What Exactly is Content Strategy?
Put simply, a content strategy is a business plan for your content.
According to Val Swisher, Content Strategy Guru and CEO of Content Rules, Inc., “Content strategy helps you identify what content you need, what content you don’t need, and where to put your resources for the most ROI.”
Ultimately, the driving purpose of a content strategy is to ensure that everyone shares the same content management goals and knows what they need to do to support them.
Do I really Need a Content Strategy?
The truth is, all organizations can benefit from a content strategy, but organizations with greater volumes of content and audiences typically see a greater need.
Does your organization currently face any of these common content management problems?
- Content is hard to find and use
- Content is often out-of-sync or out-of-date
- Content can’t be reused or personalized
- Content delivery isn’t automated and delivery channels are limited
If so, it’s time to start exploring a content strategy.
Benefits of a Content Strategy
“A content strategy helps companies deliver content when, where, and how their customers want to see it."
A cohesive content strategy can drive multiple positive business outcomes, including:
- Reduce costs of creating, managing, publishing, and localizing content
- Speed up time to market for content delivery
- Improve customer experiences through consistency at every point of the customer journey
- Increase content reuse (and a corresponding decrease in redundant content)
How to Implement a Content Strategy
Developing and implementing a content strategy requires consideration and alignment of content models, structured authoring guidelines, reuse strategy, taxonomy, metadata, workflows and governance.
This is no small task.
Val and her team recommend beginning with a single, core department and building out from there.
“We iterate and bring each team into the strategy, extending the strategy where needed,” Val explains, “until everyone is participating and building on a universal strategy.”
When implementing a content strategy at scale, technology becomes a critical driver of success.
“Most organizations that develop a unified content strategy decide to purchase a new content management system,” Val says. “Often, this system is a component content management system (CCMS).”
A CCMS like Xyleme makes supporting a unified content strategy much easier than trying to manage each individual part of the process independently. Xyleme CCMS centralizes the entire content management lifecycle, making it easy to create, manage, deliver, reuse, personalize and track content, even across dispersed teams and at a global scale.
“We’re proud to partner with Val Swisher and the entire Content Rules team to help organizations create, manage, reuse and personalize content efficiently at scale."
“We are experts in structured authoring and granular, component-level content management,” Leslie explains, “and Val’s content strategy expertise coupled with our industry-leading content management platform provide significant, measurable value to our customers.”
About Val Swisher | CEO of Content Rules, Inc.
Val Swisher is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management, and has co-authored a new book, The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale (XML Press, 2021). Together with co-author and senior content strategist Regina Lynn Preciado, Val lays out exactly what it takes to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
