tl;dr

The presenter  at the Feb 25th Portland WordPress Users Meetup, Jim Woolfrey (@informative) demonstrated ‘The Fundamentals of Content Strategy.’ He covered content strategy from a seller, marketer and agency perspective. During the presentation we saw an actual content strategy brief and the process Jim uses to build a strategy plan.

The Fundamentals of Content Strategy

Jim introduced himself and his presentation. Ultimately he will answer why digital content, good content, is more important than ever.

What is content?

• Info that delivers meaning, communicated via audio, picture, image, etc.
• Anything that we use to communicate with each other. Here’s a big list that we won’t read to you

What is strategy?

• Plan to reach a specific goal. Roots in military & politics. Also applies to business & organizational goals.

Content Strategy

A repeatable process for planning, creation, distribution and government of informational content–written or in other media–throughout the entire content life-cycle.

• For planning, creation, & re-use of content: What content. How to produce. By whom. When & why
• See Kristina Halvarson’s book, Content Strategy for the Web

Why? … due to how consumers & buyers are changing. They’re educating themselves & want to keep it that way – old way of doing sales is with dinosaurs. People avoid contact until late in the sales-cycle, once they know what they want.

Content Marketing

• It’s now about using content to inform and educate people. Engage them & provide good info so they can become informed about our product.

Content Across the Lifecycle

Lifecycle Stages:

1. Awareness
2. Exploration
3. Decision-Making
4. Post-Decision

Awareness:

Think about customer’s view of who you are.
The people we’re targeting may not be aware of who you are or that they even have a need for your product/service. Content can help to let them what to solve.
Content also helps to push them to explore

Exploration:

Help steer consumers to more information about what you solve, how you help

Decision-Making:

More exploration leads to more of your information in decision process
Content should provide value

Post-Decision:

Maintain engagement

Biggest Challenges in Content Marketing

(or any content production, especially recurring basis)

• Create breakthrough content
• Provide value
• Compelling content is a necessity
• Balance business objectives & buyer needs
• Success is rooted in developing a repeatable process to keep content going

Why Content Marketing Fails

• Lack of goals
• Lack of planning
• Poor messaging
• Bad quality, lack of talent, etc

Why a Strategic Approach?

• Align organization with audience needs
• Enables organization to better deliver to needs of different roles

The Fundamentals

• Identify
• Create
• Distribute (Publish)
• Govern (and maintenance) – Governance is about the macro process of repeating production & the stuff including maintenance

Establish Goals & Objectives

• Go back to what is at the core of the organization … what are we doing, selling, etc
• Identify & prioritize the target audience – map it to a buying life cycle

Research the target, make sure they’re aware of the need or figure out how to create awareness. Then, prioritize & map those

Buyer Personas

• Champion
• Influencer
• Evaluator/Biz User
• Decision-maker

Remember, there will be more people & personas involved in more-complex sales (ie: Boeing)

Personas

• Create personas or mental models
• Framework for establishing need mapped to customer life cycle
• Ingredients:
  • Narrative Overview (ie: is this a “SysAdmin”)
  • Keywords that resonate
  • Objectives, priorities, orientation, obstacles
    • Q: Are personas “fluffy”?
    • A: Not when they help you refine the voice of the content, but they need to match the customer life cycle. The important part is the next question…
  • Define the questions you need to answer

Q: Should we create personas using a blog?
A: Not necessarily, a PPT or Word doc works. Anywhere you can create lists and add some thumbnails

Example Docs

• Persona “buyer’s Journey”
• Persona Questions: Buying Stage > Questions Content must Answer

Identify Content

• Content Inventory
• Content Audit
  • Get a value of what you have and understand if it answers questions in your persona
• Gap Analysis
  • The “blank spots” in the Excel grid of questions & content
• Content Maps (persona-specific)
  • Look at what you need to create
  • Do a flowchart of the customer life cycle & make sure you have something to get each persona through all the steps of the buying process
• Content Plan (prioritized)
  • Figure out what’s the most-important, the most-quickly
• Editorial Calendar
  • Build this from the Map & Plan, and assign resources to the needed items

Note that we go from a conceptual level, to a structured matrix, to execution

Q: How do you create or define a life cycle for your content?
A: This is where governance comes in (later in presentation). In terms of life cycle of the target audience — amount of content per-persona should pay attention to how long the sales cycle is.

Content Creation Guidelines

Reason for this is to think about how & who will produce the content

This isn’t typical in web dev cycles, which tend to rush the content-production or give it low priority & end up late

Delivery

WordPress is the tool, but think about: (1) How the team will get content into the site, (2) How users will consume the content (* This is where design fits-in)

Governance

• Maintain, Measure, & Update
• Build a team who have a defined workflow about how to go through and revise content plans/maps quarterly (or whatever)

Measure:

• Quantitative – analytics, etc
• Qualitative – how people answer surveys, positive comments, ratio of +/- comments, number of referrals, etc

Analyze & Optimize:

• Compare performance w/ organizational goals
  • More awareness?
  • Changed attitude?
  • Stimulated taking a trial, viewing a demo?
  • Influenced a purchase decision?
  • Signed up new subscribers?

The sooner you connect content to org-goals, the sooner you can change & refine what you’re doing

Example:

Big client did a lot of getting people to webinars & ebooks. Found that ebooks were 10x better at generating sales than the high-effort webinars

Finding:

Best sales came from people who didn’t watch the webinar live … instead they downloaded & watched it later (* This was the busy decision-makers at-home when they had time)

Promises of Content Strategy…

• Why content strategy should be the foundation for UX design, social strategy
  • Someone from IBM had great success applying this to the sales-cycle

How to execute on this:

1. Step away from the CMS
2. Identify goals
3. Map & plan
4. Put a team together, identify who does what
5. Develop metrics & Create!

• Why focusing on hot topics may not be the best strategy:
  • People get excited about new topics, but that may not be the best idea b/c it doesn’t answer the fundamental questions. Don’t skip those.
  • Lesson: Keep hot topics to a minimum & remember they’re only for buzz

Further Resources

• Google, really. Search for ‘content strategy’
• Kristin Halvorson book ‘Content Strategy for the Web’
• Jonathan Colman – REI – jonathoncolman.com post “The Epic List of Content Strategy Resources”
• Strategy & Creation: Margaret
• Quality & Measurement: Colleen Jones book “clout”
• Marketing side: Ardath Albee book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale”
• Marketing: Joe Pulizzi started The Content Marketing Institute
• CMS side: Structure content Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• CMS/Technical side: Cleve Gibbon
• CMS: CMSwire.com
• James Mathewson – Global content strategy for IBM
• Karen McGrane book “Content Strategy for Mobile”