I’ve been involved with digital content since 1996 and have been doing, teaching, leading, and consulting on content strategy since 1999. For me, content strategy is an absolutely critical element of any organisation’s digital success.
I’m working with an insurance company that produces incredibly smart risk management content, but that has been delivered as PDF reports to date. They want to deliver it to their customers in a way that is easier to consume, even on mobile devices. This need is leading them to revisit all of their content.
I’m also working with a very large public school system to refocus their website on parents and student needs, which is an incredibly ambitious goal. The work is challenging, but it will be truly transformative once we’re done!
I’ve been ramping up my speaking, writing, and teaching, which is a true joy -- I love sharing what I know and waking people up to the value of content strategy.
Actually, it’s the change management aspects of content strategy that are hardest for my clients to adopt: the new roles, processes, new levels of collaboration. It’s hard for people to have the right amount of control over their content.
I find that there are five tools that help most with this challenge:
We were so very excited to be given the green light to do this study, the largest of its kind to date. The research focused on content strategy adoption and maturity in associations, but what we found is really applicable to almost any content-rich organisation.
Through surveys and interviews, we reached more than 600 association professionals. The report provides guidance on critical content strategy tactics and steps organisations can take to advance their efforts.
We broke down content strategy into 17 different activities, or tactics.
The report covered the following topics:
Whatever your role in content creation, management, or strategic decision making, you’ll come away with useful insights and ideas you can implement immediately.
One of the biggest things that we created in the report is a content strategy maturity model. Our model captures the culture, operating mode, and focus of organisations at each level.
After the content strategist goes away, content strategy needs to become part of the way people work. So content operations assumes that there is an organisation-wide style guide, content calendar, taxonomy, governance plans, content model, etc. and that the content strategist facilitated governance work to identify ways that the tasks can be executed in a smart, consistent way.
Content operations makes sure that all those foundational elements actually happen on an ongoing basis, that the people involved with content in any way are smart and capable, that they have the tools and buy-in they need, and that they’re held accountable for doing the work.
Yes, I’d love to! The community is at content-strategy.com. I started it because I saw shortcomings in the existing communities. The Facebook group is wonderful, but so many people are leaving that platform! There’s a good group on Slack also, but not everyone finds the interface easy to use, especially for ongoing discussions. And there is a large content strategists group on LinkedIn also, but it’s not very active and not useful.
We currently have more than 750 members in our community! I’m pleased to say that with this platform, there aren’t any ads, and we get to make choices about how the community works. I really like that. I managed the LinkedIn community for a long time, and that platform got less and less engagement over the years.
I’d say they should do several things:
From all of these lists, you’ll start to see that “content strategy” is actually an umbrella for lots of different skills, focus areas, and applications. Some content strategists focus on content for help centres, others for startups, others for higher education or nonprofit organisations or government agencies. Some work on marketing content, some on technical documentation. Some content strategists focus on the technical aspects of content, some on the people aspects, and some on the brand. You’ll need to find your path within all of that.
That is actually a very hard question to answer. Usually, when content strategy is done well, the content just works -- I can solve a problem or accomplish a task, and the content itself is relatively invisible. We only tend to notice content or UX when it DOESN’T work.
That said, content strategy also feeds good web design. Here are two examples of projects I worked on that I’m proud of:
In both cases, they deliver information that helps the audience achieve their goals, structured in a way that enables easy consumption on any device. It’s good that these also look good, at least in my opinion.
I’ve been involved with digital content since 1996 and have been doing, teaching, leading, and consulting on content strategy since 1999. For me, content strategy is an absolutely critical element of any organisation’s digital success.
I’m working with an insurance company that produces incredibly smart risk management content, but that has been delivered as PDF reports to date. They want to deliver it to their customers in a way that is easier to consume, even on mobile devices. This need is leading them to revisit all of their content.
I’m also working with a very large public school system to refocus their website on parents and student needs, which is an incredibly ambitious goal. The work is challenging, but it will be truly transformative once we’re done!
I’ve been ramping up my speaking, writing, and teaching, which is a true joy -- I love sharing what I know and waking people up to the value of content strategy.
Actually, it’s the change management aspects of content strategy that are hardest for my clients to adopt: the new roles, processes, new levels of collaboration. It’s hard for people to have the right amount of control over their content.
I find that there are five tools that help most with this challenge:
We were so very excited to be given the green light to do this study, the largest of its kind to date. The research focused on content strategy adoption and maturity in associations, but what we found is really applicable to almost any content-rich organisation.
Through surveys and interviews, we reached more than 600 association professionals. The report provides guidance on critical content strategy tactics and steps organisations can take to advance their efforts.
We broke down content strategy into 17 different activities, or tactics.
The report covered the following topics:
Whatever your role in content creation, management, or strategic decision making, you’ll come away with useful insights and ideas you can implement immediately.
One of the biggest things that we created in the report is a content strategy maturity model. Our model captures the culture, operating mode, and focus of organisations at each level.
After the content strategist goes away, content strategy needs to become part of the way people work. So content operations assumes that there is an organisation-wide style guide, content calendar, taxonomy, governance plans, content model, etc. and that the content strategist facilitated governance work to identify ways that the tasks can be executed in a smart, consistent way.
Content operations makes sure that all those foundational elements actually happen on an ongoing basis, that the people involved with content in any way are smart and capable, that they have the tools and buy-in they need, and that they’re held accountable for doing the work.
Yes, I’d love to! The community is at content-strategy.com. I started it because I saw shortcomings in the existing communities. The Facebook group is wonderful, but so many people are leaving that platform! There’s a good group on Slack also, but not everyone finds the interface easy to use, especially for ongoing discussions. And there is a large content strategists group on LinkedIn also, but it’s not very active and not useful.
We currently have more than 750 members in our community! I’m pleased to say that with this platform, there aren’t any ads, and we get to make choices about how the community works. I really like that. I managed the LinkedIn community for a long time, and that platform got less and less engagement over the years.
I’d say they should do several things:
From all of these lists, you’ll start to see that “content strategy” is actually an umbrella for lots of different skills, focus areas, and applications. Some content strategists focus on content for help centres, others for startups, others for higher education or nonprofit organisations or government agencies. Some work on marketing content, some on technical documentation. Some content strategists focus on the technical aspects of content, some on the people aspects, and some on the brand. You’ll need to find your path within all of that.
That is actually a very hard question to answer. Usually, when content strategy is done well, the content just works -- I can solve a problem or accomplish a task, and the content itself is relatively invisible. We only tend to notice content or UX when it DOESN’T work.
That said, content strategy also feeds good web design. Here are two examples of projects I worked on that I’m proud of:
In both cases, they deliver information that helps the audience achieve their goals, structured in a way that enables easy consumption on any device. It’s good that these also look good, at least in my opinion.
Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy. She helps associations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations get better results from their content by improving their practices for content creation, governance, management, and promotions. Content Company’s clients include the American Bar Association, Endocrine Society, Institute of Food Technologists, Allstate, Intuit, and California State University. A leading content strategist since 1999, Hilary oversees the international, 28,000-member Content Strategy group on LinkedIn. As managing director of REALTOR.org, she oversaw the National Association of Realtors’ website and created the association’s social media strategy. She developed and teaches the first graduate-level content strategy courses for the User Experience Design Masters program at Kent State University. She is also a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. You can find her on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.
Rob is Founder of Fourth Wall Content working with clients on content strategy, creation and marketing. Previously, in his role as Head of Content at GatherContent he managed all of the organisation's content output and content operations.