What does ‘content strategy’ actually mean?
It’s not the prettiest term, is it?
Unfortunately it’s one that’s been widely adopted. What it really means is
thinking about what sort of material you should be creating for your audience.
Covering everything from the forms this takes, to where
and how you should be providing it.
Let’s use an example to better illustrate
this:
Imagine you’re a national art gallery.
You’ve identified two groups of potential visitors you want to have a more
meaningful relationship with, online, based around a fancy new web gallery
thingummy a clever digital agency has built for you. (So we get off on the
right foot, I’m also going to pretend you may even have hired Alien to run the
project for you.)
For argument’s sake, we’ll take tourists and
locals working in the creative industries as the two groups you want to be
speaking to. This is with the main aim of getting them to use your fancy new digital
arts wossname.
You want them coming back regularly to your site, as the amazing digital thing you’ve launched will evolve from their
contributions and those of their friends.
There are a fair few
considerations here:
- You’ve two very different audiences you want to be speaking to
- You need to let them know about your fancy digital thingummy
- You want them to share it with their pals
- You want them to keep coming back to your site to see it grow
- It’d be nice if when they were in town they’d come along to see the physical exhibition the project relates to
- And you’ve a newsletter service too. It would be good if all these people signed up to that too
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| Daniel Rozin's Weave Mirror from the V&A's seminal Decode exhibition |
So the content strategy part of this would
look at a few key bits and bobs. Firstly, you’ve two distinct audiences you want to talk with. Does it make sense to treat them separately? Or will the proposition be
stronger if there’s one stream of communication?
Generally I’d go with the
latter. In an ideal world you might like to adjust your tone slightly for each
of these audiences, but in this instance it probably makes more sense to lead
the conversation on your terms.
We also need to establish where these
people are most comfortable interacting with you online. If there’re
options here, which of these makes the most sense? The natural assumption would
be Facebook, as everyone’s on there, right? Stuff shared on Facebook also has a slightly longer
shelf life than Twitter. But to balance that, Twitter users are more likely to
share cultural stuff, and lots of creative types use it. Constantly. Even
though this audience might be on Facebook, it’s probably not as joined to the
hip as it as, say, teenagers are.
What about your tourists? Are they
English-language speakers? From where? Different countries use different social media. People in Japan, for instance, do use Twitter, but not Facebook. (They have something called Ameba in its stead.) And if you’re tying
this in with a physical exhibition, would it be sensible to use Foursquare?
And although using social media may make sense from
the point of getting people to share news of the project, if engaging them is
what’s important, perhaps you need to focus the bulk of your efforts on keeping
them on your site? We might want user generated videos or reviews, or a blog
that connects the digital to the physical in an intuitive way.
Content strategy is about considering all
this kind of stuff and then proposing the best plan for achieving what it is
you want to when talking to—or preferably with—your
audience.
If this sounds like the sort of thing you want to do, but you need help to do it, then it’s worth a chat. So get in touch.
