ABB Co-op/ Intern

Strategic Content Development Plan

This is where you pull together all of your research to define a starting point for your
content strategy. It's the client discovery phase and the part of the strategy where you
bring all of the underlying assumptions to the surface.

Once upon a time or in the beginning there was a brand. The brand either had some
content that this story builds upon (in which case we'll use this section to describe and
evaluate those assets) or the brand is newly created or starting over (in which case we'll
describe and evaluate assets of other brands that are either related or we can learn
from).

Contents
To set the stage and make sure that you and your client have the same understanding,
describe the following:

● Brand: How is the brand currently perceived? What are its specific value
propositions? What is and is not going well with the brand's current content.
● Goals: Where does the brand want to get to? Start to think about how content
can and cannot help achieve those goals. For example, if the brand wants to
enter into the Chinese market and earn $10m in sales in the next year, content (in
Chinese) can help the brand build affinity. Content cannot (directly) help with
distribution channels.
● Setting: Is the brand operating solely online or does it have physical locations?
How does this affect content opportunities and execution? Evaluate the
channels the brand is using and the channels it should be using. This is where you
also describe the current audience and the target audience.
● Competitors: Who has the brand identified as competitors? Who do you see as
competitors? Give a brief overview of what they are doing well and poorly.

Note that because the rest of your strategy is built from here, you might want to get your
client's buy-in on these starting assumptions before you get too invested in moving
forward.

Background research
To really understand where your client is starting from, your research could involve any of
the following:
 ● Personas. Who is the target audience? What are their needs and what motivates
them? If these don't exist, you might want to create some.
● Stakeholder interviews. These interviews can tell you about everything from
internal processes and roadblocks to questions customers have but have been
afraid to ask. Dig deep and keep asking "why?" to get the best information.
● Content inventory. This is a quantitative assessment of the content you already
have. Where does content live right now? How much is there? Gather data on
the URLs, metadata, links, author, date last updated, target keywords, etc.
● Content audit. Use this qualitative assessment as an opportunity to evaluate
everything you found in the content inventory. Is the content good? Is it
accessible and on-brand? Does it meet the needs of the audience? What gets
the most (and least) traffic? How does the bounce rate and time on page look?
Are the social shares strong or weak? If it's content that's meant to convert, is it
converting? See what kinds of trends emerge about content that performs well
and poorly.
● Gap analysis. Now look for where content is missing. Are there types of pages
that should have content but don't? And are there topics that should be covered
and aren't?
● Competitive analysis. Now go back and do as much of the above as you can for
the brand's competitors.

Tools
There are a lot of great tools available, so consider this list just a starting point:

● Analytics. Google Analytics and Moz Analytics can help you identify top landing
pages and focus your efforts in the places that see the most traffic.
● Inventories. Screaming Frog helps you download a list of all your URLs.
● Audits. The Content Analysis Tool and Open Site Explorer show you different
measures of content success.
● Surveys. Use Google Consumer Surveys to reach beyond your normal audience.
While Qualaroo lets you poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup
window.
● Heat- and scroll maps. CrazyEgg shows you where visitors are clicking and how
far down the page they're actually scrolling.

Brand X started out as a well-respected cloud storage service. Your services are more
secure than most competitors and as a result your current customer base is mostly mid-
level investment firms who love the security. Recently, you've been excited to invest even
more in the business and find a niche, so you've invested in a fantastically well-designed
user interface.
Goals
As you upgraded your UI, you've been realizing that there's a niche audience of people
who might appreciate the attention to detail: indie game developers. They're hip to the
latest web technologies and also care deeply about aesthetics. They use a good deal of
cloud space, so they need you, and they're also cool enough to serve as brand
ambassadors.

Existing Content
Right now your content is still in the safe and secure category—nothing (beyond your
interface) that shows off the personality you want to be recognized for. You are using a
lot of stock imagery that also lacks personality. While Brand X currently has a blog, you're
mostly using it to promote press releases. A couple of articles, notably "13 Steps to Ensure
Your Clients' Data is Secure," have done well on LinkedIn, but the brand is getting very
little traction on Reddit, Twitter, and Google+.

Currently, the pages that get the most traffic are the home page, about page, and the
privacy page. This indicates that the current audience is vetting the company's
reputation before engaging your services. Right now a lot of that traffic bounces off your
site before ever reaching your contact page. We'd like to see more visitors either end
their journey at that contact page (customers who are ready to convert) or to increase
the number of pages visitors visit before leaving your site (people who are not ready to
convert but with whom you can build trust over time).

Content Gaps
You have a solid set of FAQs for businesses that are starting to use the cloud, but very
little information for businesses migrating between cloud providers. Also, we think a drip
campaign might be useful to reach visitors who want to learn more about how they can
leverage the cloud to improve their business.

Competitors
You're in a crowded field, but also one where many businesses are taking a transactional
approach to their relationships. Brand Y has a particularly strong series of infographics
explaining how the cloud works, but these are targeted at mommy bloggers. Meanwhile,
Brand Z has a simple and effective guide to finding the level of cloud storage that's right
for a particular business. Brand F uses very little copy on their site, but their email
newsletters are remarkably fun to read.

We could not find anyone who is targeting exactly the audience that you are, which
means you have a lot of opportunity to expand and make the space your own.
Now that you understand the environment that your content strategy will be building on,
it's time to start the story itself.

This section of the strategy is where you set the stage and can serve as an executive
summary of the overall strategy.

The prologue is where you lay the foundation. This section should include:

● Core strategy. Distill the strategy down to a sentence that is both memorable and
overarching. This core strategy is the heart of what the company wants to do and
this sentence will be the grounding point that stakeholders can return to when
questions arise.
● Themes and messages. Describe the central themes and messages that content
should express. You don't have to break them down by channel, that will come
later.
● Content plan. Sketch out the broad strokes of the plan including what channels
will be used. Also hint at any major recommendations you'll be making whether
it's building a new CMS or making large changes to the workflow.

Core Strategy
Brand X will empower game developers and other creatives by providing the cloud
space they need and the resources they can use to build projects that surpass even their
imaginations.

Themes
To reach that new audience and continue to serve your existing audience, Brand X
should concentrate on the following themes:

● Technology. Starting with the cloud and expanding into other areas that might
fulfill your core strategy, bring your audience the news and tools they can use to
make amazing things. This could be anything from an article on how to make do
with less memory to
 ● Creativity. Everyone needs a little inspiration sometimes. Reach that creative
audience by finding what inspires them and what they need when they're feeling
uninspired. You could do anything from creating mood boards for specific types
of online games to building a slot-machine inspired interactive that asks visitors to
create a story from three randomly selected images.
● Business (for creatives). Rare is the person who is wildly creative and also a
business maven. Help your customers get a leg up on success by becoming a
resource for business info that's accessible to creative thinkers like "Tax Write-Offs
Only Photographers Can Take."

Not all content will cover all themes—in fact it shouldn't because sometimes you need to
specialize in order to make the best possible work.

A note about content and risk. Ian Lurie of Portent, Inc. often refers to something called
the 70/20/10. This is the split of your content that you want to be safe, moderately risky,
and very risky. You need the 70% content—your FAQs and pricing page are examples—
because your customers need that information. The 20%—e.g. articles about creativity—
is content that visitors might want to share. It's riskier and sometimes reaches beyond your
business model, but it should always be related to your core strategy. The 10%--like the
slot machine interactive—should be risky enough that it scares you a little. It's designed to
fail, but if it succeeds, the pay-off is worth all the effort.

Content Plan
For this campaign, we'll be looking at integrating the core strategy into your onsite
content, blog, and offsite content. You'll find a chapter devoted to each below.

We want to get you started on the right foot by giving you the information you need to
develop brand guidelines and a voice and style guide. In addition, we'll be proposing a
few steps to streamline your content workflow as well develop a content lifecycle.
Onsite content is just that: content that lives on your site. Examples include: homepage
and landing page text, error messages, button text, FAQs, videos, whitepapers, product
descriptions, pricing information, and contact details. While blog content is technically
also onsite content, it presents enough unique opportunities and challenges that we've
given blogs a separate chapter.

This chapter of the content strategy is your chance to take all that research you did at
the outset. Distill that into observations about existing onsite content and then provide
recommendations about how site content can be improved.

We mentioned earlier that your existing onsite content is safe. Too safe. Even your 70%
content is dry bordering on boring. This was really good to get you where you are, which
is good. Now you're ready for the next stage. Here's how to change up your content to
match your shiny new look (and capture that creative market in the process):

● Tone. We'll be discussing brand, voice, and style guidelines in Chapter 4, but
know that revisiting your existing content with an eye to adhering to those new
guidelines should be a priority.
● Imagery. Get ready to take some chances with your images. If possible, invest in
a staff member with a background in photography. Your best bet is to replace all
your stock photos with custom images that capture your creative spirit. It will take
some time, but it's worth it.
● Error messages. You're currently returning a generic error message when a page
is down. Don't miss this opportunity to do something cheeky and keep people
entertained rather than encouraging them to bounce.
● Contact page. Right now you just have an anonymous email address. Flesh this
out so your visitors know who they are contacting and why. Suggest a use case
like, "having technical difficulties?" or "need an billing question answered?" and
then give them a specific person with a name and a picture that they can talk
to. Your audience is still small enough that this personal touch is viable. Don't
overwhelm them with options, though; no more than three should be presented.
● FAQs. Start to expand the business cases you're addressing with these. You will
have some customers who are new to the cloud, but it's time to add support for
 others. Think about your customers' needs. You might end up with enough
information that you want to subdivide the FAQs into information for newbies and
cloud veterans, but that division would be premature at this time. Keep an eye
on it.
● Keep visitors on page. Your new design is very clean. Almost to a fault. Visitors are
given the option to get a little more information, convert, or bounce. Surface the
blog in your main nav (more on that in the next chapter) so visitors who still want
to get to know you know where to go.
● Expand your content types. There are a few places

Remember as you create all of this content that you're trying to capture that new
audience, so use that style guide.
Notice something missing from onsite content? The blog. It's all most people think of
when they think of when they think of content. And it's definitely where you get to show
off your content. The blog is also a good place to start sprinkling in your 20% content
(and even some 10% if it fits).

Many companies use their blogs as a PR vehicle, but you know already that no one
wants to read press releases, right? If a blog is the right answer for your client (and there
are times when it isn't), always keep the audience's needs in mind. You've already
identified themes by now. The blog is where you can tweak those themes into categories
and let that content team loose.

Your blog has been around for two years but you're not getting any social shares (other
than on your own accounts) and you've never had a comment. This is because you're
using it solely as a megaphone to tell others how amazing your company is. The trouble is
that no one wants to hear about a company, especially not one that does something
they may or may not be able to explain at the dinner table. They want to hear about
themselves—about things that directly impact their lives. They want to hear and read
and watch content that offers solutions and inspiration and other things that feel tailor
made for them.

To make that switch, it's time to rework your categories and we'll be using those themes
we identified earlier as a starting point. Your new categories should be:

● What tech can do for you. This category highlights technology solutions for
creatives. It could include an article on capitalizing on the space-saving
properties of the new <picture> element, an interactive that shows off what a
new idea can do for you (and serves as a resource to the community at large), or
even a side by side review of the latest tablets. As long as the content speaks to
your audience's needs. While the blog is not intended to be a venue for sales, this
is also where you can highlight any new developments with your services that will
save your customers time, money, or headaches.
● Inspiring ideas. Being a creative day in and day out can be exhausting. Feed
your audience by highlighting some of the most interesting new projects other
 creatives are working on. The fun part of this category is that these people draw
inspiration from all kinds of disciplines, so you can source far and wide. Use a
newsletter like PSFK as a resource.
● Business advice for creatives. We mentioned earlier how day-to-day paperwork
can be drudgery for your new audience. If they could hire a bookkeeper to do it
all for them, they would. Help them with HR ideas, simple accounting tricks, and
anything else that makes this work seem fun or easy and anything that frees up
their time for the work they are most passionate about.

You're a small shop, so if you can get one solid blog post up per week, you're going to be
off to a good start. As you see what succeeds and what doesn't, you can tweak the
subject matter and adjust the schedule. You will also want to consider writing more
frequently as you are able.

You'll find specific guidelines for making your blog posts more Internet friendly as well as
information about creating an editorial calendar in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 5 we'll cover promoting content. For now, remember that blog content rarely
if ever succeeds on its own, so leave some time for promotion.
Offsite content is merely any content that is not on your site. It's your brochures, email
newsletters, mailing envelopes. Amazon even uses their packaging tape as a spot to
include content. The non-digital pieces are a lot more difficult to measure success on,
but that doesn't mean you should miss out on the opportunity to put good content in
front of your customers at the right moment.

As a digital-only company, you don't have much physical collateral, but there are
content opportunities you're missing. Here's where we see opportunities:

● Sales materials. Use the themes we've identified for your sales materials and think
about what your audience wants to remember about you after that trade show.
Focus on the technology aspect and give them QR codes that link to resources
which can help them, including…
● Videos. Video can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Take Wistia's example
and see what you can do with a little equipment and the folks in your office.
Show your personality as you explore those content themes and how you can
connect that audience with information that meets their needs. Showcase your
web designer as he demonstrates how his desk setup helps him feel creative.
Videotape your devs as they nerd out in their next meeting. Authentic content
goes a long way toward building a connection between your brand and your
audience. Use YouTube for your top of funnel videos to build brand awareness.
● Triggered emails. It's great that you have these in place for when customers sign
up. The information you're providing is a good start. You'll want to incorporate the
new voice on these and also use them as an opportunity to point those new
customers to an onsite resource to help them set up or migrate their storage.
● Drip campaigns. To nurture those visitors who aren't quite ready to convert, set up
a series of educational drip campaigns. The first one should be a series of stories
about how different creatives have saved money by migrating to the cloud. The
second should be a series highlighting online tools that creatives can use to
improve their business, including everything from online banking to cloud storage.

Getting new and improved offsite content in place should help you expand your brand
recognition and claim space in your target audience's hearts.
Governance is all about the rules you set in place for content success. It's everything
from the brand, voice, and style guidelines to the infrastructure on which you create and
host your content. Governance includes planning your editorial calendar and measuring
the success of your content after the fact. Governance also includes workflow, but that's
a big enough topic that we're saving it for Chapter 5.

Until now, you've had a few people from all over the company creating whatever
content was needed in whatever way they could get it done. That's a good way to fill
gaps when you're getting started, but it's not a great way to build a strong brand image.
As you grow into your rebrand, you're going to need to consider the following:

● Brand guidelines. What font do you use? How big are headings anyway? Are
there certain types of images or videos that communicate your new identity? Is
there anything you don't want to see on the site? Anything that must be on every
page?

Your designer gave you a start with the new site and we know there are some
guidelines that accompany that redesign. Now is the time to formalize a few
more. This document can start small and should be a living document that can
shift over time and everyone has access to. Start by keeping a Google Doc that
everyone can contribute to, then ask your content manager to settle any
disputes and cement some of your decisions.
● Style and voice guide. Changing your voice is a big deal and it will take some
time to get it right. You already know that you want something more fun and
creative. You also need to retain some of the trustworthiness because you're
handling people's data. It's a challenging balance and you'll want to experiment.
Also research sites your target audience visits and build a lexicon.

Use a similar process to developing those brand guidelines as you flesh out your
grammar pet peeves and any jargon that should (and should not) be clarified. If
you need an example, check out MailChimp's guidelines. Remember, this should
also be a living document. And it's okay if the voice is a little different across
channels.
● Writing for the web. As part of the above guidelines, make sure that your content
is easy to read online. People look for online text to be easily scannable so think
about ways to break up text with shorter paragraphs, bullets, and illustrations.

● Don't forget about SEO. Part of governance is making sure that details like
metadata and title tags are taken care of. And keyword incorporation should be
done by someone with a nuanced enough experience with the written word that
they can both get the keywords naturally on the page and also a wide variety of
synonyms—all while sounding completely natural.
● Create an editorial calendar. You're ready to start prioritizing content tasks and
getting into a cadence with publishing blog posts and new social pushes. To
organize all of that, you're going to need an editorial calendar. Here's an
example. This doc, too, should be adapted as you find what works for your team.

● Reconsider your CMS. That proprietary CMS you had built almost a decade ago is
causing more roadblocks than any other single thing right now. Consider
migrating to something like WordPress that's more user friendly. This will radically
decrease the amount of time your team spends training on and troubleshooting
your existing CMS.
Technically a part of governance, workflow describes who does what and in what order.
A workflow review surfaces bottlenecks and points out potential efficiencies. When
you're investigating workflow, look at the entire process from ideation to post-publication
evaluation. Also look beyond the content team. You might be surprised at how many
people touch content (in most places everyone touches content in some way).

Your stakeholder interviews are going to be essential for getting inside workflow problems
and opportunities. Keep asking. And as you sketch out the content creation timeline and
process, ask some more.

Content promotion and measuring success are

Workflow
Currently, the only people who are part of the content creation cycle are the content
team, any subject matter experts (SMEs) that they identify, and the legal team. The only
exception is at the ideation phase. This is a pretty common setup, in fact it's great that
you're involving other departments at the ideation phase, but it could prove onerous to
the content team.

Look for opportunities to leverage other team members to write some of their own
content. For example, if you have a blog post that requires the technical expertise of a
developer, it might make sense for a developer to write the entire post, not just the
outline.

Interviewing your content team, there are a lot of ways that content can (and does) get
sent back to the review process at various stages (see graphic on next page). This causes
inefficiency and also frustration among the team. We recommend adding a step for
major content pieces (and even more complex blog posts) where the involved parties
meet to talk through the idea and identify potential pitfalls.

In addition, your legal department should create a cheat sheet of things writers can and
cannot say rather than doing a full review for each piece. This will free up time over all.
Continue with spot checks for the time being, but you should be able to gradually phase
out the legal review entirely.

Promotion
Without proper promotion, content fails. There are lots of content assets you won't
promote (much of your onsite content falls into this category), but anything that falls into
the brand awareness part of the funnel needs a promotion plan behind it. Here are some
other tactics to employ depending on the value of the asset (e.g. 10% content should
get more promotion than 70%):

● Social media. This is a no-brainer and while pushing out your videos and posts on
your social channels is a must, don't expect huge returns from it. Do consider
publicizing your content more than once because social media (especially
Twitter) has a really short shelf life.
● Paid social. To achieve the best reach in social, you'll need to leverage ads. This is
neither a social nor a PPC strategy, so if you're going to set aside a large budget
for ads, you might want to consult a professional. For now, suffice it to say that
you should put the biggest ad investment behind the assets you estimate will be
most valuable. Also consider services like Outbrain.
● PR. If you find your team is producing articles that are newsworthy, consider
putting some PR behind them.
● Outreach. Likewise, if the content is something an influencer might share (and
your 20% and 10% content should be), reach out to that infliuencer to let them
know it exists.
● Syndication. Explore opportunities to take some of your blog posts and re-post
them on worthy sites with a broader or different audience.
Outreach, syndication, and PR are all tactics that require more forethought. So as your
team is ideating, think about which pieces might be worthy of that kind of investment
and do an extra layer of investigation into who might share the content (and what their
specific interests are) before putting pen to paper.

Measurement
Measuring the success of content is one of the biggest challenge marketers face. With
online marketing you have the benefit of analytics, but do bounce rate and pageviews
really capture what's great about content?

But you have to start somewhere. Here are a few metrics we use and the up (and down)
sides of each:

● Bounce rate. Bounce rate often says more about your information architecture
than the quality of content on a page. That said, a low bounce rate can indicate
that people are interested in your content. A high bounce rate can also indicate
that a lot of people were interested in that piece of content but not anything else
they saw on the page. Or that the people who visited were not getting what they
thought they would from the post (that it was the wrong audience).
● Pageviews. Lots of pageviews can either mean that you brought in exactly the
right audience who wants to know more about your products, or they can mean
that people were still looking for more information that they didn't get from the
initial content.
● Time on page. A long time on page is great, if the content is lengthy. If it's not, it
could indicate that the content is confusing and takes too long to process.
● Social shares. Lots of social shares is a total bonus. But don't count on them and
don't judge a piece with poor shares too harshly. Sometimes that's more about
how it was promoted than anything else.

As you assess these measures of content performance, keep in mind that sometimes it's
good just to invest in something for its own sake because you never know what good
could come from it (serendipitous marketing). This is especially true for your 10% content.

As for the rest of it, your content team should have a good handle on taking the metrics
and assessing what's indicating a problem and how they can learn from each failure.
Congratulations! You've just successfully written a content strategy. You've figured out
your client's starting point, determined how content can help them fight the good fight
to achieve their goals. Use this section to suggest 2-3 things your client should
immediately act on. Then give them hope for a happily ever after.

This is where your story really begins. Now that you understand where your content is at,
where you want to get to, and how you're going to use each channel to make all your
dreams come true.

Content is a long game, so you might not see immediate rewards from your efforts, but
there are a few actions you should take now to get started on the right track:

● Set up that editorial calendar. This will help you prioritize what content to create
first. Once you have a roadmap, everything else feels a lot easier.
● Meet with your content team. You're ready to nail down adjustments to the
workflow and to create a timeline for who gets how much turnaround on each
project. It may seem daunting, but you're setting yourself up for success down the
line.
● Get social. While this is not a social strategy, we'd suggest that Brand X explore
what social platforms their target audience is engaging on and start to create
content that might be successful on those channels. For example, Develteam is a
niche site for indie game developers. Articles like "What Traits to Look for When
Building Your Dev Team" and "How Indie Game Developers Get the Most Out of a
Little Cloud Space."

Get all of your content channels headed in the right direction and you and your new
audience should be riding off into the sunset together. And if you find yourself
sidetracked at all along the journey, go back to that core strategy to refocus and find
your path.