Craft Your Content Vision

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Identify and interview stakeholders.
Align stakeholders around a shared content vision.
Define business objectives for your content strategy.

Embrace the Possibilities

The path to developing a successful content strategy begins in a rather unexpected place: your imagination. You have to rethink what content is and dream big about what it can do for your organization. That’s the key to establishing a vision for your content.

Unfortunately, the vision itself isn’t enough. Your organization must also have the capacity to carry out that vision and sustain it over the long term. That capacity is your organization’s content maturity, and it’s a good idea to assess it before tackling a big strategic content initiative.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and join our hero Grace to find out how she defines Ursa Major’s content vision and objectives.

Identify Key Stakeholders

Grace begins by identifying the people who have the most to gain or lose from a company-wide content strategy. These are her stakeholders, and it’s important to involve them early on in the process. It will be difficult to secure stakeholders’ buy-in unless the content vision and strategy address their business objectives.

Here are a few factors to consider when assembling your own content strategy dream team.

Representation: Typically, many groups create content, such as marketing, sales, product, documentation, user experience, support, and training. Include content leadership from each team so there aren’t surprises and objections down the road.
Strategy: Talk to colleagues who can provide high-level input, like overall business objectives, priorities, and challenges. For example, you might reach out to the VP of a business unit, the head of product, or other executives who think strategically about the business.
Expertise: Content experts come in many varieties. Consider what experts are needed from your team—they may be thought leaders or influencers or manage technical implementations.

After identifying all of the stakeholders, Grace is ready to begin the discovery process.

Interview the Stakeholders

Grace reaches out to her stakeholders and sets up interviews with them. She schedules one-on-one interviews instead of group interviews so she can focus on what’s important to each unique stakeholder.

Grace has dozens of potential questions she might ask depending on the stakeholder’s role at Ursa Major, but here’s what she wants to learn.

What is the stakeholder trying to achieve?
What are their top short-term and long-term goals?
How might content help them achieve those goals?
How do they define and measure success?
What are the stakeholder’s concerns, expectations, and priorities for the content strategy project?
What are their team’s content challenges and pain points? Their needs and constraints?

For a comprehensive list of all the questions to consider for stakeholder interviews, see the Resources section at the end of this unit.

Establish a Unified Vision

At this point, Grace has dug up some valuable insights by talking to her stakeholders, but those stakeholders aren’t yet aligned around a common vision.

For example, the VP of Marketing sees content as a tool to drive brand awareness and boost SEO growth. But the VP of Product thinks personalized content for specific audiences could differentiate Ursa Major’s solar energy systems and improve customer satisfaction. Grace won’t make much headway until everyone is on the same page.

Against a backdrop of mountains, three smiling people gather around a telescope and share a vision of the night sky

One way to do that is by organizing a vision workshop so that stakeholders can explore high-level content objectives. Stakeholders who don’t recognize the strategic value of content will get inspired by those who do. It can start a dialogue, build momentum, and rally stakeholders around the idea of a company-wide content strategy.

Establishing a shared vision is an essential step in developing a content strategy, so don’t skip it. Stakeholder alignment will make or break any content initiative.

Narrow the Focus

Grace has managed to inspire her stakeholders to think big about content, and that’s awesome! But now it’s time to get strategic. Grace reviews everything she learned about Ursa Major’s business needs.

Obviously content can’t move the needle on every single business goal. So Grace asks herself a critical question: “Where can content have the greatest impact?” By narrowing the focus, she can build a strong case for the strategic value of content, set realistic expectations, and secure buy-in from stakeholders.

Grace identifies a few areas where content can help Ursa Major drive real business outcomes. Let’s zero in on one of the solar company’s top problems.

High Support and Customer Acquisition Costs

Solar energy systems are a complex product. Even after a customer makes a purchase, they have to navigate a lengthy installation and permitting process, which lasts 6 to 12 months. And solar contracts have a 20-year term, so a variety of issues and questions arise over that period of time.

Currently, Ursa Major’s engagement model is high touch, meaning that customer success managers and support agents interact with customers one-on-one. In fact, digital engagement accounts for only 10 percent of total customer interactions.

Grace suspects that customers might be happier if they could quickly find information and solutions online without picking up a phone or sending an email. Even better, that would help Ursa Major reduce customer acquisition and support costs. A win-win!

Define the Objectives

After identifying the business needs, Grace is ready to define meaningful goals for Ursa Major’s company-wide content strategy. What does success look like? What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) will they use to measure results?

Computer screens in an office display colorful line graphs and a pie chart

Looking over the data, Grace thinks that within a year of its implementation, Ursa Major’s content strategy can help the company hit the following targets.

Reduce support costs by 15 percent.
Increase digital customer interactions from 10 percent to 40 percent.

Note that Grace’s objectives are specific and measurable. Many companies make the mistake of setting vague content goals that are hard to measure—for example, “Improve the customer experience.” If you need guidance on setting the right targets for your own organization, see the Resources section at the end of this unit.

Grace is pleased with her progress so far. These metrics will help Ursa Major gauge the effectiveness of its content strategy. And if Grace can prove that content affects the bottom line, she’ll be able to win support for the new content strategy across the organization.

Your Content Vision in Action

Let’s face it: In the real world, it can be challenging to secure buy-in for content strategy. Grace was lucky enough to align Ursa Major’s stakeholders around a shared vision, but that might not be practical or achievable in your organization.

That’s why we recommend taking a two-pronged approach to your content vision.

Top-down: Work with stakeholders and leadership to identify the needs of the business.
Bottom-up: Tackle a small pilot project as a proof of concept. Demonstrating measurable results is a great way to convince naysayers and show that content directly impacts the business.

If you’re having trouble aligning stakeholders, then you might take these approaches in parallel. A quick win with a tactical initiative can start the right conversations and stir up grassroots support for content strategy.

Devise Your Pilot Strategy

Keep these tips in mind when you start planning your content strategy pilot.

Establish a clear business objective. Find a core metric that will help you measure the success of the pilot. Remember, business leaders are generally swayed by numbers, not rhetoric.
Target a specific audience. Make sure your pilot addresses a particular need or goal of that audience.
Pick a realistic amount of content that the pilot team can handle without being overburdened.
Be prepared to make course corrections when things don’t go as planned.

If you’re not sure how to launch a pilot program, don’t worry. Over the next few units, we follow along with Grace as she discovers an area where content can make a big difference—to both the customer and the business. She’ll use that as a pilot project to validate Ursa Major’s new content strategy.

Evaluate Content Maturity

At this point, Grace has defined business objectives that can lead Ursa Major Solar down the road to content transformation. But getting to that destination is an entirely different story. Does Ursa Major have the right people, processes, and infrastructure in place to deliver on its lofty goals? What’s the organization’s content maturity level?

Grace uses ASAE Foundation’s content maturity assessment tool to evaluate Ursa Major’s content maturity. It turns out that the company has a lot of work to do on that front, but Grace loves a challenge!

She immediately bookmarks the Content Operations and Management module, which she’ll tackle after Ursa Major has established its content strategy. Then she can help the company build repeatable, scalable processes for producing high-quality content.

Shift the Focus

Now that Grace understands the goals of the organization, she’s ready to shift her focus to the most important element of content strategy: the goals of the customer.

In the next unit, we learn how to get to know the audience and map their journey with a product or service.