Strategy and planning
Building solid strategic foundations for efficient, effective content
Knowing exactly what content you should create, and why, is crucial. It’s also vital that everyone’s on the same page about this. It’s especially useful to have a clear picture of what content you need (and what you don’t) if you’re planning a new website.
The problem
Trying to create great content without a great strategy leads to trouble. Different parts of the organisation can pull in different directions, resulting in inefficiency, friction and an experience for users that isn’t very joined up. Content that doesn’t help an organisation achieve its objectives is time and effort wasted.
A strategy without a plan is like a bike without any wheels. Getting anywhere is hard. And plans that don’t cascade perfectly from the strategy are almost worse than no plan at all.
Too often, there’s no solid evidence base for a good plan. As a result, important things get missed and prioritisation is hard.
The solution
We’ll analyse your current strengths and weaknesses across all your content and all your channels.
Honing a content vision will make sure that everyone is unified and motivated.
A detailed plan will be the roadmap for exactly how to get from where you are to where you and your users need your content to be.
1.
Content audit
A content audit will analyse exactly what you have, what’s working well, what would benefit from improvements, and what can be safely archived.
Working with many clients, we’ve developed a state-of-the-art content audit process. We use the best tools around and combine:
- detailed data about content scope
- measures of content performance
- in-depth quantitative analysis of your content
- expert qualitative assessments of content quality, against a bespoke set of criteria.
We create a structured content model and interactive dashboards with graphs and visualisations that allow you to interpret the results and filter by section.
To accompany the audit findings themselves, we produce a digestible report that details the headlines and suggests improvements and areas for focus.
You get an expert, neutral evidence base on which decisions can be based and priorities set. You also get analysis of the findings that helps forge a path forward.
2.
Content strategy
At the strategic core of all good content is the reason why the content is produced.
Your content vision statement, or core content strategy, will describe how content is vital to achieving your organisational aims. It will be closely connected to your organisational strategy. It will be your guiding light, your north star.
We run sessions with staff and stakeholders, assess your organisational strategy, and do a lot of careful listening in order to produce a beautiful, distilled strategy that can be understood and remembered by everyone.
Once everyone’s happy, we present this back to whoever needs to see it, in order to make sure that it’s fully socialised within your organisation.
3.
Content plan
A content plan tells you how you can get from where you are to where you need to be. It details exactly who needs to do what, when.
Whereas an audit looks at the current status quo, a good content plan looks forward.
Our content plans are interactive and flexible, giving everyone involved their own views as well as an overall, bird’s eye view so that whoever is managing your content processes can keep track of progress.
They’re built using the best in modern technology, giving you a great platform that’s brilliantly usable and adaptable. You’ll be in the perfect position to create great content, painlessly.
Clarity, direction, plan
If strategic clarity about your content would help, get in touch.
We can design a project that combines a content audit, strategy and plan. Or we can start with the audit and take it from there.