Content Strategy

Produce Content with a Strategic Backbone

You can’t be a marketer  today without a content strategy. Thinking about your customer first – what they think, feel and need while engaging with your content – makes all the difference when creating custom, revenue-producing content.

How can we help you?

Content strategy means a lot of different things to different people. The type of content strategy we offer is messaging/brand strategy.

Our approach

Content strategy services include:

• Content audits, assessments and competitive gap analyses
• Editorial toolkits
• Content workflows
• Content governance

Content audits, assessments and competitive gap analyses

We offer in-depth content audits and assessments that help you build a dashboard of how your content is performing right now. Once we have that data, we create a gap analysis that informs our understanding of your position (and your competitors’ positions) within the marketplace. Armed with that information, we can begin to make critical decisions about how to manage your content. Read more about content audits, assessments and competitive gap analyses.

Editorial toolkits

To get at the heart of the conversation you want to have with your audiences, we build an editorial toolkit to answer:

• Who are you talking to?
• Who are you as a brand?
• What are you trying to say?
• How are you saying it?
• When and where do you say it?

Editorial toolkit planning

We build these content strategy tools through a day-long workshop with your team:

1. Persona development: To implement a content strategy, we need to understand your audience. Our personas create a 3-D picture of your potential customer, as well as a journey map that informs content creators about how to build a connection.
2. Identity pillars: This tool informs which messages and sub-messages to communicate that are in line with your overall business objectives. Think of identity pillars as aspects of your brand’s personality.
3. Messaging architecture: This tool maps a clear matrix of the messages you want to communicate about your brand, along with proof points so your writers are working from the same information to reinforce those concepts for consumers.
4. Voice and tone: How you say it is just as important as what you say. We create a voice and tone grid that helps all of your content creators stay within the brand’s personality and shift when the situation shifts.
5. Editorial calendar: When and where do you publish? Which messages are most appropriate for your audiences on different channels? An editorial calendar gives you the power to plan and manage your content effectively.

Content workflows

Workflows are challenging in any organization. And when you’re dealing with content, which is messy and complex, workflows become even more critical.

How do you organize your editorial workflows so you produce content in an efficient, repeatable manner? How do you get different parts of your organization to agree on how to source, create and maintain content?

We’ve got the experience to show you how and to build on your existing internal teams.

Content governance

“Governance” is just a thick word for consistent, coherent and controlled content. Some think of governance as a phase of content strategy, similar to planning or creating. But, based on our work with a variety of organizations, our philosophy is that governance belongs at the center of any content strategy.

Ready to improve your content? Contact us today.