Content Strategy or Content Marketing? I'm Confused!

In the past few weeks I've had a lot of people asking me about the difference between content strategy and content marketing. If you remove the first word from each label, it's pretty clear: content strategy is about STRATEGY and content marketing is about MARKETING. But both of them focus on content to get the job done. Let's look a bit closer...

A Content Strategist evaluates business and customer needs and provides strategic direction on how improved content and content processes can help to achieve specific objectives. The focus is to provide direction on how to improve content to meet measurable business goals.

A Content Marketer evaluates the market to find ways to engage with customers and prospective customers through relevant content. The focus is to attract and retain customers and promote the brand. 

So, clearly there's overlap. The word "content" is in each of them for good reason. And frequently a content strategy contains a content marketing component which in turn requires a more defined content marketing strategy. And THIS is why people get confused!

Make sense?

Content strategy: Getting started in bite-sized steps

Content Strategy is fairly new and companies are still struggling to understand how to get started. They don't know what to ask for, or who to ask. They hear the buzz, but are not sure why they need a content strategy. As corporate content gets more complex, and the field of content strategy gains more exposure, executives begin to feel like they should know where to start but this only adds a layer of embarrassment to their ignorance. THIS IS NORMAL, and it's OK!

As content strategists, we frequently run across companies that really need a content strategy, but are not yet ready to commit. Sometimes it's because of lack of budget, sometimes it's because they are unsure of the value. And many times, it's just because they really don't see what all the fuss is about. But while we're all doing our best to educate our clients and the business world at large, one organization has decided to tackle this issue head on, and spread the content strategy love around. And not just around their own cozy circle of acquaintances, but around the world.

Firehead is a recruiting company that specializes in matching the right content strategy and technical communication people with the right companies. With head offices in Sweden and the UK, they've come up with a program that matches interested companies with some of the leading content strategists around the world to deliver a "Bitesized Content Strategy" specific to the company's needs. For very little cost or commitment, the content strategist will 1) inventory, 2) audit, and 3) analyze their web content and then 4) define clear next steps on how to improve the content to meet business goals. Simple, quick, easy, and effective.

I won't go into detail about the Bitesized program here, because you can read about it on Firehead's site. But I was so happy to see that somebody is actually filling this need that I wanted to share it with you. And I ask you to share Bitesized Content Strategy with businesses you know that really need a content strategy but don't know what to ask for, or who to ask.

Check out these links for more information about Firehead and their Bitesized Content Strategy program:

• Firehead's website
• Firehead Bitesize, and more here, and here.
• Or follow the Bitesize team on twitter: @FireheadLtd, @fionacullinan, @fit_to_print, @word_forge

Content strategy tip: Show, don't tell.

If you're like most business people (and many writers), the concept of "show, don't tell" is hard to integrate. When I talk to clients about demonstrating their corporate characteristics, and living their brand, and acting on their mission statements, I always get very enthusiastic head nods, and "Yes!" exclamations. Everyone's excited and on-board. And then they say, "And on the home page, we need to say something like 'We care about each and every customer as if they were our children, and you can trust us to provide the best service in the industry, bar none! You have our word on that, and our word is our bond!'" Hmmm... they missed my point.

Please, for your own sake, stop trying to tell your customers what to believe. They don't like it, and they don't trust it. That kind of copy is not only useless, it's potentially damaging. People just don't believe what they're told anymore--they believe what they experience. You still need to develop key messages for your website, but instead of conveying these messages through your copy, you need to convey them through experience.

Let's look at the client's message above and see how we can turn web copy into web experiences.

What's the first message in their home page copy? "We care about each and every customer as if they were our children..." OK, fair enough. But, instead of telling them, how can we show that you care about them? First you have to care enough to really know and understand them. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Get to know your customers well. Parents don't care for their children simply by telling them they care. They look after them and guide them. How can you look after your customers? How can you guide them? (Hint: It's NOT by telling them that you have the perfect product for them!) When customers come to your site and find information that's useful and pleasantly surprising--information that fits into the context of their lives and makes them feel understood--then they know you care.

Next message? "...and you can trust us...". Can they? What inspires your customers to trust you? It certainly isn't you telling them to. But maybe it's your credentials, or your professional reputation, or how long you've been in business. Maybe it's because you're local, or maybe it's because you're global. It may be because you have testimonials or reviews or recommendations from other customers just like them. Or they may trust that if you've already sold 20 billion products to 20 billion happy customers, then they're likely to be a happy customer too. Again, it's all about knowing what inspires your customers to trust, and then showing them that you're trustworthy.

And: "...the best service in the industry..". Says who? Other than you, I mean. If you can back up that statement by showing that reputable organizations, publications, or awards have recognized you as being the best, then do it. If not, don't say it.

And finally: "You have our word on that, and our word is our bond!' Really? What guarantees or warranties do you offer? What's your return policy? What experiences have other customers had that demonstrate you sticking to your word? Make these things obvious on your site rather than your verbose promise. (And ditch the exclamation marks. Nobody trusts exclamation marks.)

If all of these messages are demonstrated through the content on your site, you don't need to say them. Your customers will see it, believe it, and say it for you.

So here's my challenge: Take a look at your corporate mission statement and key customer messages, and think about ways that you can demonstrate them through your web content. Then share your ideas with us in a comment below. And a call-out to all the other content strategists and web writers out there: What other messages and values have you demonstrated online, and how?

Content strategy in 6 crazy-simple steps

I keep reading about how content strategy is so difficult. People say it's hard to pin down, it's vague, it's a moving target. Those are really just excuses. Content strategy is difficult in the same way that losing weight is difficult. The process is not complex. It's not hard to figure out what needs to be done. The challenge is in mustering the commitment and willpower to do it.

So, let's say you really are serious about implementing a content strategy for your website this time. Here are 6 surprisingly simple steps for you to follow:

1. Conduct a content audit. Look at the content already on your site. What's worth keeping? What needs to be thrown out? Which pages bring in traffic, and which pages are never visited? Determine the "OUCH factor" for each page: is the page outdated, unnecessary, current, or has to be written? It's a simple idea, but the challenge here is in developing a deep and meaningful relationship with your spreadsheet.
   
   
2. Review existing research. Odds are, in a company of any significant size, there is already some research done on your customers, your website performance, your competitors, and standards within your industry. There is often both in-house and third-party research for you to reference. Part of your job here is to paint as clear a picture as possible about these things, and the other part is to identify the research gaps that still need to be filled.
   
   
3. Do primary research. You know the research gaps, so now you get to fill them in. In addition to the items above, you need to get crystal clear about your business goals, marketing objectives, technology constraints, and project requirements. You also have to get to know your customers as if they were your family. Who are they, exactly? What are their goals and motivations for doing business with you? What are their barriers? Where do they hang out online (or even DO they hang out online!), and why do those places appeal to them? What do they expect from you, and what would it take to pleasantly surprise them?
   
   
4. Create customer personas. Now that you know so much about your customers, distill all that knowledge into a few well-researched, well-written personas. Personas are fictitious people that represent each of your target customer groups, but are based on real market data and customer research. Include personality, story, or lifestyle elements that answer each of your key customer research questions. Make sure that every team member gets to know these personas well, and run every web and content design decision by your personas to see how they react.
   
   
5. Define your content strategy and tactics. You now have clear view of your business goals, marketing objectives, project success metrics, technology constraints, and, of course, your customers. You know where you are now, and are ready to figure out where you need to be to meet your goals, satisfy your customers, and beat your competition. In a nutshell, that's the first step of your actual content strategy--figuring out where you need to be based on all of the things above. It's really about knowing what the overall business strategy is, and determining how your web content can support and reflect that. Once you have your strategy, you can determine the tactics, or the techniques and tools you'll use to get there. For more on strategy and tactics, Chris Moritz wrote a great post for the Content Marketing Institute on diagramming content strategy and tactics that you should check out.
   
   
6. Set guidelines and processes to support your strategy. Knowing what has to happen, and how to do it, is easy compared to actually doing it! A solid content strategy will fail if the people executing the strategy don't have the tools or resources they need to effectively carry it out. This is the stage where you create an editorial calendar and a writers' style guide. This is where you push to ensure you have sufficient resources to hire people with the right skill sets, or retrain the people you have. This is where you ensure that your processes support your strategy, and that they include continual testing and evaluation of all things content. This is where your hard work and brilliant insights will either fall flat, or take wing!

Alright, alright... I never said that content strategy was easy.I just said that the process is very simple. And I know you won't let the need for a bit of hard work, creative problem-solving, mind-boggling analysis, and insane powers of persuasion scare you away from doing what's right for your business. Then again, if you're easily scared, you can always give me a call.

Small business owner? 5 Tips for getting a low-cost, high-value content strategy

It’s hard work to secure a budget for content, let alone content strategy. For small business owners, there may be less hassle to get the budget, but there’s also less budget to get. How can you make sure that your small content budget covers the content strategy activities needed to make sure your content is effective?

1. Make sure your content or design budget has some room for content strategy, research, planning, and design. We can work with “low cost”, but “no cost” will send your content into the world completely unprepared.
   
   
2. Cut costs by eliminating formal reports. Small business owners really don’t get much value from what usability expert Steve Krug refers to as “the big honking report”. Reports are time-consuming to write and expensive. Forget about them. You’re better off actively communicating with your content strategist. Share working notes, spreadsheets, doodles, and ideas. Talk to each other! Write everything down, but don’t worry about getting a polished presentation report.
    
3. Get involved! With a limited budget, your content strategist will appreciate a helping hand. Gather up any existing customer or competitive research you have. If you don’t have any, go get some. Define your core brand messages. Think about what you want your customers to do on your site. Make sure you are super-duper clear on your specific business goals and customer needs and motivations. Then share this with your content strategist. Discuss it, shape it, evolve it, test it. Sit in on customer testing.
   
   
4. Use quick-and-dirty guerrilla testing methods. Every design or content budget should include a content strategy component, and content strategy should always include testing. This is the only way that you’ll be able to prove the success of your content. There are tons of different ways to test different things but here’s a couple ways you can test quickly, easily, and for next-to-nothing.
   
   Customer validation testing:
   
   Surveys. Validate any assumptions that you made about your customers. Work with your content strategist to define customer goals, motivations, and demographics. Get your content strategist to put together a short survey that you can distribute to past clients or anyone else who fits your customer profile. Your understanding of your customers will skyrocket when you start listening to them.
   
   Benchmark testing, before and after your content strategy is implemented:
   
   Web metrics. If you don’t currently have web analytic software, set up Google Analytics (free) and get a snapshot of your web traffic and performance prior to redesign. Go into as much detail as your budget and expertise allows. Then compare these benchmark metrics to post-launch metrics at 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
   
   One-On-One Customer testing. Always do customer testing of some sort. If necessary, sit in a busy coffee shop and offer people who vaguely resemble your customers a free latte for spending 15 minutes to help you out. Or hang out where your customers are, and offer them... something, anything that makes sense and that you can afford.
   
   Get somebody who knows what they’re doing (your content strategist or usability expert) to put together the test scenarios and conduct the tests. You stay to watch and learn. You may want to run perception testing, key task testing, readability testing, or any combination of these, depending on your research goals. There are lots “right” ways to test, but always remember: Any customer testing is WAY better than no testing.
   
   
5. Be open-minded! Your content strategist will probably come back to you with some new ideas on how to develop, distribute, or manage your content. If they’re good at what they do, those ideas will somehow fit into your budget and timeline, and will reinforce your business goals and your customer needs. You’ll probably know, deep down, that their content strategy makes really good business sense. But you may find yourself panicking, thinking, “Whoa. Hey, I didn’t mean I wanted to change everything.” What you’ll really mean is, “Do I really have to pack in my brochure-ware site and get with the 21st century?” If you want to keep doing business online, the answer is probably yes.

At least you have a sound content strategy to guide you on your journey!

2 New Ways to Think About Content

We all know that content creates the web experience. So let’s go beyond that. If you think of content as any scripted business communication, the opportunities for impacting business strategy and customer experience increase. Customers will experience your content either directly, or indirectly through your employees.

Customer/Content Touch-Points

Here are some common ways in which customers interact not just with your business, but with your content:

• Being welcomed as they enter your business (Think, “Good afternoon, welcome to Burger Bonanza where we make big beautiful burgers, my name is Nancy Natterbox, what can I get for you today?).
• Listening to customer service or sales reps go through their spiel.
• Listening to, and interacting with, voice messages or recordings.
• Filling out application or membership forms. And sometimes more forms. And more forms.
• Reading follow-up e-mails.
• Reading your service contract.
• Reading your privacy and policy statements, guarantees, and disclaimers.
• Reading reminder notices.
• Reviewing invoices and statements. 
• Reading print newsletters, brochures, or articles.
• Completing surveys.

Employee/Content Touch-Points that Impact Customer Experience

Your customer’s experience is also directly impacted by how your employees interact with the content that you provide to them. Here are some ways in which your employees interact with content that can make a massive difference to the customer experience:

• Reading from scripts.
• Going through checklists.
• Filling out print or online forms.
• Getting face-to-face training, or reading training materials.
• Searching for information on the intranet.
• Referring to policies or procedures.

Take a moment to think about all of these different content touch-points in your business. What other content touch-points do you have? Do they all work together to create a consistently great customer experience? Do they effectively convey the same core values and brand messaging? Do they provide an effective and efficient tool for both customers and employees?

If you’re like most businesses, you’ve just identified a huge opportunity to strengthen your customer experience strategy simply by improving your content. Some tools that are particularly helpful to get you started are journey mapping and content assessments. More about those later!

Hiring the Right Writer

You already know that it’s more effective and cost-efficient to hire a professional writer to develop your business copy than, say, getting the product manager or designer to do it. But how can you make sure that your content investment pays off? And why do so many professional writers do a lousy job of getting your message across?

Well, the good news is that bad writing is not necessarily the writer’s fault—it may very well be yours. That’s good because it means that great writing is within your control.

Many businesses hire writers because somebody tells them the writer is good or they read something the writer wrote, and liked it. This is a bad approach. There are way too many different types of writers, with different styles and skill-sets, writing for different audiences and business purposes. What’s divine in one instance is deadly in another.

Here are 6 steps to help you hire the write writer:

1. Don’t rely on their title

Writers use many different terms to describe their role: copywriter, web writer, technical writer, marketing writer, SEO writer, and content developer are a few of the most common. But these all mean different things to different people. The title is pretty much irrelevant. Ignore it.

2. Ask for writing samples that demonstrate familiarity with your project type

Just because somebody has written great marketing content on a website doesn’t mean that they have the skills to write user-interface text for your web application. An article writer who was trained in print media may not know how to effectively adapt their skills online, and an ad writer may make a mess of your e-newsletter.

The audience is also important. The skills needed to write for Mr. and Mrs. Everybody is very different than those needed to write for software developers, or the youth market, or research scientists. Is your writer experienced in speaking to your target audience in a natural and compelling way?

Look for strong writing samples that reflect a similar purpose, audience, and communication channel to your project.

3. Make sure they have sufficient subject matter knowledge or good research skills

Many businesses rely on writers to “create” rather than just “write” content. But writers need to get their information from somewhere. Be sure to hire a writer that has demonstrated a solid understanding of the subject, or has excellent research skills. Even if you’re providing all of the content, a writer who has research experience knows how to ask the right questions and can identify and strengthen weak areas in your content.

4. Choose somebody with the appropriate level of experience

If you have a good understanding of the writing requirements, only require one specific type of writing, and have a strong writer’s support system, then a junior writer may be appropriate. Look for a writer who is articulate and eager, has an adaptable writing style, and at least some experience in your specific type of project. It’s ok if this experience was gained through a school project or volunteer work. It’s essential that they know how to ask relevant questions and follow direction and the systems you have in place. I’ll talk about more how you can support your writers next week.

If you do not have a good support process in place, or if you need a writer to develop content for different purposes across multiple communication channels, then you need an experienced writer. Look for a writer who can clearly explain how their writing approach will be different in each context and the processes that they follow.

5. Choose a writer who can articulate and defend their writing choices

With every sentence we write, we make a series of choices. During the interview process, ask the writer to explain why they made the choices that they did, both in terms of language and information design. Listen to see if you think their points are valid in speaking about your business to your target audience. If the project is online, can they explain why their content is easy-to-use and easy-to-read? Can they explain why their content is compelling and effective?

6. Verify the quality of their writing

Get an expert’s opinion of the quality of the applicant’s writing. This is often easiest when you ask each shortlisted candidate to complete a brief writing assignment. This way, you can directly compare writing styles and techniques based on a writing sample relevant to your project. If you don’t have the necessary background to effectively evaluate the quality of the writing, hire a professional editor to provide feedback. For many people, mediocre writing may appear to be great. But the impact of mediocrity on your business can be huge.