The phrase “content strategy” has been applied and defined in many different ways. It can describe anything from executive-level enterprise management to small-scale content-marketing planning.
I define it as the activities that managers and designers use to guide and plan content programs:
Benefits
- aligns stakeholders around user needs
- clarifies and articulates the business purpose that your content serves
- provides evidence-based guidance for your content plans
Scope
- discovery of the scope and goals of the program:
- stakeholder identification and engagement
to identify who should be involved - user needs research
to identify the needs of the users that the content program is addressing - business goals articulation
to clarify what you want the content to do for your organization - constraints
like schedule, budget, staffing, etc.
- stakeholder identification and engagement
- messaging strategy
to connect communications programs with the content strategy - content inventory
to enumerate and account for all current content assets - content audit
to vet current content for accuracy, currency, relevance, etc. - gap analysis
to identify the distance between the current content state and the desired state: - strategy-statement formulation
to create a succinct, shareable document that all involved can refer to - content planning
to coordinate the implementation of the strategy with content creators, content operations managers, content engineers, website managers, app developers, conversation designers, et al.