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Digital & Software Solutions
September 11, 2024
Content strategy can be a confusing topic. When you take two words as ubiquitous as “content” and “strategy,” it’s inevitable. Often, content strategy is used interchangeably with content marketing or confused with copywriting. In reality, though, it encompasses more than either of those.
A broad definition of content strategy is a plan for the development and ongoing management of the content a company creates and shares with its audience. For Hexaware, digital content strategy goes a bit deeper and is considered an integral part of the customer experience of a successful digital product. That’s because with a digital product, quite often the content is the product.
A broad definition of content strategy is a plan for the development and ongoing management of the content a company creates and shares with its audience. For Hexaware, digital content strategy goes a bit deeper and is considered an integral part of a successful digital product. That’s because with a digital product, quite often the content is the product.
Before we get too far along, let’s talk about what we mean by content. In the context of digital content strategies, the types of digital content covered include anything that conveys meaningful information to another human. This includes page copy, blog posts, video content, audio recording, content from social media platforms, imagery, blog articles, alerts and notifications, and more. All of these elements come together to impact the way a brand is expressed to its audience and therefore all of these need to be strategically coordinated.
Digital content strategy is important because failure to consider content as an integral part of digital product development can lead to misalignment between design, copy, and visuals, resulting in friction for the user. Lack of strategic content consideration can also lead to misalignment between the final product experience and the overarching business strategy. Ultimately, this can impede the product’s ability to deliver the necessary value to the organization.
To be successful, a digital content strategy must work with visual design so that users can find what they need when they need it. It must also take into account the broader goals of the company and make sure it is furthering those objectives.
Any company with a digital product or property should have a digital content strategy. But don’t feel bad if you don’t—only the minority of companies have a strategy that contains all of the important elements that guide an effective content strategy.
There are some key indicators that it may be time to revisit and improve upon your content strategy. These include if you:
The list is potentially endless, but these are some top indicators that the time is right to re-examine the strategy behind your content production.
How can you create an effective content strategy? There are an infinite number of ways to start and we’ve found the following steps work well in most cases.
How you tackle the first stages of your digital content strategy work will depend heavily on where you are starting from. For example, is the organization on board with devoting the time and resources it will take to redesign the way content is brought to life? Are you an external consultant of the organization? In either of these situations, kicking off the project so that everyone is on the same page with the objectives and output is key.
This could include a kickoff meeting, a project brief, agreement on the cadence of updates, or alignment on scope and goals. One way to determine the best way to kick off is to consider where you anticipate challenges along the way—is there something you could do at kickoff to get ahead of those hurdles? The most important thing is to make sure important stakeholders understand the scope and value of the content strategy work you are about to embark on.
Before you can do too much else, you need to get the lay of the land. A lot of this will be investigating what exists today, seeing how content is organized, and identifying opportunities that may exist to deliver a better user experience. Key considerations in this step include:
Examine the business plan and existing research
You’ll want to identify what documents already exist that outline the organization’s strategic goals and anything that guides the content creation process. The ultimate goal of all content creation should be to further overall company objectives, making it imperative that you understand the high-level business strategy.
When it comes to content creation guidelines, you’ll want to understand if there has been any persona development since it’s crucially important that you understand exactly who each piece of content is targeting. If any prior research has been done that could impact persona or content development, you should gather that in this stage. Additionally, if there are any pieces of example content, templates, strategy decks, or other foundational work, that should be considered at this time, as well.
In addition to persona development, are there brand guidelines, user segmentation, voice and tone work, or other key guiding documents? If so, you’ll want to be familiar with those.
Make time for stakeholder interviews
In addition to checking live content for yourself, you’ll want to get information and content ideas from the stakeholders who know the business and current content best. You can identify who those people are in the kickoff process and set up time to talk to them one on one. Understand from their perspectives what they think is and isn’t working, what opportunities exist and what their content creation and management program would be like in a perfect world.
User research can be helpful
If budget and time allow, doing primary user research will give you a perspective that you can’t get anywhere else. Understanding users’ unbiased opinions of the content they see and their feedback on what’s confusing can be invaluable in building out your plan.
Analytic reports and auditing are crucial
Finally, you’ll want to pull any relevant analytics you can find from sources like Google Analytics, your content management system (CMS), customer relationship management platform (CRM), social media, email marketing platform, and any other place where content is served to your target audience.
Analytics will feed into a key document that is almost always a part of a content strategy: a content audit. This requires taking the page level data that you pulled in the previous step and looking at what existing content is performing the best against your most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You’ll be looking more closely at this information in the synthesis and goal setting step – ultimately, you’ll want to create some theories around why some existing content is doing better than others so that you can test against these later.
At this point, you’ll likely have quite a lot of information. It’s time to dig in and get your hands dirty. You probably already have ideas about what needs to be done and now is the time to formalize those thoughts. Every digital product or experience is different so there’s no way for us to give you a one-size-fits all template. We recommend, however, that you consider a few key areas in your plan:
Key documents to consider creating
This is where the rubber meets the digital content strategy road! Depending on your capacity as the content strategist, this may be the time when you roll up your sleeves and make it happen or the time when you hand over your plan to the team and hold your breath (or possibly a hybrid of both!). Either way, be ready and available for a few questions and maybe hiccups along the way. Luckily, you’ve done your homework and can figure out a solution to whatever comes up.
A digital content strategy isn’t a once-and-done, fixed document. It should be a living breathing part of how teams meet their goals. It’s important to revisit this strategy often and adjust what’s no longer accurate, relevant, or impactful.
There are many ways to do this, but a few important steps include regular evaluation of your analytics. See what content is performing to expectations and what might need some revisions. Once you understand what’s resonating with your audience you can incorporate more of what’s working into your plan.
It’s also important to regularly review all content. Some companies make it a point to revisit content once a year. A good way to tackle this is by looking at all your historical content created in that month, this way you never have to look at all of it at once. Often a quick review will reveal some opportunities to update references, statistics, check that links are still active and working and add any new content that has become relevant since the original content was created. Not only does this create a better user experience for your site visitors, but Google and other search engines reward content that is regularly updated with higher rankings.
If you’ve created a solid digital content strategy, and a concrete measurement plan, you should have some wins to celebrate in no time. Make sure that people across the organization understand how content played a role in that new customer, closed sale, or recent PR mention. By making sure that you understand the value that your strategy is bringing to the table, and sharing it with others in the organization, you’ll have the best chance possible at getting more resources to fuel your content engine.
When designing a digital content strategy, it’s helpful to consider the tools that can help with creating high quality content and its distribution, analysis, and management. Here are a few we find useful across different stages of the content lifecycle:
These tools, combined with a well-defined digital content strategy, can help streamline content creation, distribution, and analysis, ultimately driving better results and achieving your business objectives.
Content strategy is an important part of how we bring digital products to market. Contact us to learn more about how we can help with your digital content strategy!
About the Author
Amy Kleppinger
Director of Customer Experience, Digital & Software
Amy Kleppinger is a Director of Customer Experience within the Digital & Software group at Hexaware. With a background in marketing, market research, and product management, Amy specializes in helping clients with product marketing and product management strategies.
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