Is Content Strategy Your Missing Ingredient?

Posted by: Natalya Minkovsky, Director of Strategy & User Experience Mar 08, 2011 0 Comments

This blog post is about content strategy, but it was inspired by a tweet about cooking.

Cooking Light magazine recently compiled a list of the most common cooking mistakes. Number two on that list? Not reading the entire recipe before you start cooking. The outcomes of this mistake, Cooking Light writes, are dull flavors and missing ingredients.

“You don’t want to be an hour away from dinner guests arriving when you get to the part of the recipe that says to marinate the brisket overnight or simmer for two hours,” says former Cooking Light Test Kitchen tester Mary Drennen Ankar.

Replace “guests arriving” with “website launching” and “marinate the brisket” with “write 126 pages of content,” and Ankar could be talking about content strategy.

In the process of launching your website, the last thing you want is to be a few days away from launch when you discover that your content is outdated, inconsistent in tone, doesn’t match the taxonomy established during the development process, or doesn’t map to your new information architecture.

So how does content strategy help ensure that your website has all the right ingredients?

Content strategy is the equivalent of mise en place—the practice of having all of your ingredients prepped and assembled before you begin to cook. By planning ahead, you can ensure that you’ve accounted for all of the content on your site, whether it’s the main content on a page, dynamic content in the sidebar, or captions for photos in a carousel.

Ultimately, content strategy ensures that your content supports your business goals and your users’ needs. Did you tag all of the content in a way that helps it rise to the top of search engine results? Do your taxonomies help your users quickly identify related content? Did all of your content authors adhere to the same editorial style guide, and did you plan for an editor to review the content before it goes live? Do you have a content governance process that tells you who’s authorized and empowered to respond to comments on your blog (and should you even have a blog)?

So before you jump into “cooking” your website, assemble your content strategy ingredients. Just like with cooking, you may need to customize or tweak your recipe to create a content strategy that works best for your organization. Depending on your business processes and goals, the process can include deliverables such as a content inventory, gap analysis, editorial style guide, editorial calendar, copy deck templates, content brief, metadata recommendations, social media content strategy, and a content governance model.

Just remember, no matter what ingredients you plan on using, get them in place first. Making content strategy a part of your web design process will result in engaging, useful content that your organization can sustain. And after all, isn’t content why people are coming to your website?

Photo by Flickr user wickeden.

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Natalya Minkovsky

Director of Strategy & User Experience

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