A lot goes into corporate content strategy, and oftentimes content strategists have to start from scratch- that is, start with a mess of information that has to be filtered through and analyzed. Content strategy begins with this situational analysis in order to define strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the organizations content process. Doing this work in the beginning of a content strategy process makes unification and design of an effective model for business purposes that much smoother.
Clear content strategy is necessary for any systemization project involving high quantities of communications. A lot of content means a lot of content creators- authors, editors, marketers, designers, and more. This means a major part of content strategy begins with unifying all of the different facets of creation, so that business goals and customer needs are satisfied with efficiency and meet high standards of quality control.
With unification in mind, creating a clear content strategy at an organizational level requires a strong understanding of corporate challenges and goals, and customer needs. After all, the point of content strategy is to make interaction with the content as smooth as possible for both the client and representative, so that short and long term goals for both parties can be completed with efficiency. Ann Rockley of The Rockley Group writes, “Before you can build your unified content strategy you need to understand the content and structure of your information so that you can model it, develop authoring forms/templates, and determine how you can optimize the creation and management of content through content reuse.” (Rockley, 2003, p. 5).
Analysis of the type of content produced, how that information flows across communication channels, skills of creators within the organization, and the types of technology available for capitalizing on are all contained within Rockley’s guide. This analysis and unification makes the next steps of creating clear content strategy much easier, as a content strategist aims to identify cross-department information to be implemented in information models and further unify the organization for efficiency and effectiveness.
While the idea of reusing information, sentences, or whole paragraphs in separate pieces of content seems monotonous, it shapes a holistic image content strategy aims to clarify. This streamlines content use, signaling to consumers that the organization can confidently meet their needs.
As for content strategy, this means content production draws on established, reusable models that align with organizational values. At a sentence level, this could mean directly reusing words and phrases. By defining the voice of the organization through content strategy, “We can imbue our Web copy with a tone that is distinct, clear, consistent and relevant to the target audience.” (Freeland, 2013).
Overall, an effective model requires the content strategist to take stock of the strong points and gaps within an organizations current mode of content delivery and cross-referencing between different departments of the organization for repetitive language or messages. After ensuring that this language helps the business meet it's content goals, it can form a new and improved "content package" that streamlines information, bringing clarity and organization to high quantities of content.
Introduction to Content Strategy
References for Content Strategy