Learn Content Strategy Basics
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define the term content.
- Describe an effective content experience.
- List common content challenges.
- Explain what content strategy is.
What Is Content?
When you hear the word content, what springs to mind? Maybe it’s a blog post on a website, a video on a YouTube channel, or a how-to article in a help portal. You could point to any one of those resources and say, “That’s content.”
And, in part, that’s right. But content isn’t just an appetizing chunk of information that you spoon into your hungry brain. Content is also:
- A product that requires research, design, development, delivery, and iteration.
- A system that connects people, processes, and technologies.
- A set of data that must be structured and modeled.
- A business asset that can be tied to objectives, metrics, and results.
The tiny word content describes an entire universe of possibilities! But that’s not even the full, glorious picture. Because ultimately, content is an experience.
The Content Experience
Content experience is exactly what it sounds like: the comprehensive experience of customers who interact with your content during their journey with your product or service. It’s a customer-centric approach to content.
An effective content experience takes into account these questions.
- Who’s the audience? What are their needs, problems, expectations, and goals?
- How, when, and where do customers interact with the content?
- How do customers feel when they engage with the content?
- Is the content easy to find?
- How is the content presented and delivered?
But most importantly, a successful content experience is a force that shapes the path of the customer journey.
Give Customers a Compass
In the business world, we love to talk about the end-to-end customer lifecycle as a journey. And for good reason! It’s a helpful and descriptive metaphor.
If customers are on a journey, then your content is what they use to navigate that journey. It’s their compass. Customers need and expect a seamless, personalized experience that points them in the right direction each step of the way.
Common Content Challenges
Too often, our content isn’t a compass for our customers. It’s an obstacle that gets in their way. Here are a few challenges that customers can experience when trying to interact with an organization’s content.
- They can’t find answers to their questions, or they don’t know where to look.
- The right information is buried under an avalanche of irrelevant or outdated content.
- The content isn’t consistent or useful.
- The content is too general, too basic, or full of jargon.
- The information is disjointed and fragmented, so customers can’t connect the dots or see a clear path forward.
- There aren’t enough real-world examples, solutions, or best practices.
- The content doesn’t address the needs of people at different skill levels—from the beginner to the seasoned expert.
Issues like these contribute to a frustrating experience for your customers. And that has real consequences. It damages your brand, and it can also impact the bottom line by increasing support costs, decreasing customer satisfaction, discouraging customer retention, and more.
No one wants that. So how do companies end up delivering bad content experiences to their customers?
The Root of the Problem
To answer that question, let’s meet Ursa Major Solar, a regional company in the US that sells solar energy systems. The company is growing fast and recently hired Grace Chung as its first director of customer experience. Her mandate from leadership is to collaborate with cross-functional departments to deliver a connected experience across the entire customer journey.
Grace knows that content will play a vital role in such a big digital transformation. But currently Ursa Major Solar is facing some serious content headaches.
Lack of Vision
No one at Ursa Major has a clear picture of all the content that has been published or why. The company hasn’t established strategic enterprise-wide objectives for content, so it’s hard to measure content effectiveness. In fact, many executives see content as a cost center, not a core capacity with the potential to affect the business and brand.
Tactical Silos
Multiple teams are churning out inconsistent or duplicate content. Those teams have different agendas, and they’re stuck in the tactical weeds. Instead of thinking holistically about the customer journey, they focus on short-term projects—a product launch, a new feature, the latest campaign—and ignore the big picture.
Research Gaps
Ursa Major hasn’t prioritized user research, so teams don’t know enough about customers to create rich, valuable content experiences that support the entire journey across all channels and touchpoints. That also makes it difficult to personalize content for specific audiences.
It’s a daunting list of problems, but the good news is that no matter where Ursa Major’s content stands today, the company can transform it into a compass for its customers and an asset for its business. To do that, Ursa Major needs a content strategy.
What Is Content Strategy?
Many people assume that content strategy is the same thing as an editorial calendar or a content plan. But it isn’t.
Content strategy is a practice that aligns the needs of your customers with the goals of your business, and it’s the guiding star for all of your content development efforts. It determines what content to create, what content not to create, and how the content fits into the customer journey. It's a series of hard decisions that focus your time and resources, allowing you to deliver the biggest possible impact.
In other words, content strategy helps you provide the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time… and for the right reason. It answers the all-important question: “Why?” If you can’t articulate the strategic value of a piece of content, then you probably shouldn’t create it.
The Making of a Content Strategy
Content strategy might seem a little abstract until you start digging into the nuts and bolts of developing one. So in this module, we follow along with Grace as she leads a content strategy initiative at Ursa Major Solar.
Here’s the basic process she follows.
- Craft Ursa Major’s content vision and get buy-in from stakeholders.
- Learn about customers and map their end-to-end journey.
- Evaluate existing content to identify gaps and opportunities.
- Define, pilot, and evangelize the strategy.
Of course, it’s easier said than done. It involves cross-functional collaboration, change management, and lots of stakeholders. But Grace knows it’s worth the effort.
It Takes a Village
Like many companies, Ursa Major has several teams that create content: marketing, product, documentation, service, and training. That’s a lot of groups! It might be tempting initially for departments to work in isolation when defining a content strategy.
But remember, content doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it’s part of a complex ecosystem. The customer doesn’t know or care which team created the content assets. They experience the content as a whole, and the experience should be seamless. That isn’t possible unless all teams have a shared understanding of the customers’ journey and goals.
This is Grace’s mantra: “No single department owns the company’s content strategy. Everyone owns it. Each content producer at Ursa Major is a custodian of the customer experience.”
Strategy at Multiple Levels
That being said, Grace recognizes that the departments at Ursa Major are unique, and they each serve a specific business function. So of course it makes sense for content strategy to exist at multiple levels within the organization.
It’s sort of like the gears in a machine. They’re different sizes, and they rotate at their own speeds. But the gears are linked together, so they work collectively in service of the machine’s overall purpose and design.
So after Grace helps Ursa Major establish a broad macro-level strategy, then each department can develop a supplemental strategy that dictates how it will contribute to the company’s content vision.
The Path to Content Transformation
Ready to learn how to create a successful content strategy? Great, let’s hit the road! In the next unit, Grace defines Ursa Major’s business objectives for content and rallies stakeholders around the company’s strategic efforts.
