At Firehead, we’re extremely proud of the exceptional quality authors we’ve gathered in our training centre. They are top names and thought leaders in their fields.
Hilary Marsh is our Content strategy overview course author. She’s an internationally recognised expert in creating content strategies for professional associations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and corporate intranets, and for her passion for teaching.
Why is this course important?
This course is a comprehensive overview of content strategy tasks and roles. Content strategists guide organizations to become more strategic, intentional, and holistic with the myriad types of content they publish. Organizations produce three layers of content:
- Core content: the substance of what the organization does – its programs, services, documentation, product descriptions
- Informational/supportive content: describe the core offerings and help people use the — sales collateral, web pages, registration tools, etc.
- Marketing content: blog posts, infographics, social media posts, etc.
Content strategy should apply to all three layers, and ideally should connect them.
There are many online courses ostensibly about content strategy, but most of them are actually about content marketing or copywriting and focus only on marketing your content. This course presents a collection of presentations and resources that will help communicators become content strategy thinkers and doers.
How will this course help?
This course is for communicators, designers, and user experience professionals who
- want to do content strategy work
- will be working with a content strategist, either on a project or on an ongoing basis
- will be advocating to engage a content strategist to participate on a project
For all of these, it will be helpful to develop an understanding what a strategic approach to content looks like. Content strategy ensures that
- only current, accurate, relevant information is accessible to audiences
- different departments/divisions don’t publish redundant or conflicting information
- all published content uses the organization’s voice
This course will help you make the case for doing content strategy and show how to lead the organization through the work. As a content strategist, you’ll be able to provide smart analysis of an organization’s content and its practices and make recommendations for improvements in the roles and processes, as well as in the content itself.
In time, once an organization has a sustainable content strategy in place, its offerings will be easier to find, easier to use, and easier to share. They will be more successful because the audience can accomplish their goals, thereby enabling the organization to reach its goals. The course touches on content operations — if you are interested in a deeper dive into that topic, Firehead’s content operations course is a great corollary to this one.
Here’s a little bit about Hilary
Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital consultancy that works with professional associations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and corporate intranets. She helps these content-rich organizations get better results from their content by improving their practices.
Content Company’s clients include Allstate, American Bar Association, American College of Cardiology, American Medical Association, Estée Lauder, Endocrine Society, Fulbright Teachers Exchange, Institute of Food Technologists, Intuit, NORC at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, and Walgreens.
Hilary has been a leading content strategy practitioner, mentor, speaker, and professor since 1999. She’s taught at Kent State University, the University of Strasbourg, The Society for Technical Communications, and University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria. She has been published and quoted, and her work cited in major industry publications including Content Strategy for the Web, Content Strategy at Work, and reports from Prophet/Altimeter, and she is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. She also leads the online content strategy community at https://content-strategy.com (which we encourge you to join).
After you complete this course, you will
- Have a clear idea of what content strategy is
- Understand the various types of work content strategists do
- Know how to assess how content strategy can help an organization treat its content more strategically, helping the audience succeed and thereby achieving its own goals.
If you’re interested in learning more about content strategy facets, you’re in luck! Hilary has created not one, but FOUR, guides with checklists on content strategy topics that you can download for free. Get started on your journey here:
Checklist for creating an enterprise content strategy
Creating a content strategy roadmap
Content audit planning worksheet
Audience understanding workbook
Or sign up for our online Content Strategy Overview course here: Content Strategy
