Cohesive content strategy

Digital agencies have long had content strategists on staff, but a variety of organizations are seeing the need to add someone to their team to be in charge of “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content,” as Kristina Halvorson defines the job in Content Strategy for the Web,

In her book, Halvorson identifies multiple steps in the content strategy process; first audit the existing content, then analyze, strategize, categorize, structure, create, revise, approve, tag, format, publish, update, and archive.

Key concepts

Audit
A review of existing content, how much there is, how well it’s organized, and how accurate and how well it is produced?

Content 
Content is much more than text. Multimedia elements such as pictures, graphic elements, video and audio can help tell the story.

Content lifecycle
Content needs to be regularly evaluated. What needs to be refreshed, updated and taken out? A website is in a constant beta stage.

Message architecture
A hierarchy of the core messages that define an organization or brand, which helps content strategists figure out the story they are trying to tell and what content is not related to the brand and is unnecessary.

“Don’t outsource your voice?”

Halvorson has a love hate relationship with content strategies and explains that the decision whether to outsource it or not isn’t that simple.

“On the one hand, that’s a really great quotable line. On the other hand, refusing on principle to outsource content is just impossible for most organizations. If you can’t hire anyone internally to do the editorial stuff, you’re going to have to outsource because you can’t just publish Web content and leave it there. You have to take care of it over time”.