Content Strategy

What is content strategy?

• It is the planning, creation, delivery, and management of content.
• Planning
  • Outlining the type of content needed, the topics covered, and how it will fit into the overall communication goals
• Creation
  • Produce high-quality, relevant, and engaging content tailored to meet the needs of the audience
• Deliver
  • Ensuring the content reaches the intended audience through the right channels, such as websites, social media, email, or other platforms
• Management
  • Overseeing the content lifecycle, including updating, archiving, or repurposing it to maintain relevance and ensure consistency over time

Content can be in many forms

• Digital, physical, etc.

Foundational elements of content strategies

1. Content audits
   1. Thorough review of all content assets (webpages, blogs, videos). Identifies gaps, redundancies, and areas for improvement, offering insights to optimise user experience.
   2. Helps make things easier for users, but also earns the business profit as they spend less managing their content.
   3. Audits are key when doing a website redesign, rebranding, SEO, performance analysis
2. Setting content goals
   1. Identify key stages — Awareness, consideration, decision, retention, your user journeys will help here
   2. Set content goals per stage — Each stage has its own goal, like “Awareness” stage might have the goal to drive traffic to a specific page
   3. Map content to each page — Provide relevant, timely content at each journey stage to help designers know which components are needed and wehn.
   4. Validate through research — Test your goals with research and analytics.
3. Content models
   1. These are kind of life a wireframe — Organises different types of content and how they connect.
   2. Helps with starting a project, improving user experience, scaling content production
4. Tone of voice
   1. Essential for creating a cohesive user experience across all touchpoints — How your brand sounds like to users
   2. Define brand identity, understand your audience, set key tone traits, create & refine guidelines — Helps determining tone of voice

Collaboration is key

• Can’t do everything on your own — You’d need to work with different people

Main purpose

• You’re designing for people, not just problems.
  • E.g. Spotify designs their UI such that it’s always showing users what music they prefer — there’s a strategy in how they display their content.
  • BMW website shows content about their cars with a moody and edgy atmosphere in high quality visuals — Tells users that it’s about speed, quality and performance. In their store, all car models follow a consistent structure (all of them facing the same way), shows icons that let users know which ones are hybrid electric, etc.
• The content should also be truthful to the brand — Good content is appropriate
  • Appropriate for your business
  • Content is appropriate for users when it helps them accomplish their goals.

Venn diagram for appropriate content — Good content is useful for users