A Methodology for Content Strategy

By Rahel Anne Bailie | Fellow

Content strategists are the management consultants of the content world. We are the professionals who listen between the lines as we record the litany of client pain points. We are the diagnosticians who interpret the trouble spots and turn them into a framework that the client can use to determine what might be the best prescription to alleviate their content woes. We are the interpreters who translate between the language of business and the language understood by technical professionals, and help keep the implementation on track.

Practicing content strategy isn’t something that can be done by applying a formula. There’s a reason that medical school graduates aren’t allowed to become doctors without first completing an internship and then a residency. Or, as another practitioner remarked, you have to spend time in the trenches before becoming an officer and figuring out the strategies of battle. It’s important to know “how things should go” but it’s also important to how things should not go and to develop that gut feeling about the ways a project can go sideways before it does. A good strategist can pull from experience a couple of ways to course-correct and get things back on track.

Serving the Content Lifecycle

Content strategy is a system that consists of a repeatable process that governs the management of the content throughout the entire content lifecycle. If you parse that statement, it actually has a lot packed into that statement.

• A content strategy assumes that content is not part of a supply chain, but has a lifecycle. Content doesn’t get published a single time. It gets edited and republished; it gets revised and versioned. The lifecycle is iterative, and has multiple stages. (A description of the content lifecycle is described in the Johnny Holland Magazine: http://johnnyholland.org/2010/10/content-lifecycle-closing-the-loop-in-content-strategy/.)
• The implementation of the strategy is systemic. It’s not a one-off way of producing content, but a repeatable process that the content producers, designers, and others professionals along the line can depend on to produce content well.
• The strategy is governing. It defines who does what along the way, and ensures that the process can be reliably repeatable.
• And last but not least, a content strategy is just that: strategic. The strategic part is answering the question of why. Why is content being produced this way and not that way? What are the business drivers and why can this strategic direction make a difference? How can we improve, and why is this a good idea? As soon as you talk tools and processes, you’re talking implementation.

Getting a GRIP on Content

A simple way to explain the underlying methodology for content strategy is the GRIP method. This method, which I’ve used in my practice for over a decade, has an infinite number of variations. That’s not to say that this method is simple or easy. However, much like the method for diagnosis and prescription of a doctor or a consultant, the actual phases are straightforward. It’s the conclusions that the practitioner draws that will ultimately bring strategic value to the table.

• G is for gap analysis. Look for the gap between the current state, what is happening now, and the future state, where an organization wants to be. Once it becomes apparent where the content—editorially or technically—misses the mark, it becomes apparent how to lay a foundation for a strategy that will work for a particular situation. There is no one-size-fits-all solution; each situation needs an individual set of recommendations based on the findings of the gap analysis.
• R is for requirements gathering. There are two sets of requirements that need to be understood. The first set is business and user requirements. The organization’s business requirements need to be met; if the organization cannot leverage its content as a business asset, a big opportunity is being missed. The flip side of that coin is understanding user requirements. Knowing what content your readers/viewers need and why is a critical step toward an effective content strategy. The second set is content and technical requirements. Creating effective content is the editorial side of the coin; being efficient with content production is the flip side. Having a good technical system means delivering content faster; good editorial means having good content to deliver.
• I is for intepretation. Interpretation is where the magic happens. A content strategist needs to have a good understanding of how sort through the discovery material gathered from the gap analysis and requirements and figure out how all the puzzle pieces fit together. How the requirements and gap analysis get interpreted can make—or break—the strategy for creating, delivering, and managing content.
• P is for process. The final product is a content strategy: a repeatable process or methodology for managing your content throughout the entire content lifecycle. Your customized strategy allows you to deliver your content, reliably and cost-effectively, from the right source, to the right audience, at the right time, in the right medium, on the right platform, in the right language, and through multiple iterations and versions.

Having a reliable method for assessment is one half of the equation. The other half of the equation is to understand the principles of content strategy from the view of the practitioner: the writers, content managers, content architects, and technologists associated with producing and delivering content.

Basic Principles of Content Strategy

Developing a content strategy to address all of the aspects needed is not a simple endeavour. As a starting point, you can get your content strategy off the ground with these basics:

• Content analysis. Understand the content landscape. Create an inventory, carry out an audit, and then analyze the content from qualitative, quantitative, and technical points of view. Look at all the content within the organizational ecosystem, not just the content for one medium or one project. Behind the analysis should be research typically done ahead of time by business analysts who assess the needs that the organization hopes to address through a content strategy, and by user experience professionals who determine the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the audiences who will consume the content.
• Unvarnished content. Resist the temptation to give meaning to content through inline formatting. Content should be as plain as possible. No desktop publishing, no inline formatting. Plain content can be leveraged far more easily than content with embedded formatting. Format-free content is easier to migrate between systems and is interchangeable between systems that use a common set of content. Figure out if the content has been polluted by misuse of inappropriate mark-up and what it would take to fix that.
• Content standards. Editorial standards are important and should not be sacrificed. However, to leverage content, it needs to conform to any international standards that are applicable to that content type. This means getting familiar with content standards—from Dublin Core to schema.org to DITA—and knowing when to use them and why. This also means understanding the competitive landscape and where the differences are between the value proposition of the organization and its competitors.
• Technical and editorial. It’s not worth investing in the technical side of content if its sole purpose is to produce and deliver bad content with more efficiency.
• Semantics. What allows content to be leveraged, beyond the combination of good content and good technology is metadata. Without good metadata, content is hobbled: software tools won’t understand what to do with the content, and search engines won’t understand the content. Understand the place of administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata, and the ways all three types are needed to help content meet business objectives.

Additional Considerations

Once you’ve covered the basics, there are other pieces you’ll likely need to address. This is not an extensive list but an overview of some of the more common aspects of a more complex strategy.

• Closed-loop approach. Build a strong foundation for content solutions and ensure that the foundation is as extensible and scalable as possible. A solid foundation allows for growth and adaption. Create content solutions that can draw from a technology-agnostic single source and that can be easily published to many different platforms. Build into the process the ability to track content, versions, status, and other aspects that make up a good audit trail.
• Technology matters. As the purpose of a content strategy is to support business goals and user needs, adopting the right type of system is critical. Using a system because it’s what the IT department has or because the VP used it at a previous company is not a good approach. Get a GRIP, and then choose the system you intend to implement.
• Measurement, assessment, maintenance. Evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a body of content, and then implement a process that measures content and its effectiveness to all of its audiences. Continue to refine the success metrics and key performance indicators and use that to develop the content lifecycle to make content perform.
• Governance. As a content strategy develops, certain decisions will need to be made about how content is managed throughout the content lifecycle. Making these decisions as issues arise avoids the tendency for management to make snap decisions when pressed later on or to capitulate to the loudest voice in the room.
• Talent and skills. Developing a content strategy needs specialized skills. Different content strategists have different skill sets. In each case, they should have a deep understanding of content, albeit from different perspectives. Implementing an end-to-end strategy likely requires a variety of skill sets. Core skills are content creation such as writing, and creating content in other media such as graphics, illustrations, and videos.
• Collaboration. A content strategy can’t be developed in a silo. There is the need for information architecture (to organize content), analytics and search engine optimization (to make content rank properly in search engines), library sciences (to develop indices and taxonomies), curation (to keep your content relevant, fresh, and fully connected), and technology (to create content types, models, and other structures).

Embracing the Chaos

Taking on content strategy means aligning business and user priorities, balancing project tensions, and creating order from chaos. It’s not for the faint of heart and it’s not for the new kid on the block. Content strategy needs the voice of experience applied to a reliable method for discovery, analysis, and implementation. 

RAHEL ANNE BAILIE is a content strategy consultant with a skill set encompassing content management, business analysis, information architecture, and communications. She helps discerning clients to analyze their business requirements and spectrum of content to get the right fit for their content development and management needs, and facilitates transitions to new business processes, content models, and technology implementations. Her experience gives her an intimate understanding of end-to-end processes, from requirements-gathering to implementation. Rahel presents on content strategy at conferences around the world. She is the founder of Intentional Design (http://intentionaldesign.ca), an STC Fellow, and an accredited Cognitive Edge practitioner. She co-produces the Content Strategy Workshops events, and is co-author of Content Strategy: Connecting the Dots between Business, Brand, and Benefits.