Content Strategy

Content strategy guides content creation, presentation, and governance to help an organization meet user needs and business goals. It includes developing content models and making choices about metadata. It aligns business goals, technology, and people to provide a valuable user experience. It plans for the content that helps people use a product or service to accomplish their goals.

To serve you well, I need to understand your content, business needs, and technological constraints before designing a solution to help you achieve your goals. I practice content strategy in two complementary phases.

Discovery and Alignment

In the discovery and alignment phase, a content strategist needs to understand your business goals, user needs, the current state of your content, and what stakeholders think about the situation. When an organization has content problems, it's common for teams also to have:

• Incompatible goals and incentives
• Problems collaborating across silos
• Unclear workflows or procedures
• Workflows or procedures that don't work
• Spoken or unspoken disagreements

To help, a content strategist needs to learn about the organization's content culture—how content is created, organized, and governed. These are common activities during the discovery phase:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Content audits and analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Performance metrics and analytics analysis
• User interviews and surveys
• Technology audits and analysis

By the end of a discovery phase, everyone involved should clearly understand the problem space, technological constraints, and a sense of alignment around the user's needs and business goals.

Strategy and Design

My strategy phase has three goals:

Good strategy creatively works within your constraints to design a scalable solution. Your organization has to be able to maintain a solution that we develop.

These are common activities during the strategy phase:

• Establishing a core strategy
• Identifying success metrics
• Writing and editorial workshops
• Process modeling and mapping workshops
• Domain modeling and content modeling workshops
• Copywriting, UX writing, script writing, etc.

While I like to do a lot of thinking and strategy work alone, I find that including a group of people in a workshop helps to create a sense of shared ownership and investment in the results.

While the deliverables depend on the project, by the end of the strategy phase, I want your team to have an agreed-upon core strategy, governance plan, editorial calendar, content workflow, and the essential content to carry out the strategy.