Summary: A content strategy is a high-level plan that guides the intentional creation and maintenance of information in a digital product.
Organizations generate content to facilitate the interaction between people (whether current or prospective customers, employees, or clients) and their products or services. Content plays a crucial role in ensuring that the experience of interacting with an organization is smooth and pleasant. Yet very often, companies waste money and resources creating and maintaining content that’s pointless for users and profitless for organizations. And that is because they lack a content strategy.
In This Article:
- Defining Content Strategy
- Content Strategy vs. Content Tactics
- Phases and Components of Content Strategy
- An Ongoing Approach to Content
- References and Attribution
Defining Content Strategy
Content strategy:The ongoing practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and effective content about a particular topic or set of topics. This original definition of content strategy was created by Kristina Halvorson in her 2009 book,Content Strategy for the Web(with a second edition published in 2012).
A content strategy ensures that every piece of content in the experience serves and sustains a legitimate purpose.
A content strategy will usually specify:
- The point of the content (business objective or user need)
- Who will own, create, measure, and maintain the information
- How and where the content will best meet users’ needs (formats, channels, style, tone, word usage, etc.)
- How the content should be structured, tagged, and organized for findability and contextual visibility
- How the content will be published and fit in the overall experience
Content Strategy vs. Content Tactics
People often confuse content strategy withcontent-related tactics, like copywriting or editing, making videos, designing infographics, and posting social media promotions. A content strategy comesbeforetactics. It plans, clarifies, and connects the tactics to a meaningful purpose.
Why the continued confusion between tactics and strategy? Unfortunately, many organizations still treat content as an afterthought instead of an asset (Halvorson, 2012, p. 31). They prioritize the user-interface design instead of the information that people need.Others ignore the need for the content strategy until it’s too late. Then, the content becomes so cumbersome and incoherent that users abandon the products or services entirely. In these cases, content cleanup efforts require more time, compared to taking a strategic approach from the start.
In our research, content professionals working as one-person UX teams expressed frustration at the lack of content-strategy understanding in their organizations.Many of these content professionals reported that they were expected to author, edit, and market content. The unbalanced emphasis on tactics leaves them little time to think holistically about content.
Regardless of the reason for the confusion, slow down and plan for content before it's created. Identify goals that serve the organization and its users to align efforts and form a cohesive strategy for content.
Phases and Components of Content Strategy
Content strategy comprises four conceptual phases:
- Planning
- Creation
- Maintenance
- Unpublishing (or removal from the digital product or the user experience)
When a piece of content reaches the maintenance phase, it continually moves back through the planning, creation (updating), and maintenance (governance) phases until it is ready for removal (or being “unpublished”).
All these continuously occur throughout the lifecycle of any piece of content. Each phase relies on different components, tools, and tactics to communicate the content strategy as a whole and keep activities, such as the following, running smoothly:
- Content-focused user research that’s conducted properly
- Purposeful instigation of new content, ideation, and scheduling
- Format selection and adherence to standards during creation and publishing
- Review of existing content for accuracy and necessity
- Conscious measurement and monitoring of the content for success
- Removal of outdated or unnecessary content
- Crossfunctional education and advocation for the content strategy
Planning
During the initial planning phase, examine the following questions and use these suggested tools to inform your content strategy:
- What content do we currently have? Use acontent inventory and auditto compile and analyze existing content.
- How well is the content working for our users and organization?
- What is it supposed to do?
- What are the challenges, risks, and opportunities?
Review existing data andtest content with usersto understand the questions they have and the knowledge gaps that new content or improvements to existing content can fill. If needed, consider additionalresearch methodsto help you address questions about how your content is performing. Use acontent-strategy statementto summarize what the content is supposed to do. Content tactics may change, but the strategy should stay the same over time.
Reflect on whether you have the right people and processes to own and support content. Clarifyroles and responsibilitiesand decide on acontent-management modelto determine who or what initiates new content or updates to existing content. Determine:
- Who can make content-related requests?
- Who has subject-matter expertise?
- Who creates, reviews, approves, and publishes the content?
- Who addresses bad content requests or execution?
Whether it’s a few people handling these important tasks or an entire team, consider people’s time,skills, and strengthswhen developing a content strategy. Use an editorial calendar to plan and clearly communicate the creation, publication, and maintenance processes for content.
Creation
No more last-minute lorem-ipsum replacements. Reflect on what's really involved in content design and creation before launching into design activities. Consider the following questions and tools:
- How can we ensure that content isn’t left out until late in the design process? Usecontent framesfor early ideation and exploration before design activities begin. Make sure that content is brought in at the very beginning; not when someone realizes the content is a mess.
- What are your editorial, legal, and publishing standards? Document best practices, editorial standards, andstyle guidelinesfor content components in yourdesign system.Collaborate with UX-design and marketing partners to include thebrandin the content experience. When it's required, involvelegal and regulatory teams early to avoid lengthy review cycles and last-minute derailments.
- What do users see or hear and how is it powered behind the scenes? Use a content-requirements checklist to outline the content modeling, structure, information architecture, metadata, tagging, accessibility, andinclusivityessentials.
- How does content change or stayconsistentas users move across and betweenchannels? Use anasset mapto consider crosschannel content implications and to align on how things fit together, connect, and display.
Maintenance
Maintenance and governance determine when and how content is reviewed to monitor quality and success. Ask the following questions to document a content-maintenance plan and process:
- Who will be responsible and accountable for maintaining content? Form acontent-governance councilto regularly review and decide what to do with low-performing, inaccurate, or outdated content.
- How often will we revisit and add new content to our inventory and audit? What about our style guide, tools, and standards? Start with at least a 3-month interval for reviewing content and supporting collateral. Add any new content to your audit and explore the search terms that people use most. Determine if they can find what they need based on the content's structure, metadata, and tags. Use the same criteria in your content audit to determine the content’s fate. Refer to amaintenance checklistto decide which criteria to prioritize for maintenance and updating decisions.
- How are changes initiated and communicated? Share a list of updated or retired content after each review cycle. Include dates for the last updates and the next scheduled review cycle. Use acontent scorecardto show how content creation or content changes supported increases in revenue, user satisfaction, or successful task completion. Include recordings or quotes from users to prove the value of content maintenance and governance.
Content won’t govern itself. Ongoing content reviews reduce risk and ambiguity around content success. Quickly decide whether to improve, replace, or remove low-performing content. As part of content maintenance, educate others about the importance of monitoring content’s success incrementally to save time and sanity in the long run.
Unpublishing
Content maintenance and governance help you see when it’s time to remove outdated or irrelevant content. This is a difficult-yet-important decision for teams to make. Removing unnecessary content ensures you’re directing users’ attention to the most recent and relevant information. When determining a process for unpublishing content, consider:
- Who makes the final call on removing content?
- Who removes it from the content-management system?
- Do we need to keep an archive of unpublished content? Why?
- For how long and where will we keep the archive?
- What other sources link to the content? Do we need redirects?
- What are the SEO consequences of deleting content?
An Ongoing Approach to Content
Content has the power to make or break the user experience: it's impossible to design a good user experience with bad content (Halvorson, 2011). People, processes, and flexible policies make good content happen.
Your content strategy defines how your organization will use content to achieve its goals and meet user needs. It's about setting overarching goals for content and an intentional plan for how to achieve and maintain success. Content strategy connects people to the information they need and connects the content to form a working system. Without a content strategy, information can quickly get out of control to the detriment of the user and employee experience.
In your next UX initiative, I challenge you to start with the content first, not with the UI design. Does the content make sense? Is it interesting? Continue answering these questions throughout the design process to set your content up for success.
References and Attribution
Kristina Halvorson. 2012.Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition,USA, New Riders.
Kristina Halvorson. 2011. https://uxmag.com/articles/content-strategy-and-ux-a-modern-love-story
