Personas and Content Strategy

"Personas" are imperative for content strategy. "Personas" tool comes from user experience area. "Personas" is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. "Personas" are realistic descriptions of your target audience.

"Personas" help to bring richness to otherwise statistical data. They provide greater depth and context to generic target audience groups by focusing on one character who embodies the predominant qualities of the larger group. Personas enrich different content data with more qualitative information that is extremely important for all content decisions.

"Personas" answer such questions as: What are the common goals of a target audience? What is their information seeking behavior? What are their frustrations? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What is a typical user scenario? Why they access content?

These questions would have huge impact on types of created content, where it is published, how it is published, how it can be found, how it is governed. Thus personas present critical information that inform the planning, creation, management, and evaluation of content. This would help to plan a better user experience.

Examples of personas could look like this:

- mechanical engineers;

- marketing and sales professionals;

- attorneys.

These groups of people, as an example, would have different goals in their work style and the content which they create and use.

A "persona" can also include demographics such as age and gender, the stage of life the person is in, goals they have, and challenges they may face.

There are three main principles in creating "Personas":

Location

This is not about geography, this is about understanding where your audiences are digitally active. You need to know which content they use, what they read, which social networks they use, etc.

You also need to understand what devices they are using, and ensure that your content is being delivered in a way that is accessible on that device.

Motivation

Different consumers are motivated by different things. Some value new content, others value historical content, while many are interested in overall content on a given topic.

Finding this motivation will ultimately drive the direction of your content.

Participation

Different audience groups interact with content in different ways and for different purposes.

You need to understand not only what content your audience consumes, but how they consume it, how they engage with it, and how they respond to it.

This is ultimately about choosing your message and tone for each audience group depending on their current need.

"Personas" have valuable effect on the conversations and requirements gathering from key stakeholders. Content stakeholders are scattered between a variety of different departments and their content needs are different. This approach would help the overall content strategy by directing content stakeholders expertise and efforts towards creating content management model and its governance. Content strategy ensures that that enterprise content management is going to be effective.

Without personas, you may only be guessing what content your audience needs instead creating and managing content which your audience is actively seeking. Documenting your personas, even if it is done in a quick way, is key to keeping everybody focused on the same audience.

You may have multiple personas that you are targeting, but the content you write should be directed to a specific audience (persona) and serve a purpose which can be measured.

Personas are critical component in an organization’s overall content strategy.

Galaxy Consulting has over 17 years experience in creating content strategy for the effective content management. We have always created "personas" and found it to be very effective. Contact us today for a free consultation.

A Practical Guide to Content Strategy in Six Steps

A critical question you must ask yourself: what is your content strategy? Further, what do you plan to do with content assets you have and how do you take full advantage of that data?

There are many types of content, of course, and each group of assets may have a different strategy entirely. Let’s look at how you can identify that content, organize it and execute a strategy to handle it.

Step One: Identify Our Content

Let’s first start by identifying your content assets. What content do you have? How and why is it currently being used? Start by asking these kinds of questions to assess the content assets so you can later evaluate and organize that information into groups used in taxonomy (categorization of your content) and so forth.

Identifying your content is an important first step because, obviously, you have to know what you are working with before you can actually develop a plan to organize and use that available data to your advantage as an organization. Try to create some type of outline as you work through this.

For instance, you will likely want to look at all of your marketing content, employee policy content, customer and financial data and business operational data all separately. Find where all of this content lives (in the cloud, data center, computer hard drives, network drives, social media, email, wikis, etc.). This will help you move into the next crucial step of the content strategy process, which involves organizing all of your content and grouping it into categorical context.

Step Two: Organize, label, categorize

So now that you have identified all of the content within your organization’s hard (such as those in a file cabinet) and soft files (such as those in the cloud or stored on a computer), you can begin the critical steps of organizing, labeling and categorizing your content. This process involves creating an outline, hierarchy or taxonomical system for your content assets.

You will first want to start with a plan that outlines your organization’s goals for the content, with your overall mission in mind, so you will be able to develop a useful system of organization and taxonomy. Group your content assets within these groups and subgroups to create cohesion and transparency. One of the goals of your content strategy should be to make data easier to access for those with the proper access privileges. Each layer may have different privileges or added layers within. It is kind of like baking a complicated cake, using data for our ingredients.

Step Three: Develop targeted plans for each layer

Because you have these different layers of content, it only makes sense that you must plan a slightly or even widely different approach to each of those layers. For instance, your strategy for delivering employee policy and conduct information surely would not use the same approach as delivering customer marketing material to the public. They must be implemented with the user in mind.

Part of this is about identifying the user or audience in mind, but much of that process should have been already taken care of during the organization phase.These layers of taxonomy (content that is tagged or categorized for use in a particular context or definition of terms or navigation) can become increasingly complex and overwhelming, even for the most seasoned content managers, so be vigilant and stay focused on the overall strategy.

There are two good ways to do this. One is to make sure that you audit your content for consistency, accuracy, relevance (outdated information should be archived), mechanics, usability and design. The next is to conduct usability testing through each phase of the content management overhaul.

Step Four: Find a content management system that works for you

There are many different content management systems (CMS) that have varying levels of efficiency, complexity and advanced features for editing and managing your content. Each one is different and has a different learning curve.

Your job should be to find the one that works best for the purposes intended. Possible CMS include Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and several others for content like blogs, web portals and basic (or complex) websites. Sharepoint helps to manage document files. There are a number of different options depending on a particular need. You just want to make sure that your chosen system will allow you to categorize content effectively and make search easier.

Step Five: Employ good user design or user experience principles in design and navigation

It can’t be stressed enough. Make finding content easier for members of you organization. Make sure your content strategy involves looking at both form and function of content. A good information designer or graphic designer should not be underestimated. The work they do helps people navigate complicated websites or applications easier.

Designs should be clean and clear of clutter and complicated imagery. Icons and images should be displayed in the proper format so they don’t appear distorted. They should be easy to read, easy to find and easy to digest. Web users typically have little patience when it comes to looking around the page. You literally have seconds to grab their attention. Make it count.

Navigation structure and page elements should also be displayed logically and in a clean and clear manner to avoid confusion and congestion on pages. Also ensure that all navigation leads to relevant content that is useful for the intended audience.

Step Six: Employ analytics to make the most of your content

Lastly, when developing a content strategy and after all the other five steps have been completed (this is an ongoing though), you will be able to analyze your data. Using analytics tools to access insights about information can be critical to making your content strategy work for the organization. Look at how users clicked, where they clicked, what content was most accessed, how it was accessed and why. These insights will allow you to be nimble and make gradual changes over time to continually tweak the content management process.

Optimize Web Experience Management

Leading enterprises strive to acheeve higher levels of customer engagement through online channels, and this means they must easily, quickly and cost effectively provide fresh, personal, relevant content anytime, anywhere, on any device, through a consistent and dynamic user experience.

Traditional web content management system (CMS) solutions are no longer sufficient, and a richer and broader range of capabilities that enable web experience management - managing and optimizing the site visitor experience across the web, mobile apps, social networks and more - must now be leveraged in this new era of engagement.

The Need for Web Experience Management

Over the last few years, the Internet has undergone a tremendous amount of fundamental change in its landscape - socia1, personal and mobile.

1. Social - The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. The power of sharing can enhance or destroy brands in seconds.

2. Personal - While the Internet is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, at the same time it's becoming much more local and much more personal in terms of user experience.

3. Mobile The growth of mobile access to the Internet is rapidly expanding to the point where access from tablets and phones will soon exceed that from desktops and laptops.

The very way we communicate with customers is changing, and when fundamental change like this occurs, those who recognize the change and move quickly to adapt will benefit the most.

A New Era of Engagement

Each of these trends reinforces the others and fuels further adoption and innovation. It is these technologies, the behaviors and capabilities they foster that have brought us to a new era which Forrester calls the "era of engagement."

Driving these trends are people - our friends, leads, customers, critics, and fans. This is our audience and the other half of the conversation, and in today's age of engagement, they want to participate and expect us to engage them on their terms, on their schedule, in the context of their location, in their language and optimized for their device. To effectively tackle this challenge of serving a mass audience with limited resources, enterprises require strategy and effective tools to help get the job done.

Web experience management (WEM) provides us with the tools to take on this otherwise daunting task. The capabilities of WEM allow you to create, manage and deliver dynamic targeted and consistent content across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, etc. It takes a lot more than a traditional Web CMS to meet these new demands.

Key Principles of Web Experience Management

To effectively implement WEM, enterprises must start with their business strategy and goals which should drive their messaging and engagement strategy and which in turn should drive their content strategy. In other words, the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that businesses face should be considered first and foremost.

Too often organizations fail to do this by jumping straight into a technology selection without due consideration of the business drivers. Around this foundation, we wrap the fundamentals of basic Web content management. It is important to remember that content is still king. Business users and marketers need easy to use, yet powerful, content authoring and publishing capabilities.

They need rich content models that allow them to create engaging visitor experiences, to easily create new content assets, to quickly find and re-purpose existing content, and to preview content and the site visitor experience for all online channels.

Upon this foundation, an effective WEM solution provides a comprehensive collection of capabilities that allow organizations to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content and visitor experiences across multiple touch points -corporate website, dedicated marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, social media sites, etc.

While WEM requirements are going to vary from organization to organization, some of the most critical features needed by essentially all enterprises include content targeting and personalization, mobile device support, faceted search and navigation, multi-channel publishing, integrated Web analytics, and campaign management.

Website Content Strategy

A web site is only as good as the content it contains. If you spend all your web site development resources on building the technology that contains your message and don't clearly think through the message you want to convey, your site will not be effective.

Part of your web strategy and design planning requires that you think through the type of content that would be the most appropriate, who your audience is, and how you will create that content and keep it fresh and interesting.

Understand what your site content can do for you. Content is the main reason that people visit your site. You are writing content to attract and keep visitors on your site, to get them to return to your site again, and to sell your products. Your content generates page views. The more page views your site serves up and the more traffic it generates, the more money you can charge advertisers to place banner ads on your site.

Sticky content refers to content published on a web site, which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular web site or hold their attention and get them to spend longer periods of time at that site. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to this site. Examples of sticky content include chat room, online forum, webmail, games, weather, news, horoscopes, etc. Sticky content is also sometimes called sticky tools or sticky gear. Web sites featuring sticky content are often referred to as sticky sites.

Tailor your content to your target audience. Who are your customers? What kind of content do they expect to find on your site? Keep in mind the purpose of your site: is it an online sales brochure, a newsletter or magazine site, or a tool to sell your products? The answer will help determine what content you should include in it.

Examples of the types of content you could include are contact information for the company, company history, profiles of key people, frequently asked questions, press releases, customer testimonials, product features and dimensions, product comparisons, case studies and articles about your products or services in action, and helpful tips.

You could post articles that spotlight your knowledge and expertise in certain area. Such copy can extend your reach and invite inquiries from people interested in hiring your services. The same can be true for a product that requires considerable aftermarket servicing. You can use your Web site to build trust in your products and expertise. Once you complete your research, make a list of the content you will feature on your site.

Like your other marketing pieces, you need to decide on the tone of your content. For example, consider whether you want a friendly or folksy tone or a more factual style. Consider what kind of image would best reflect your company's style.

Establish your content budget. Within the context of your overall budget, come up with a range of how much you want to spend to put content on your site, and then to maintain it and keep it current. It usually costs more to commission content than it does to refresh it or check it periodically for accuracy. Don't forget to consider the costs of taking people away from their primary responsibilities to create content.

You could generate your own text and graphical content by drawing on your existing in-house talent or by hiring outside content creators. Creating your own content gives you a greater level of control over the information that is featured on your site. You will need to evaluate your current resources and decide whether the alternative of hiring people to create your content is feasible.

You can acquire both text and graphical content from outside sources through syndicated companies that share their content. Obviously this content will likely have a broad appeal, and if your company fills a niche market, you may not find content that is appropriate.

Your web site is your only face to many of your customers. If you post your original content and forget about it, they will be able to tell. You need to keep refreshing your features to make sure your site is up to date and keep the interest of your customers.

The only way you will know whether your site is meeting your customers' needs and how it might need to be changed is to keep monitoring it after it is built. You can use a number of methods to make sure your content is right for your audience: log analysis tools to track traffic patterns on your site, keyword tracking, and surveying your customers can all help you to make sure that you don't waste your resources on content that no one is reading or that turns your customers away. There are also web analytics tools such as Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, SiteCatalyst.

High quality web site can greatly help your business.

Do You Really Need a Content Strategy?

The answer is Yes.

You have many discussions about content activities, methodologies, and deliverables. But if you don’t have a conceptual framework for those activities, you are not practicing content strategy.

It is impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you are passionate about creating better user experiences, you can't help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content.

Content strategy is not a single solution or deliverable. It is a process and a mindset. If you approach your content management initiative knowing that it will constantly evolve, and that you are guiding its evolution, then you are practicing content strategy.

Content strategy evaluates business and customer needs and provides strategic direction on how improved content and content processes can help to achieve specific objectives. It’s a continual process of improvement.

Content strategy requires more time and resources upfront, but your content management initiative is much more likely to succeed with a solid strategy supporting it. Content strategy activities are scalable and can be modified to fit any budget. You don’t necessarily need a large, formal content strategy. You just need to take the time to think things through and determine your goals, resourcing, workflow, and success metrics, which can save you from the high cost of ineffective content.

You can’t expect to get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is, what you need to do to get there, or how to even recognize it if you stumble across it.

Content strategy starts with the big picture and then drills down to a granular level that can be implemented and measured. It encompasses everything that impacts content, including workflow and governance.

The content-strategy process is not so much circular as it is spiral, starting at the big vision and then repeating at each stage as you drill down to more details. To make matters worse (or more fun!), content strategies, tactics, processes, and even specific pieces of content are often shared between projects, products and business units.

A good content strategy looks across organizational silos and integrates the different business needs, goals, and tactics. It makes sure that the end product promotes consistent, effective and efficient user experiences and business processes.

Reasons for developing a content strategy:

1. Better Content

Developing a content strategy will enable you to create content that will be more engaging. A content strategy will allow you to clearly identify the elements that will add more value and create more interesting experiences for your users over time.

2. Consistency in Messaging

This is traditionally done within a marketing strategy, but the problem is that content extends beyond the marketing department. Within a content strategy you can outline guidelines,standards, quality control processes, branding, voice tone and messaging, so that anyone creating content of any format has some rules for the road.

3. Optimization

A content strategy will help you optimize your content. When developing content, it is critical to identify user personas, and create individual content paths for each of them (all fitting into one content strategy). Since each has their own questions, concerns and interests, you’ll need to develop content around these specific characteristics. By doing so, you will optimize for search by using the right keywords, and your content will be more relevant to those searching for it. The reason you need to consider this within your entire content strategy is because your content lives in various locations; your website, social networks, press, etc.

4. Limitation of Friction

A content strategy will help you to avoid friction in your content management system. You want to facilitate an engaging environment, so if there are disconnects between your information architecture or formats, you will create discomfort and stress for your users. You want to make sure their experience is easy. This ease will come from clearly defined goals, research, content paths, content processes, and the tactics that have been identified by the content strategy. This will also ensure that everyone responsible for content creation is on the same page, even if they are not on the same team or in the same department.

5. Improve efficiency

There are many ways to re-use content, like posting a blog post into a web site or a series of documents, or maybe an ebook. The idea is that you repurpose content to be consumed in various way, so you can always reach who you want while staying relevant and adding value. A content strategy outlines the thematic content and how it can be used throughout the year so you are not constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. It will help you organize an inventory and plan for releasing various kinds of content throughout the year, as well as streamline the internal processes needed to achieve the content goals.

Things to think about when developing your strategy:

There are many elements you will need to consider. You will need to know what content you have, what content you will need, who your users are, how they like to consume information, and who will be responsible for what. All of these things will be important in developing a realistic strategy for your content.

Here is a brief list of questions to ask:

• What content do we have? 
• Who are the content sources? 
• What does the current content creation process look like? 
• What are the content channels? External web: website, social media, partner sites, email, webinars. Internal: intranets, wikis, training sessions, seminars. Traditional: PR, print, events, outdoor, direct mail. The reasoning behind a content strategy is to make informed recommendations about the creation, delivery and governance of content. 

 Your content strategy should outline the following:

• current content and what you will need;
• how content should be structured in various formats Long-term plan–starting point and ending point What will this mean in terms of business objectives?

With the current proliferation of social media, and web based tools, including your web site, it is very important to have a content strategy. It is important that everyone is on the same page. This is difficult for most companies, but the development of a strategy and plan will only help things run smoothly, and actually have the business impact you are looking to achieve.

Content Strategy

Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content. In other words, content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

The purpose of content strategy has been described as achieving business goals by maximizing the impact of content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we are publishing it in the first place. Otherwise, content strategy is not strategy at all: it is just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants.

Content strategists strive to achieve content that is readable and understandable, but also findable, actionable and shareable in all of its various forms. Content strategy development is necessarily preceded by a detailed audit and analysis of existing content.

A content strategy defines:

• key themes and messages;
• recommended topics;
• content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements);
• content gap analysis;
• metadata and taxonomy frameworks and related content attributes;
• search engine optimization (SEO);
• implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance. 

Content strategy may include:

Editorial strategy 

Editorial strategy defines the guidelines by which all online content is governed: values, voice, tone, legal and regulatory concerns, user-generated content, and so on. This practice also defines an organization’s online editorial calendar, including content life cycles.

Web writing

Web writing is the practice of writing useful, usable content specifically intended for online publication. This is a whole lot more than smart copywriting. An effective web writer must understand the basics of user experience design, be able to translate information architecture documentation, write effective metadata, and manage an ever-changing content inventory.

Metadata and taxonomy strategy

Metadata and taxonomy strategy identifies the type and structure of metadata, also known as “data about data” (or content) and taxonomy. Smart, well-structured metadata helps publishers to identify, organize, use, and reuse content in ways that are meaningful to key audiences.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of editing and organizing the content on a page or across a web site (including metadata) to increase its potential relevance to specific search engine keywords.

Content management strategy

Content management strategy defines the technologies needed to capture, store, deliver, and preserve an organization’s content. Publishing infrastructures, content life cycles and workflows are key considerations of this strategy.

Content channel distribution strategy

Content channel distribution strategy defines how and where content will be made available to users.

The content life cycle is a repeatable system that governs the management of content. The processes within a given content lifecycle are system-agnostic. The processes are established as part of a content strategy, and implemented during the content life cycle.

Aspects of a content life cycle 

The content life cycle covers four macro stages: the strategic analysis, the content collection, management of the content, and publishing, which includes publication and post-publication activities. 

The content lifecycle is in effect whether the content is controlled within a content management system or not, whether it gets translated or not, whether it gets deleted at the end of its life or revised and re-used.

The analysis quadrant comprises the content strategy. The other three quadrants are more tactical in nature, focusing on the implementation of the content strategy.

Analysis 

In the analysis phase, the content life cycle is concerned with the strategic aspects of content. A content strategist (or business analyst or information architect or writer) examines the need for various types of content within the context of both the business and of the content consumers, and for multiple outputs on multiple platforms.

The analysis has a bearing on how the content strategy is implemented in the other quadrants of the content life cycle. On a new project with new content, this is the beginning of the process. Much of the time, the process will start somewhere else in the cycle; a lot depends on a multitude of factors involved in changing content from a current state to its future state.

Collection 

Content collection includes the garnering of content for use within the framework set out in the analysis phase. Collection may be through content development - creating content or editing the content of others, content ingestion - syndication of content from other sources, or incorporation of localized content, or a hybrid of content integration and converge - such as integrating product descriptions from an outside organization with prices from a costing system, or the convergence of editorial and user-generated content from social media for simultaneous display.

Publish 

The publishing quadrant deals with the aspects of content that happen when the content is delivered to its output platform and ensuing transformations, manipulations, or uses of the content. Publishing the content is only a point in the first life cycle iteration; there are post-publishing considerations such as re-use and retention policies that require attention.

Management 

The management quadrant is concerned with the efficient and effective use of content. In organizations using technology to automate the management of content, the management aspect assumes use of a content management system (CMS) of some sort. In organizations with smaller amounts of content, with little need for workflow control, and virtually no single-sourcing requirements, manual management is possible.

However, in large enterprises, there is too much content, and there are too many variations of content output, to manage the content without some sort of system to automate whatever functions can be automated. The content configuration potential is enormous, and builds on the information gathered during the analysis and collection phases.

The solutions will be highly situational, and revolve around the inputs and outputs, the required content variables, the complexity of the publishing pipeline, and the technologies in play. The most basic questions are around adoption of standards and technologies, and determining components, content granularity, and how far up or down the publishing pipeline to implement specific techniques.

At its core, content strategy is a way of thinking that has direct impact on the way we do business. And the way we do business must include a clear focus on how we create, deliver, and govern our content. Because more than ever before, content has become one of the most valuable business assets.