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Content Strategy Begins With Purpose

I remember reading about Norman Cousins, who developed a serious illness in the seventies and received a poor recovery prognosis. Convinced of the power of positive emotions, he used humor and laughing to support his recovery by renting funny TV shows and movies. He wrote about it in his book Anatomy of An Illness.

For me today, I think it would be TED Talks because of their incredible inspirational value. All marketers and sales professionals should take 20 minutes and view this insightful as well as inspiring talk:

The insights shared in this talk were reinforced during my drive to work today. WBUR, our local NPR station, presented a story about companies setting up gardens at work for employees. Say what?

You can read the article here. They quoted Judith Frampton, a vice president at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, saying the company tries to promote healthy eating, and the garden helps do that.

“The main reason we did it was because we are totally serious about trying to figure out how to get people to be healthier before they get sick,” she says.

When messages like this come from a "stand" -- the "Why" of the business -- they resonate and stick far better than those that discuss the "What" or even the "How."

When our content strategy emanates from our core purpose and intent, our language, messages and content become aligned in ways that attract our best customers and partners.

Keeping PowerPoint in Perspective

A recent New York Times article -- We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint -- is the latest in a (seemingly) never-ending series of articles deriding the tool. This is a good opportunity to move from the "cool" perspective of bashing PowerPoint, to consider it's significant possibilities -- even for content professionals.

For over twelve years we have recommended a different perspective. Rather than view PowerPoint as a bullet-oriented presentation tool -- it's initial purpose -- we suggest viewing it as a business graphic development, and even general communication tool.

Training organizations have long embraced PowerPoint as a foundation for e-learning. Where would marketing webinars be without PowerPoint?

As a production tool for general business people, nothing beats it and that's why it's so pervasive.

But what of more "professional" users?

A Tool for the Content Marketing Professional

Consider the following marketing and sales content requirements facing most business content creators:

• Relevance -- tailor content so it is relevant to viewer's roles, interests, etc.
• Faster development times -- produce and deploy content quickly
• Multi-purpose -- create content that can be used for multiple purposes -- training, marketing, briefings and selling
• Modularity -- create content as modules that can be mixed-and-matched for different versions of end products
• Multimedia -- move beyond static text to rich media documents and multimedia
• Maintenance -- maintain content to extend shelf life and accuracy
• Lower content costs, improve return-on-content -- accomplish the above objectives while driving production costs lower

Years ago, a marketing agency performed an analysis on the use of PowerPoint at HP. One of the (not so) startling findings from discussions with the sales organization was: "if we built PowerPoint the right way, we would never need brochures."

I believe this is even more true today.

For non-website content, companies must adopt a new approach to creating content. We've called this thinking and creating like a publisher.

PowerPoint is a true multi-media content creation tool. Over the last few versions, functionality has matured significantly. It enables professionals to quickly build highly modular content which facilitates dynamic content assembly. Front line business communicators can easily tailor and personalize finished content so it is relevant for intended audiences.

What other software tool provides a universal standard with usable functionality for "mere mortals" to work with text, images, graphics, animation, audio and video in a single application that costs virtually nothing?

Content Strategy for the Web

If you're accountable for creating content for marketing and sales I encourage you to immediately get copies of Kristina Halvorson's Content Strategy for the Web for everyone on your team.

There are many parallels and insights that apply to building non-website content. The core premise, that organizations must take a strategic approach to building content and think of content as important business assets, applies to content created for lead generation and nurturing programs, sales enablement and customer communications.

The following are a few key excerpts from the book:

"Only when we embrace our identities as publishers will we be able to commit to the necessary infrastructure to care for our content as a strategic business asset.

For years, we've been spending millions of dollars on strategy and research, user experience design, visual design, and technical platforms. In other words, we've invested in everything we need to build the online vehicles for our content.

And yet, strangely, it's the content that gets left until the last minute. It's the main reason projects are delayed or even abandoned. It's an afterthought, a nuisance.

Why? Because most of us haven't yet realized that we're actually in the publishing business.

Publishers plan far in advance which content they will create. They have established, measurable processes in place. They invest in teams of professionals to create and care for content.

Creating useful, usable content requires user research, strategic planning, meaningful metadata, web writing skills, and editorial oversight. It requires people. With experience. And insights. And judgment. It requires planning. And input. And time. And money.

It will not happen automatically.

Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. A strategy is a carefully considered, well-articulated plan of action, achievable and executable. It's a roadmap that gets us from where we are now to where we want to be.

Until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful spend, we'll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We'll keep signing up for online content initiatives without pausing to ask why. Our customers still won't find what they're looking for. And we'll keep failing to deliver useful, usable content that people actually care about.

Content strategy will help you deliver content that inspires trust. Drives action. Builds loyalty. On time. On budget."

Elements of strategy include:

• Online messaging and branding
• Information architecture
• Editorial strategy
• Web writing
• Search engine optimization
• Metadata strategy
• Content management strategy
• Content channel distribution strategy

Three steps to content strategy

1. Content audit
2. Analysis
3. Strategy

Content Strategy Deliverables

• Message map
• Content inventory
• Gap analysis
• Site map
• Page tables
• Content template map
• Editorial strategy
• Content style guide
• Editorial workflow diagram
• Content management system architecture
• Metadata framework
• Taxonomy
• Content flow schematic
• Content model
• Content quality assurance tools
• Content production schedule
• Competitor content audit
• Content migration plan
• Content licensing evaluation report

My company, Avitage, is developing content strategy for content marketing initiatives, especially for rich media and video content.

Over the next few week's I'll delve into the application of a strategic framework for publishing content that is not targeted for website delivery.

How to Think Like a Publisher

In 1982 I joined Ziff Davis publishing company in a special group that Bill Ziff set up to figure out how to migrate his print publishing empire into electronic publishing. This experience fundamentally changed my thinking and my life path.

Content marketing thought leaders today are regularly instructing us to think like publishers. When I ask people to explain what this really means and, more importantly, how they would create content like publishers, they typically respond with blank stares.

Those familiar with the way many websites are supported by content management systems have some familiarity with this concept. But this doesn't inform the creation process.

How does the CMS analogy help our understanding of creating like publishers? Publishers separate the major tasks involved in producing finished work products. The database is key to this approach.

A content management system is a database that stores source content that populates website templates. This makes it faster and easier to change content on websites by simply changing content in the database. It reduces website maintenance costs by lowering required technical competencies.

Typical stages in the creation process are:

• Acquire (source information or knowledge)
• Edit into small modular segments
• Store source assets in database
• Design delivery templates (magazine formats, websites)
• Use editorial process to write timely stories (scripts)
• Layout and assemble work products
• Complete physical work product or deliverable (website, doc, video, etc.)

Contrast this with a typical business production process. In most cases, whether we're producing a letter, presentation, brochure, video, etc. we take what I call a "point production" approach. We create a single work product or for a single purpose.

Usually one individual or group perform the work in each stage, or skip stages that don't apply to a production process. For simple content environments, such as when content explains specific company or product factors, this works just fine.

Publishers disaggregate these functions. Each stage is a function that can be performed independently. This allows special resources and processes to be applied. It brings speed, economies and higher quality to each stage of the process -- not unlike specialization on the manufacturing floor.

But today's challenges of producing customer relevant content significantly raises complexity. In order to be able to tailor content to make it relevant by roles/personas, business issues, buying stages, industry factors, and competitive factors, we must produce significantly more content, and build it in different ways.

We must also produce content for multiple media or delivery methods: print, audio, video, electronic on web and mobile for example.

Here is a resource for more information about creating content like a publisher and for detailed processes for each of the above stages.

 
 
 

Creating Relevant Content

The shift from building content about a company and it's products and services, to building content that speaks to specific interests of target audiences, raises the issue of content relevance.

What makes content relevant? How would we gauge the degree of relevance of a content item?

This shift is being driven by new customer buying processes enabled largely by internet availability of information traditionally provided by vendors. As buyers begin their buying process with online research, content becomes more critical than ever before. Content is what helps companies get discovered during this research process. Used properly, content can help companies discover potential buyers before they decide to contact vendors.

Search engine optimization (SEO), internet syndicated articles, and marketing automation technology (among others) have changed the marketing game.

Buyers are not interested in vendor products and services until quite late in their buying process. At the start, they are primarily interested in their business problems. And, to paraphrase the common line about politics, all problems are personal.

So content is relevant when it is tailored to specific:

• Buyer roles or personas
• Issues or interests
• Questions buyers ask at different stages in the buying process
• Industry factors
• Alternative approaches to buyer solutions
• Communication purpose (capture attention, educate, motivate, prove, etc.)

In a complex corporate sale most companies sell to three to seven different buyer roles. Typically problems are comprised of multiple issues. Customer buying processes can be segmented into at least four stages. Many companies sell into two or more industries. Customers have many optional approaches to solve their problems.

Consider the implications of these variables. For any topic, if one wanted to optimize content relevance for every combination of situations it would require over 1000 versions! Now obviously this is an overstatement, but don't let that make you too comfortable. If you are building content for purposes of lead nurturing, you probably need three different pieces of content for each version.

My company Avitage has published a Content Relevance Scorecard that you might find useful if you are interested in a quick evaluation of the relevance of your content.

e-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

When we look back at the past decade, I believe we will see a significant inflection point in the transformation of B2B marketing and selling. The rhetoric of the internet has become the reality of the internet. The web, along with digital media, web 20 technologies, and the proliferation of wireless and mobile computing have resulted in the long-awaited convergence. Even user adoption rates, traditionally the regulator on the velocity of technology impact, are accelerating noticeably.

Of course, not all is perfect. We tend to implement new technologies using old processes and methodologies. True breakthrough occurs when we re-engineer these processes based upon the new technologies.

To paraphrase an old line, to ask, "given my business, how should I use these new technologies?" is fundamentally the wrong question. A more helpful question is, "given the capabilities provided by new technologies, how should I design and run my business?"

Ardath Albee helps answer this question for marketers and business executives in her new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. For marketing practitioners and executives who are looking to innovate their revenue engine, this is indeed a must read.

The motivation is considerable. When "marketing has taken charge of propelling prospects farther through their buying process, salespeople are selling to more qualified buyers. This means shorter time to revenue and optimized results from your sales force. "

Starting with the well accepted premise that business-to-business (B2B) buyers begin their buying process online with searches for a rich array of available information, Albee lays out the business implications along with a cogent framework for content strategy and execution.

Most organizations lack a content strategy, and many lack a marketing strategy. "Event thinking" pervades our approach to marketing, lead generation, content creation and sales support. Albee makes the case for a "mind shift" required to capitalize on the potential of emarketing and marketing automation.

"It's time to shift your thinking. Think of today's marketing department as a publisher with a variety of content channels at its fingertips that can provide you with a larger communications reach than you've ever had before. Even though 80% of companies say that they "found" their vendors rather than their vendors finding them, chance are high that their initial discovery was somewhere other than your corporate Web site. "

With her guidance, readers will begin to develop not only effective strategies, but new processes and procedures to create the volume and kinds of "contagious content" buyers demand.

"The buying process for a B2B complex sale has shifted in recent years. This shift means that much of the time that was previously spent with salespeople is now spent reviewing online resources. For this reason, it's imperative to be found in the places where your prospects are looking. Now more than ever, your company must be recognized as a source of relevant knowledge that pulls prospects into the sales pipeline. Well-executed content will play a bigger role in building trusted relationships that get salespeople invited into the process more efficiently."

Content -- buyer relevant, edu-focused, convenient, compelling, story-based content -- is indeed the fuel for today's revenue engine. It is the "bait" that attracts prospective buyers to find you on the web, and to be found by you, long before they are ready to speak with your sales people.

For most organizations, "Content development is seen as an overwhelming task that takes too much time, effort and money from an already stretched-thin budget and overworked marketing staff. The reality is that a well-structured content-development plan can supercharge marketing and sales results. A well-designed, integrated content strategy will give you more content with less effort."

Albee fulfills on this promise with practical, actionable prescriptions and recommendations.

I found the following concepts especially valuable:

• Begin the process by thinking from a "problem-to-solution-scenario" perspective


• How to create content for specific "personas" -- because "relevance is king"


• Create a "buyer synopsis" to direct the creation process


• Create content for multiple purposes, buying stages, issues related to the topic, and stakeholders -- in one creation process


• Create content also for sales "conversational resources" and "conversation starters"


• Create content for both "scan" and "read" value


• Numerous ideas for creating content as compelling stories so "people to step into your stories and envision their future with you"


• Create content to support "persistent progression" through the buyers journey


• How "listening" is the marketers "secret sauce"


• Create content to support buyer "step backs"


• Five content "catch factors" that impact viewer attention


• Five content "amplifiers" that guide content creation