We’re going back to the beginning here with a series on the basics of content strategy. Think of it as back to school!
I’ve been doing this kind of work for 15 years now, and our discipline has even had the name of content strategy fairly officially for 4-5 years, but this is still the No. 1-most-asked question I get: What is content strategy?
Around here, we’re partial to Kristina Halvorson’s definition, from her seminal article in A List Apart in 2008:
Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
This is one of those times where explaining what we do helps a lot, as well.
Here are some projects we’ve handled recently:
- We completed a content inventory and audit for the website of a university division.
- We created the structure, content strategy and content management procedure for a health care firm’s private customer website.
- We write and manage a newsletter that promotes the expertise of a health care practice.
- We find content for a health and wellness website to license to meet its business objectives and customer needs.
- We created a taxonomy and metadata schema for the health and wellness website to manage its content.
We take our clients from understanding their customers’ needs, to creating a business goal, to defining the product that uses content to meet the need, to building the technical structure that will support the content, to creating a plan to govern the content, and finally to analyzing the results. Some of our work involves writing, but much more of our work involves analyzing, organizing and creating structure.
Can content strategy help your communications efforts? Probably so. Contact us to find out more.