doesn’t.
Voice and Tone: Watch Your Language
As a person, you have one voice. However, when you speak, your tone of voice changes depending on who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and the message you’re trying to convey.
That’s exactly how to think about your company’s voice and tone when it comes to content. Your company has one brand voice that has a distinct personality, style, or point of view. That voice can take on different tones in different situations and for different purposes, all depending on your specific audience.
Defining voice
When you tackle defining your organization’s voice, start by looking at any brand materials you have. The voice might already be defined for you. Consider how it feels, what values live behind it, the different media in which it might manifest. To explain it to content creators and others, select clear, recognizable adjectives. For example, if you’re a financial services firm, your brand voice might be “trustworthy, straightforward, and authoritative.” If you’re a large university, your brand voice might be “aspirational, inclusive, and authentic.”
Defining tone
Now, look back at the information you collected about your audiences. Combine that with what you know about the user’s native voice and the objective of the specific website or channel content you are creating. Pick some words or phrases that describe how tone may shift for each audience. Funny? Enthusiastic? Calming? Helpful? To see this in action, check out the MailChimp case study on page 113.
It can help to look for example content from your existing content catalog, compare against your competitors, or review sites you (or your target users) like as examples.
Cultural differences
Just a quick note, here: Obviously, different cultures have different communication styles. Because we need to make sure our personality is understood in all our markets, our style may vary across countries—even different states and regions—to allow for cultural and linguistic differences. If necessary, get help defining a tone of voice that fits the cultural norms in each market.
Source: Where your Content Comes From
The good thing is, there are several options for acquiring content to fulfill your content strategy. The bad news is, there’s no truly easy way to go “get content” that will automatically make your content strategy succeed. Even if you buy or license ready-made content, editorial oversight is still required to ensure that co-created or third-party content meets your organization’s brand guidelines, web standards, and user needs.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of each option.
* * *
Case Study: One Voice, Many Tones
Kate Kiefer is a content curator at MailChimp, an email marketing service with a lovable chimp as its mascot. MailChimp is known for having a distinctive voice—one that strikes a perfect balance between playful and professional. But how can a large organization maintain a consistent voice when dozens of people are creating content?
Kate ran into this question as she worked to create a style guide for MailChimp. Initially she simply wanted to document grammar and other editorial considerations, but she soon discovered that writers needed a bit more. Kate and her team recognized that they also needed to create a voice and tone guide. Through collaborations with others, here’s how they defined the MailChimp voice:
• Fun but not childish
• Clever but not silly
• Powerful but not compl
icated
• Smart but not stodgy
• Cool but not alienating
• Informal but not sloppy
• Helpful but not overbearing
• Expert but not bossy
These distinctions helped a lot. They captured the personality of the organization and gave writers a place to begin. But Kate discovered that defining MailChimp’s voice was only the beginning.
Consider this: You’re a MailChimp customer, reading a message about your successful email marketing campaign. You’re thrilled with the results. If a cheerful cartoon monkey shows up on your screen to offer a verbal high five, it strikes exactly the right tone for your emotional state. But what if you’ve made a mistake, and your account is in danger of being shut down for spam violations? Suddenly a high-fiving monkey doesn’t seem as charming.
That’s the difference between voice and tone: a voice is a reflection of who we are, but tone is a reflection of the audience’s emotional state. Just like a person, an organization has one voice. But we use that one voice to convey many tones, depending on the situation.
Check out the entire MailChimp voice and tone guide at http://voiceandtone.com/.
* * *
Original content
Content created by and for your organization is usually the most valuable kind of content: It’s unique to you, it reflects your specific points of view, and it’s communicated in your voice and tone. It’s also the most expensive. But, when you take the time to really understand your audiences, create content specifically for and about them, and then deliver your content in formats that engage and motivate, you’re delivering the kind of user experience that will bring people back for more.
To create original content, you (obviously) will need to do a lot of work collecting source material and generating new ideas. This can be time-intensive, so be ready to invest the necessary resources to make it work. (See Chapter 9, People, for more details.)
Co-created content
Big brands are making the most of high-profile bloggers, studios, podcasters, and other entities who are already in the business of creating content for an engaged audience or subscriber base. And that’s smart.
If you’re a food company, consider reaching out to popular food bloggers and hiring them to create content for your brand, either on your website or another sponsored channel. If you’re a city or state visitors’ bureau, partner with local photographers who will regularly upload photos to an online photo album featuring the best of your area. While you do give up some control of the content being generated with this approach, you’re gaining built-in audiences, unique perspectives that can complement your brand strategies, and the opportunity to experiment with a wide range of content types, often for less time and money than would otherwise be involved.
Aggregated Content
There are also ways to collect content created elsewhere. One way is to automatically aggregate content from other websites or sources (which, of course, must be accurately credited). This can be accomplished in several ways. For example, you can pull content with an RSS feed, which automatically collects content from the websites or feeds you subscribe to. You could also create search algorithms, which pull content based on specific keywords or phrases.
There are a range of risks that come with taking this approach—everything from dumping too much content on your users that ultimately gets ignored to unknowingly publishing something that gets your organization in trouble. One of the more important risks, here, is that content is being published or linked to from your organization without any sort of qualitative review. Yes, the tools provide a filter of sorts, bringing in content they calculate to be of some worth. However, you’re making a big assumption, based on subscription choices and keywords, that content will have relevancy and context for your audience. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose their attention and, potentially, their trust.
Curated content
Another way (and, for us, the preferred way) to collect content is to have someone research and curate content with an editorial point of view. Social media consultant Beth Kanter writes:
Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.*
* http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/
Please note that content curation is not the same as asking users to provide content reviews or ratings. Simply asking your users to rate your web content does not ensure that the most relevant, valuable content will be surfaced; overall ratings can be seriously skewed by just a few active (and opinionated) users. It’s a way to surface content, but it’s not curating it.
Licensed content
If your content strategy includes offering a deeper library of online resources than you have the infrastructure to create, you may choose to license content created by a third-party publisher. (In this instance, it would also be the content strategist’s responsibility to research, review, and recommend third-party content providers.)
Articles, images, audio, and video are all widely available for licensing online. Again, you may be risking brand dilution by offering generic content to your online users. However, this is a hugely popular (albeit questionably successful) option for a wide range of industry websites. For example, health insurers license content from WebMD, Staywell, the Harvard Medical School, and more.
Don’t forget that licensed content still requires research and oversight. You’ll also need to decide if you’re just going to publish everything or manually curate it for your audiences.
User-generated content
Another way to source content is to invite users to create it themselves. For example, you may launch a community forum focused on product support, anticipating that users will essentially create “help” content for each other. Or you may invite users to create their own content as part of a brand campaign. If you choose the user-generated content route, be forewarned: without proper planning and oversight, these tactics can go awry. Case in point: An SUV manufacturer once invited their users to co-create commercials promoting a new SUV model. The campaign backfired when environmentalists stormed the virtual gates, creating commercials that damned SUVs as gas-guzzling, nature-killing, road-hogging beasts.
No matter what, don’t just dive in to user-generated content tactics. Plan, test, measure, respond. Just because it works beautifully for some brands, doesn’t mean it will for yours. Proceed with caution.
Final Note: You Can’t Always have (all of) What You Want
Now you have your messages, topics, formats, and sources nailed down—great! Let’s do this thing! Let’s make some content!
Whoa, there. It’s tempting to jump right in and start creating or collecting content just so you have something to show your boss or client. “See? We’re out there, doing stuff!” But trust us: that is the path to suffering and doom. Over the years, we’ve seen it again and again: Organizations commit to an amount of content they simply can’t sustain. They launch websites with unfinished or subpar content no one really had time to generate in the first place, let alone pay attention to once it went live. They create newsrooms and blogs that languish after only a few months. They start YouTube channels, but aren’t sure what to broadcast (except commercials).
So, when the content you want is too much content for your resources to create and maintain—at least immediately—how do you prioritize what content gets done or done first? Brain Traffic’s Lee Thomas has developed the following criteria:
• Requirements: Is the content required for some reason (legally
, politically, for funding, etc.)?
• Reach: Which audiences is the content likely to reach, both today and in the future? How big are those audiences?
• Relevance: How important and interesting is the content to users? (The answer is likely to affect reach.)
• Richness: How valuable or unique are we able to make this content?
• Revenue: How will the content affect site revenue-generating activities (actual product sales, ad sales, etc.)?
Most of these criteria are somewhat subjective. It can be helpful to create a scorecard, where each topic, piece of content, or content category is given a score (on a scale of 1–5) for each of the other four “R”s. The content with the highest overall score stays, the lowest scoring content goes. The cut-off, which is somewhere in the middle, is defined by your timeline, budget, or resources.
Okay! Substance ... BAM. Done. Moving on to ... structure! (Insert sound of party horns.)
Structure
How will your website or other web content be structured? How does the navigation work? What pages live where? What content goes where, or on what page? How do things link together? What elements are on every page of the website?
My, you ask a lot of questions. It appears that you’re ready to take on your next big challenge: structure.
Whose Job is it, Anyway?
Figuring out how your content will be structured might sound like a job for an information architect (IA) or a user experience (UX) designer. And sometimes, it is. But sometimes content strategists consider creating a sitemap and wireframes to be part of their job. Some want nothing to do with it, preferring to focus on core strategy, workflow development, or editorial considerations. Sometimes the content strategist, an IA, and a UX designer all work together. Sometimes it’s all the same person. It really doesn’t matter what your title is. Someone just needs to get the content work done.
Content Strategy for the Web Page 10
