Content Strategy: Who says it's great content?

Lately, I’ve been noticing that many firms, copywriters and Tweeters are talking about creating great content.

• “We need to create great content for our #contentstrategy.”
• “Our content sings—it’s the most important part of our content strategy.”
• “I craft great content that will fit in with your content strategy.”

Uh huh.

What makes your content great?

There is only one answer to this timeless question—get ready for it:

“YOUR CONTENT IS GREAT IF YOUR USERS FIND IT USEFUL, PERSUASIVE AND VALUABLE.”

I’m all for beautiful words—poetry even. But, great content delivered online means answering users’ questions, so they can get back to creating the content of their lives. (See—me write pretty too!)

How do you create great content?

First, you must define what great content is. Doing this is impossible. See a high school English class for an example; one student LOVES The Scarlet Letter. The other thinks it’s complete dreck. (For more current examples, see: The Jersey Shore, Dancing with the Stars, Eat, Pray, Love, Coldplay, etc...) Listen to people argue about books, music, photography, art, science, philosophy. Those are all examples of content that can deeply divide people.

People disagree on greatness; what they don’t disagree about is what they find useful. For example, most people own a car (I am making no political statements here). Most people do not own a horse and buggy. Why? Simply put, a car is more efficient than a horse and buggy. Is a car greater than a horse and buggy? Well—what are you using it for? A romantic marriage proposal in Central Park? Or, to travel from Boston to New York?

Brings me to my point—you must define WHO your users are and what they are using the content for if you want to create persuasive, valuable content.

What do they care about? What will help them get the information, commodity, interaction that they need? Answering those questions will go a long way toward creating content they find useful.  And useful content to your users could be anything under the sun: a funny YouTube video to forward to a friend, a recipe, a picture for their bathroom, a blog post that sparks an idea. 

So:

To create useful, persuasive and valuable content you must:

1. Define your users.
2. Anticipate their questions and needs.
3. Write copy that answers those questions directly.
4. Create easy pathways toward the call to action.

You can also read:
Creating engaging content and How to measure the effectiveness of web content. Enjoy!

5 Rules for Avoiding Boring Hospital Web Content

I gave this presentation last night at Health Stat 2.0. You can also watch the presentation on You Tube here. Five years of experience on 20 slides...Enjoy!

5 Rules for Avoiding Boring Hospital Web Content

View more presentations from Ahava Leibtag.

What a content strategist needs a Web designer to know

If I asked you to build me a house, what would be the questions you would ask before you began planning?

Let’s hope: How many people will live in your house? What is your budget? How large is the land? How many bathrooms do you want? How many kitchens do you want? Oh right, just 1 kitchen, usually.

If I asked you to buy me a car, what would you ask me?

Let’s hope: What kind of car do you need? Are you looking for a mini, subcompact (what does this mean, anyway?), compact, large, van, RV? How many people will you be transporting on a regular basis? What is your budget? Is the cost of gas important to you? Do you like the feel of a racecar underneath your fingertips? Do you prefer leather or fabric seats?

If I asked you to build me a website, what would you ask me?

Let's hope: What do your users need to do? What kind of content do you have? How often do people come to the site? What is the primary function of the site to them? What is the primary function of the site to you?

Let's keep hoping, because as we all know, that isn't typically what happens. Instead, I find many Web professionals asking these questions:

1. What color do you want it to be?
2. Is it content management system driven?
3. How many pages do you think it will have?
4. What do you want the home page to look like?
5. Should we include Facebook and Twitter icons?
6. Do you like rollovers?
7. Do you like colors besides blue?

Almost all these questions have to do with visual design. And we can't blame the designers. The truth is, most people are visual. And they contemplate the success of something based on how it looks. See, like the entire history of the world, for proof of this concept.

But users (people who use your website) do not surf the Web looking for beautifully designed websites. On the contrary, I’ve seen them hang out on the ugliest website you’ve ever seen for the promise of GETTING the thing they came to the website to get.

Users come to websites for content—text, pictures, slideshows, videos, status updates, purchasing power, personal information updating and the list goes on and on.

Um...don't we know all this already?
A potential client inspired this blog post; he told me he had found a Web design firm and now he wanted to find a writer to fix his content (I'm thinking of changing my title to digital communications fixer). I told him flat out:

“That’s backwards. First, you assess and audit your content and decide on a messaging strategy. Then you identify and collaborate with a designer.”

In the words of Margot Bloomstein, “We don’t want our content to break the design.” We need to think about the types of content that exist BEFORE we create the design. Dan Brown explains how content strategists function as a type of designer in his post, “Letter to a Content Strategist.” He does a GREAT job suggesting the intricacies of how information architects and content strategists can work together to build better websites.

We need to start urging our clients to think about their content not just as a commodity, but as the starting point, the building blocks of a website. It’s time to stop designing the car before we know how many people it has to transport. It’s time to stop building the house without knowing how many bedrooms it may need. It’s a paradigm shift in the way we think about building websites.

But, it has to be done. Because you know what they call things that are beautiful, but have no function?

Useless.

Content Strategy: Why you should hire a content strategist

Content strategy is hot. But companies are loathe to embrace the next big thing, particularly because it’s so hard to pin return on investment on social media, the last big thing. So why should you, if you are contemplating a redesign, migration, re-do of a section, mobile or email campaign, hire a content strategist?

First, a story: Last year I decided to take up running. Always an avid “walker”, I wanted to up my fitness regimen. Plus, everyone talked about the “high” you get, and I was intrigued by the challenge.

As I often do when trying something new, I asked my friends who run for their advice. This is what they told me: Start slow and work your way up. Make sure you have fast tunes on your iPod. Stretch before. Stretch after. Jump up and down 10 times everyday to protect your knees.

So, I listened. I ran at 60 second intervals and walked for 120 second intervals. I made new playlists. I stretched before and after. I jumped. And you know what? I couldn’t get past more than five straight minutes of running.

So what was the problem? What did my running friends forget to tell me? “Is it just me?” I asked myself. Can I never learn to run? But, here I am, six months later, and I’m running more than half of a sixty minute route. So what changed?

It was actually a very simple fix. So simple that none of my running friends even thought to mention it.

It was the shoes.

I was running in cross trainers. Then, while shopping with my husband for new sneakers for him, it occurred to me to buy new ones for me. Sneakers that were designed by a person who actually thought about what runners need in a shoe. “Maybe these will help”, I thought. And boy, did they boost my running, because they gave me the foundational support I needed to move ahead faster.

Consider the following scenarios:

• You spend hundreds of thousands on a redesign, and the first time someone wants to post a picture, you realize you never designed any templates that would showcase photos. Or slideshows. Or videos.  And your users depend on that kind of content to make purchasing decisions. (Oh yes, this is a true story--as are the next two.)

• Your company has merged with a competitor, and thousands of product specs need to be rewritten. Your boss insists on a redesign to rebrand the company, and you migrate all the old product specs with your competitors. Now your customers can’t tell what’s what.

• Your email marketing campaign is failing and no one knows why. You look at the analytics and see that the landing pages aren’t converting. It occurs to you that there’s no call to action and when customers do try to buy, the buying process in convoluted.

What went wrong in all these scenarios? The same thing that went wrong with my running friends—everyone forgot about the basic basics. Everyone forgot to point out that I needed TO BUY THE RIGHT SHOES.

It’s the same with content strategy. If you don’t have a professional with the foundational knowledge necessary to look at your content from the ground up and consider what all the changes you’re making might do to the content, you’ll never be successful.

Planning for your content without a content strategist is like running in high heels.  Can it be done? Yes. It is painful? Yes. Uneccessary? Yes. Stupid? Ok, I don't want to get insulting--you surely get my point.

 Content strategists will help you:

• Organize your thinking around your content
• Inventory and analyze your content—both online, print and social media
• Align your content to your business objectives
• Manage your content
• Repurpose your content
• Create a methodology for creating your content

So, if you’re in the market for someone to help you with your content, hire a content strategist. And, don't run in high heels.  It's bad for you.

Content Strategy: Stop the Blah, Blahing and focus on THE GET

Users come to your site to GET something: information, a pair of shoes, a feeling of friendship, a piece of music, etc. Whether it’s a physical commodity, an interaction or a phone number, the GET is what users are after.


Problem: Sometimes their GET isn’t the same as the GET we marketers, Web people, CEOs want them to GET.

So how you we, as Web professionals, GET them to GET it?

For example:
• An e-commerce site wants users to know that there’s a sale on certain rugs for 20%
• A social interaction site wants users to send their friends birthday cards for a small fee (Hey, if each person on a 4 billion person social networking site buys 1 card for 1 dollar—this isn’t supposed to be a math lesson—but you can see where I’m going)
• A hospital wants users to find their services listed so they can call and make an appointment


I’m a content strategist, so I’m going to answer this question from a content point of view. But I’m aware that I depend and rely on designers, UX professionals, programmers and others to inform solving this problem—these are just rules from a content perspective.


Rule #1: Establish your authority and credibility on the topic from the get-go. If you are selling shoes, make sure you have a lot of shoes on your site, and show them from different angles. Describe the shoes, really, really well. Have other customers talk about the shoes. Does this sound familiar? Yup, it’s them.


Rule #2: Give your users pathways to the information you want them to GET. If you are a major clinical service line at a hospital, say cancer services, and you want your patients to know about this breakthrough treatment technology you just bought, create one page that aggregates all the content about this new technology. Write a what to expect guide about this new treatment technology. Discuss the latest research. Describe everything you can about it. The, put a button or small module that attracts users to the page and then link it from every page on your site a user might be searching for treatment technologies. Watch your traffic climb into the stratosphere.


Rule #3: Stop Blah, Blahing around. Take a good look at your analytics. Watch the click paths very carefully. What are your users stopping at? Where are they bouncing off of? Take that crap down! If no one is reading it, or even worse, it’s providing a major STOP AND GET OFF THE SITE NOW BEFORE THE BOMB GOES OFF moment, then it’s not really to your benefit, is it?


How do you manage the GET?