By Janus Boye
When a financial crisis hits, marketing gets fired. Or downsized. Management starts getting ideas; perhaps someone from IT or finance could write some sort of blog? The general notion which especially reveals itself in a time of economic instability, is that content is nice to have, but not essential. It’s icing on the cake.
Rahel Anne Bailie is an expert on content strategy, and she knows how content can be a business assist — an investment in the company’s future. In this posting, I share some of my lessons learned from a recent conversation with her.
Planning your content
You wouldn’t try to run a business or organization without a business plan. Sometimes it seems the same is not true for content. It seems that often the immediate goal of your shiny new content is mistakenly taken for the long term goal. While an immediate objective may be to inform or entertain, you should always be aware of how accomplishing this will support your long term business goals.
Too often emphasis is placed on simply creating some sort of content. And getting it out there. On some sort of channel. But you need the right sort of content on the right channel. This means that strategy should always be the defining term when it comes to content. Therefore a process where the organization’s high-value activities are identified, is needed. When this is done, content can be geared towards supporting those activities.
This process is not just important before creating new content. It should also be applied to existing content. Maybe you already have piles of great content, but perhaps you are not using it in a fashion that lines up with your overall goals?
A content ecosystem
When your content is very directly supporting your organization’s long term business goals, it will result in an ecosystem in which it will undoubtedly be easier to gather support for the process of creating and distributing content.
If important stakeholders can see how investing in a piece of content can improves sales or reduce the number of confused customers calling customer support, then content suddenly becomes a method for achieving long term success — instead of icing on the cake.
This process also involves a great deal of strategy; identifying different types of content and what business goals they serve. This process might reveal rudimentary content that no one had really thought of as content — perhaps it is perceived as information or design — and therefore overlooked in the content strategy.
With a content strategy in place, you might realize that content is all around us, and that not aiming those resources at our business goals is downright wasteful.
Learn more about content strategy and digital communication
Rahel is a frequent and popular Boye speaker and you can meet her in November in Aarhus at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference.
You can also join our peer groups, where everything content is a regular topic, e.g. in the CMS Expert group and in the digital communication groups.
Finally, you can also read more in these related postings:
