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What is content strategy

By Steve Kellas, Content Director

You probably realise how important your web content is to your business. But have you spent any time planning your content as a strategic business asset? We don't mean 'we need FAQs on the website' kind of content. Have you REALLY thought about what it's for? Who's reading it? And most importantly, are they enjoying it?

Apart from identifying some sections to dump stuff into, content too often gets pushed off the map when websites are built. All the focus is on the design, programming and hosting. Content can be tricky to gather and time-consuming to manage and create. And yet, content is the most critical part of the site – it is the only part that speaks with your customers and tells them what you are all about and what you have to offer to them. Without good content, a website is just buttons glued on a shell.

A content strategy is a business plan for creating, sharing and policing your content. It should help you understand why you create your content at all and why your customers will care about it.

What's in a content strategy?

As content consultant, this is probably the most frequently asked question we hear. Let's take a look at some of the things a content strategy should cover in order to make your content creation process (do you have one?) less haphazard.

We begin by taking a snapshot of where you are at currently to identify how you communicate to your audience across your entire website: are there any gaps in the content, any inconsistencies in message or tone and bottlenecks to creation? This content audit would inform the plan for your content strategy. It will clearly outline what to write about, how to write, why you're writing it, and where it fits in.

Here are some of the topics a good content strategy covers:

• Purpose – explains what your content is supposed to DO and why people will people care
• Messaging – outlines your key messages (what are we writing about?), and the hierarchy of those messages across and through the layers of the website (how to get people from 'A to Buy')
• Tone and language – often found in style guides, this is useful in the strategy as it gives guidance for how to write the content itself
• Audience profile – who is this content being written for, what are they like
• Subject areas – guides web copywriters on what to write about, which content topics to follow and on which part of the site
• SEO – every website needs a plan to optimise the content for search, this would cover keywords, and specific ways of writing the content to improve search ranking
• How to write for the web – specifically how to layout and construct the content on your web pages for online readers
• Meta data guidelines – how to write about what you're writing about
• Distribution strategy – the big plan: where will your customers be able to read your content and how does it all fit together, defines where your content will be published: what sections of the website, blogs, articles, PR, emails etc

Once created, your content strategy should be comprehensive enough to be read by anyone coming into your business either in-house or freelance and give them a thorough understanding of why, what and how to write valuable content for your target audience and business.

Find out more about our Content Strategy services