Content Strategy

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.
• 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.