selling content strategy to management

Selling Content

Strategy to Management

Or, how content strategy challenges are keeping your

CEO up at night

Hilary Marsh Chicago Content Strategy Meetup

March 2013

#contentstrategy #chiCSmeetup

Hilary Marsh – www.contentcompany.biz How to Sell Content Strategy to Management Chicago Content Strategy Meetup March 26, 2013

What weʼ’ll discuss tonight

§  Sample content strategy problems

§  Communicating the value of content strategy

§  Culture change

§  Potential approaches for raising awareness


About me

§  Content strategy since 1999 (yep!)

§  Clients include

§  I have taught, hired, led, and done content strategy

§  Strategic direction, tactics, oversight

•  American Bar Association

•  Walgreens •  FINRA •  HIMSS

•  CompTIA •  Trulia •  Florida

Association of Realtors

Sample content strategy problems

How many ring true for your organization?


Sample content strategy challenges

§ No one can find anything on our website, and they’re starting to complain to the CEO

§  Practically everyone in our organization can – and does – publish content to the site, and on social media, and you’d almost never know it was from the same organization

§ No one is in charge of the home page

§  Everyone is in charge of the home page



§ We want to share our information on social media more fully, but we can’t do it easily because of our technical limitations

§ We can’t add comment functionality to our content because we won’t know how to handle the comments

§  Our best material is presented as PDFs, with titles like “4002.pdf”

§ We can’t pull in related links on content automatically because our content isn’t tagged or labeled



§  Our website is organized based on our org structure rather than on how our audience thinks about us or our content

§  Our audience can’t get the information they want from their mobile devices

§  Our content isn’t appearing on Google like we think it should

§  “We should be on YouTube”


What do you notice about these challenges?

§  They result in business challenges

§  They’re about

§  process

§  ownership

§  collaboration

§ mutual understanding (or lack thereof)

Why isn’t this solved already?


Common obstacles

§  Communication silos

§ No understanding of what content strategy is or the value it can bring

§ No understanding of what content is or the value it can bring

Communicating the value of

content strategy


Content strategy: what is it?

§  It is NOT:

§  a content audit

§  an editorial calendar

§  a message architecture

§  a plan to churn out white papers

§  voice and tone

§  editorial guidelines

§  All these are tools used to execute a content strategy



§  From the Content Strategy Consortium: the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content

§  From Kristina Halvorson: Content strategy isn’t a bunch of tactics. It’s a plan:

§  a well-founded plan, fueled by your business objectives and user goals

§  an achievable plan, created with your current business reality, content assets, and limited resources in mind

§  a future plan, for what’s going to happen to your content once you send it off into the world.

§  a profitable plan, where your measures of success ultimately have impact on your organization’s bottom line.



§ My definition:

§  the who, what, when, where, why, and how of all the content a site or experience will offer

§  a strategic statement tying communication (and content) to business

§ and the people, processes, and power to execute that statement


Three faces of content strategy


What would happen if you skipped content strategy?

Tremendous risks after the site is (re)launched:

§ No one will come

§  Frustrated users will flood the call center

§  Visits will drop off dramatically after the first few weeks

§ Nothing will change about your business

How to create that strategic statement


Know and understand the business goals

What is your company trying to accomplish?

§  Understand the business strategy – this affects the content you’ll want to create (or keep), as well as the channels you’ll use.

§  Understand the brand strategy – this affects your tone and style.

§  Choose success metrics that you can actually measure.

§  Interview the stakeholders. Know whatʼ’s important.

§  Know the pitfalls. Watch the internal politics.


Understand your audience

§  Understand your users: what are their goals? their needs? their pain points? what do they not need?

§  Read existing knowledge, and do your own– go stand in their shoes

§  Create personas and stories about your users

§  Segment your users (by activity, role, age, interest – think beyond demographics)


Get to know the content (and the creators)

§ What information is required to support the business, the users, and the tasks?

§  Itʼ’s not just textual: it can come in many different forms

§ Need to know whatʼ’s there already…

§  Online

§  Offline

§  In peopleʼ’s heads

§ … and what needs to be created or deleted.


Sample statements

§  Curate an authoritative website that offers [list specific audiences here] to take actions supporting [list organization's causes here].

§  [our site] is the key online vehicle to support and make members and others aware of the organization’s strategic objectives and the programs and services that support them.

§  ____.com is the easiest way to buy ____ on the internet


If you don’t know what you need to communicate, how will you know if you succeed?

—Margot Bloomstein

Content strategy requires culture

change


Culture change

§  From “knowledge is power” to “sharing knowledge is power”

§ New need for collaboration – and trust

§ Moving together toward common goals

§  Subject matter experts are not writers

§  “Poof – you’re a publisher”

§  “HOP e-news”

§  How many universes are there?


Understand change management

1. Establish a sense of urgency

2. Create the guiding coalition

3. Develop a change vision

4. Communicate the vision for buy-in

5. Empower broad-based action

6. Generate short-term wins

7. Never let up

8.  Incorporate changes into the culture Courtesy of Kotter International

Potential approaches to sell/introduce content strategy


Just because it’s the right thing

§  Educate your management

§ When they agree, work with them to educate the company

§  Show successes along the way


Stealth approach

§ Work with a single group that already gets it

§  Tackle a specific initiative in a new way

§ Measure success

§  Take the success story to executives, with ideas about how it could scale

§  Give them the messages to share with the staff


Pain relief

§  Paint the picture of the end state, an organization where communication is valued, where people share information, and where everything works effectively

§  Show how different things are now, and the business risks posed by the current state

§  Come armed with a plan about how to get from the current to the future state


Common to all approaches

§  Talk their language, especially ROI

§  revenue

§  speed

§  engagement

§  Give the executives the messages to share with the staff

§  You’ll be the person executing what management wants

§  Keep them updated about progress and obstacles


Thank you!

§  Hilary Marsh

§  www.contentcompany.biz

§  [email protected]

§  (312) 806-‐7854

§  For useful arFcles, visit my site and subscribe to my newsleJer!

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