Rather than a fixed checklist of things you need to do, at 世界杯押注, our content strategists approach creating a digital content strategy in phases. There’s no set sequence, regarding how to create a digital content strategy, but each stage builds on the next.
- Research and planning
- Process and structure
- Content operations and measurement
Let’s dive into each phase of our content strategy to see how our team might deploy different questions and tactics in a given project.
Research and planning
Defining your goals is the first step in every successful digital content strategy. You have to know where you’re headed so you know which tools to use to get you there.
Practically, this looks like understanding business objectives and user needs, and familiarizing yourself with the “content landscape” and how your organization is positioned within that landscape.
Questions we ask in this stage:
- What content do people need?
- What content do we have?
- How much content do we have, what is it about, how good is it at meeting people’s needs?
- What messages or content components are getting lost?
- How does the audience want us to communicate with them?
Process and structure
After establishing where you are in the content landscape and where you want to go, it’s time to develop systems and workflows that support your goals. At this stage, examine current workflows, methods, and roles involved in content operations—and identify opportunities and plans for improvement.
To ensure content is structured and formatted to meet users’ needs, it’s also essential to establish a content model to define rules for how content is grouped, tagged, connected, displayed, and reused. And a content model with templates and documentation streamlines your process by automating and aligning creation across teams who need to be involved in creating content (marketing, legal, etc.). This not only maximizes the benefits of your content but allows you to get content to the market quicker—and with fewer required resources.
Questions we ask in this stage:
- What processes and tools are required to move content through the organization?
- What workflow improvements can be made?
- How does the content need to be organized for users to find what they need quickly?
- How does the content need to be formatted?
Manage and measure
To operationalize your content strategy, you’ll need guidelines to ensure consistency and quality—plus the training, processes, and tools for your team to follow those guidelines. Larger enterprise organizations should plan to create an internal communications strategy that designates responsibilities within your team and so you can share content wins with the larger organization.
Since digital content is constantly evolving, it is critical to establish a formal governance structure to outline clear ownership over content strategy decision-making for future changes and requests. You will also want to identify goals and KPIs to gauge the success of your content efforts and build a roadmap for measurement, testing, and continued research and iteration milestones going forward.
Questions we ask in this stage:
- How will we lead our organization through new content strategy processes?
- How might we make decisions about core content strategies in the future?
- How are changes to our content strategy initiated, and by whom?
- How will we know if our approach is successful?
- How can we continue to listen to our users and meet their needs?