Introduction to Content Strategy

Despite its young age internet already went through different phases.

Started in the late 60s for military purposes as Arpanet, we had to wait until late 90s/early 2000s for it to spread worldwide.

Are you old enough to remember how different it was then? Most designers didn’t even care so much about content. They focused more on graphics and cool effects which often ended up being just distracting, heavy to load and boring at the end. The coming of Flash with all its animations was no help either.

However it didn’t take long for people to understand that Usability and Content matter.

As Bill Gates quoted in 1996:

“ Content is king, (…) it’s where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.

Needless to say he was pretty right on this predictions.

Nowadays internet is affecting almost every aspects of our lives. Every day new services and apps are born and keep on filling this demanding market.

The challenge is to provide the right content to the right person at a right time. That’s where Content Strategy comes in.

It makes sense but…what does ‘content’ exactly mean? It may sound obvious but finding a good definition is harder than we may think.

As reported by speaker and Lynda instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen: “In its most basic form the term Content applies to anything that conveys meaningful information to a person.”

Not just a user but a person: it’s important to remember that people are not as predictable as marketers pretend us to be: we are complex beings with mixed feelings and changeable minds living in an ultra-connected world.

But still there’s a lot of demand for meaninful information: at its core the goal of content strategists is to deliver it for the right audience in order to reach some business goals.

Audience and goals, everything starts from these key concepts.

There’s no effective business or communication if we don’t know exactly:

• What we are communicating,
• Who we are communicating with,
• The best way to reach them,
• …And above all their needs.

It’s vital to gather all the necessary information and get a clear picture about company’s goals. What success means to them and how to ensure a successful communication with the people.

At the end it’s the people that matters and understanding them helps strategists to deliver content they will understand and value.

Ok so, how do we define an Audience?

Well, we can start just by asking who the organisation is aiming to reach. It would be effective to do a competitive analysis and to track down the closest competitors and their audience.

For every project there’s always an archetypal user for which a product or service was originally designed.

From this archetypal user — or primary audience — we build a list of key characteristics which define them. These are the first potential users of the product. Surely not the only ones: we need to know who is inspired by them and maybe wants to wait and see before trying a new service.

From the primary audience we can also establish a secondary and tertiary one.

These three groups will let us target the potential audience in its whole, the target audience.

This research brings us to the concept of Personas: they are ideal descriptions of people, complete with names and attributes of all the groups in your target audience.

They must be as real as possible, with photos, names and main statistics. A common way to gather all these data is through face to face interviews with real people.

As we said that’s the people that matters. So it’s vital to know all about their needs and wants.

You can guess empathy is key here. The capacity to listen and talk openly without any assumptions and bias, to put people at ease and willing to speak. It’s UX professionals’ job to advocate on behalf of the user.

If we know what’s bugging our audience we can address these issues and significantly improve the product we are working on.

When enough people are interviewed it’s possible to define some patterns in their actions and beliefs. So to extend personas with empathy maps and to give the project a structure, with a precise style and architecture.

A single book could not be enough to write about Content Strategy from A to Z: in fact these are just the early steps.

It’s not just about planning and delivering content. It also provides the necessary tools to measure the efficiency of content and its maintenance.

It’s the base on which the investment can be safely built and preserved.