by Janus Boye
Hilary Marsh in action at a past Boye conference in Denmark. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Content strategy has been around for a while as a term, but personally I do think that the pandemic has shown the importance of communications and specifically content.
As Hilary Marsh said in our recent member conference call:
Content is everyone’s work
According to Hilary, content strategy is making decisions about all the aspects of how an organization’s content will work. Content operations is executing all of those decisions, every day, putting it all into action.
A new way to think about content strategy
As a part of her presentation, Hilary also offered a slightly improved definition of content strategy - adding the word ‘effective’ to the broadly used existing definition:
Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, effective content
She also said that to make it stick, content strategy has so much change management in it. You need allies, and her recommendation is to start among those who already get it. That might be those who are already posting on LinkedIn, already asking for more, or those wanting guidelines.
Content strategy is also an HR issue
Hilary made a compelling point when she discussed a real-life example that is similar to content governance. The Illinois Rules of the Road book states all the guidelines, signage and rules to driving safely and legally in Illinois. However, before we issue a driver’s license to someone, we educate them about the regulations, have them practice driving, and then have them show their proficiency through a driving test. As an organisation, you need to put similar kinds of education, training, and reinforcement for content — which you do through content governance.
This is also where the Human Resource (HR) department comes into the picture. Content needs to be a part of the job descriptions for everyone who creates, reviews, or oversees content. And content strategists can learn from HR about how best to inform people about content best practices, educate/train them, and reinforce the appropriate behaviors.
Finally, content strategists need to work with IT to ensure that the tools (digital experience platform, CMS, or whatever you call your digital stack) makes it hard to make mistakes. This could be by ensuring that outdated content is flagged, by ensuring that content is accessible, or by making it impossible to publish content that has not been approved.
Learn more about content strategy
Hilary Marsh was supposed to do a talk at our Brooklyn 20 conference on the topic of Making Content Strategy Stick. Now that the conference didn't happen due to the pandemic, she's generously shared more of her thinking in this blog post which elaborates on making your content strategy stick.
You can also download the slides (PDF) or view the entire 29-minute recording below. Feel free to leave a comment, if you have any feedback or questions.