CopyDiva

Sometimes, even consultants get caught up in our own consultant-speak (or whatever you want to call it). Sure, we accuse our clients of this all the time, and its true that when you are a brand manager or corporate marketer, sometimes its hard to think about the message from the customer perspective. When you’re so entrenched in your own little world, its helpful to have someone on the outside of that world bring you back to reality and just plain ask, “What the heck do you mean by that?” That very thing happened to me this week.

I was talking to a perspective customer – an interactive agency director – and, we were talking about web sites. We talked a little about how I can bring Content Strategy to her group. Sounds good, she said. What is that, exactly, though?

Great question! Here’s what I think of when I think of a Content Strategy. Note: this specific example is for creating a web site, but can be applied to other types of communications as well.

Content Strategies are a process put together that streamlines the biggest pain-in-the-ass for all web sites – the content. Everyone is always eager to work on the look-and-feel, but the written word is always painful. It’s even worse if you are re-developing a bloated website that has lots and lots of pages of dense copy, extraneous pdf’s, and no thought process as to why any of this content is useful to begin with. This is typical when the web site has grown through add-ons over time, with the earnest notion that “we need this info on the site,” but without any thought around why, or the best way to present it.

Content strategy takes into account the following:

1. Site users: Who uses the site? Clearly, this is not a one dimensional or single type of person. But, it helps to prioritize who the key users are. Buyers? Researchers looking for information? Knowledgeable about your industry, or not so much? To give you a concrete example, a medical technology company might have doctors (who use the technology), hospital administrators ( who buy the technology) and patients (who have the technology used on them). Each of these have different levels of knowledge, plus have different needs for going to the site. How are you going to present the information for these three key audiences?
2. Content: After gathering up all the existing written content that is potentially needed on the site (or is currently on it), what is of value? Probably there are levels of detail that are important to some, but not everyone. What is the key information that most people visiting will want to know first?
3. Style: Was the content written by many different people? Were there any kind of guidelines put together to keep the style somewhat consistent? I am not a big fan of 300-page style guides, but some basic guidelines are really helpful in keep tone and style similar across a site. Even a sample page that’s used as a guide is helpful.
4. Visual cues: Most people are skimmers and scanners, not readers. What kind of visual cues and images would help to break up the text and move visitors through content to find what they need? I personally dislike irrelevant stock photos, which are used frequently to no effect. A better use of images is to use color boxes, graphs or charts, icons, or plain old white space.
5. Relevant calls to action: The web isn’t a linear medium, so you can’t tell people where to go, but you can make suggestions based on what you think is important to their next step. As an example, today I signed up for a Gmail account, and right in the header bar above my new inbox was a call to action to try Google Calendar. Relevant? Yes. Calls to action also help with the inertia of too many choices (tabs, menu drop downs, sidebar buttons, etc).

All 5 of these pieces are important factors I use when putting together a good content strategy for a very usable web site. What are yours?