The Case for Content Strategy

Content has too often been the bastard stepchild of web dev projects.

Clients want the beautiful site but they’re going to write the content.

So the agency designs the site. They port over the content that’s going to stay, mainly because nobody’s taken the time to look at it—stuff like the press releases from 2001, bios that weren’t written with the new design in mind (and nobody bothered to update), and some random pages of something that nobody has the heart to say goodbye to.

It’s two weeks to launch so the project manager sends a nudge email, and a week after that an urgent email, and a few days after that a “we can’t launch without the content” email, and then maybe 48 hours before launch the content comes in.

Great. We can publish.

Wait, we can’t publish? Why?

Content Strategy Matches the Content to Your Brand

Because the content doesn’t fit the design, the tone—authored last minute by the ambitious marketing assistant forced into an all-nighter—is uneven, and pretty much every page reads pretty much like a partially revised version of the existing content, which is what the client wants to get away from to begin with.

So somebody comes in and does a hack job of mashing it together. Duck tape and staples. Great. We can launch, right? Right. Here’s what’s wrong with this scenario:

• The delays cost the organization, add $$$ to the project, and offer at best a temporary fix 
• Nobody looked at how the content could work with the design (or the design could work with the content) to communicate the promise, the value, the extraordinariness of the organization, its products, its people, its purpose, which is sort of like when the groom leaving the bride at the alter: horrifying 
• Despite the facelift—the new colors, the new fonts, the new images—the content that’s there is basically, essentially, the same
• The last minute mashing of this with that and that with this means that the stuff that helps people do what they come to the site to do isn’t optimized for them to do it - The last minute mashing of this with that and that with this introduces mistakes—punctuation mistakes, lost words, truncated paragraphs, confusing statement, erroneous statements, off-message statements—a mess, basically
• It’s the same site, but different (and the client wanted: different, just different!) 
• There’s nobody in charge, no plan for removing old pages in the future, no thought as to where new content will live, nary a copy chief in site

It Happens. Projects Blow Up without a Content Strategy.

OK. Maybe this is pushing the envelope toward worst-case scenario. Except that it happens. I’ve seen it happen. All of us here have seen it happen. We try not to let it happen. We ask politely, we communicate the implications, we ask nicely, we explain the implications, we encourage, we champion, we pester. But the client doesn’t want to pay for it. The client thinks they can handle the content.

Sometimes the client can handle the content. Sometimes they take the page templates we give them and samples of how to adapt the content to them, and deliver. Sometimes.

Too often, they say, we can do that. We can assign the content to the program director or the marketing coordinator or the intern—somebody without professional training who’s already overwhelmed with a full-time job.

The results are not stellar.

An Ounce of Prevention . . .

Too often, the client creates a pain-in-the-ass for themselves down the road—an expensive mess they’ve got to pay a lot of money to clean up when they could have spent a little money up front to avoid that mess, to polish their brand reputation, to invest in relevant, usable, on-target content—to plan for what it would be, to create it, and to think through how they’re going to manage it moving forward.

Now you’ve probably heard about content strategy. People are talking about it. It’s getting it’s fair share of tweets, it’s got conferences, it’s got groups of practitioners who meet and drink and talk about it. (Seriously. Us professionals meet and talk about it. Regularly. We think content’s cool.)

And this is good. Because whether you like it or not, content strategy is part of your website. It is. It’s intrinsic to your site. It’s relates directly to the primary expression of your brand.

Content Strategy Delivers ROI

In the time it saves you, the risks it saves you, the conversions it creates for you, the traffic it drives, the SEO it builds into your site—in these things and more, it’s worth your investment.