Our content strategy overview course author, Hilary Marsh, explains why and how a content strategy is so important to integrate into your organization’s business processes.
If you plan, create, manage, and share content in a strategic way, your audience will better be able to find it, understand it, and use it. And the more they use your offerings, the more highly they will value their relationship with you.
Here’s a little more: By “content,” we mean the information about your products, services, and programs. All the information: sales and marketing materials, product details, technical documentation, help resources, etc. This might include text-based pages, videos, infographics, PDFs, and in-app content.
Does your organization plan all content together? Do you have an explicit, measurable goal for each piece of content you publish? Do you make sure that all content speaks in your organization’s voice? Do you ensure that all live content is still accurate and relevant? That all the facts align, regardless of who actually creates the content? Do you make sure the content has reached its audience and met its goals, and do you use this data to inform future content decisions?
If you had a content strategy, all your answers would be “yes!” And our content strategy course will show you how to achieve this.
1. Business success
Here is the formula for ensuring that all of your organization’s content is effective:
- Current
- Accurate
- Relevant
- Written so its audience benefits are clear
- Has a known audience
- Has explicit measurable goals and success metrics
- Sounds like it’s from your organization
- Gets promoted in the right* channels and at the right* frequency
If your content meets all of these, it will be successful!
* By “right,” we mean the channels and frequency that produce the most positive results for your particular audiences.
2. Customer satisfaction
See #1 above. If your content meets all of these, your audience will
- Understand what you have for them
- Know whether they are the right fit for your offerings
- Be able to engage with your organization and your offerings easily
3. Employee satisfaction
If the people creating your offerings – and the content of and about those offerings – see that their work has a greater impact, they will have more pride in their jobs and in the organization that employs them.
4. Greater efficiency
If you establish measurable goals for your content and assess whether the content has met its goals, you might revisit the need for the content – and for the offering that the content is about.
If you only publish content that is effective and stop publishing content that is not working, your staff will be able to focus their efforts only on the offerings that your audience wants. The “stop-doing” list is difficult but necessary, and has wonderful effects on staff morale. See #3 above.
If you want to learn more about content strategy principles and how you can use them in your organization, Firehead has a course by Hilary Marsh, and expert content strategist, that will give you all of the foundations you need to get going.
Check it out here: Content Strategy Overview
We also have many free resources to download that can help you get started on your path.
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