When you listen to many online marketers and interactive agencies, it seems they accept as self-evident truths these statements about Internet strategy:
1-“Content strategies are at the very core of Web strategy.”
2-“Adapting the content to the target audience makes a brand’s message more efficient and persuasive.”
3-“What a brand says about itself is not necessarily credible; the legitimacy of the message needs to be enhanced.”
Self-evident: really?
This trio of truisms, acknowledged by all, should logically be the guidelines for companies’ Internet strategies – right? But as it happens, that’s not the case – not by a long shot. Too often, marketers only pay lip service to content strategy: when it comes down to it, they’re perfectly happy to recycle their existing content materials and push them online.
In fact, defining a content strategy consists of developing a strategy for approaching and connecting with a particular audience with a distinctive value proposition. To achieve this, a brand needs to have something coherent and convincing to say, something likely to engage a conversation with the Web user, something which also establishes the brand’s legitimacy and credibility. In practice, this involves determining the right places for diffusing the brand’s message, places where consumers spend time and socialize online. More and more, we can’t just expect them to visit a brand website.
This approach to digital content means that first, a brand must build an audience strategy and second, develop an influence strategy. It’s all about constructing consistent communications that give (or give back) legitimacy to a brand, to the point that online consumers willingly take the message up and spread it themselves.
Content strategy: OK, but how?
Target strategy, influence strategy, content strategy: they all refer to conceiving and adapting brand communications not just to diverse audiences, but also to the different digital spaces (official websites, portals, blogs, emails…) where these communications are consumed. Availability in a variety of formats (text, video, audio, rich media…) enable messages to reach a wider audience and to achieve better visibility. And, more important, to be co-opted all the more easily by Web users, who can make it their own – further reinforcing the brand’s legitimacy.
The challenge presented by this strategic approach is to maintain message consistency over the full range of digital formats. A content plan helps to ensure consistency, by providing a clear definition of the objectives as well as an exhaustive list of the contents and formats that need to be produced. A solid content plan also sets forth the recommended tone and style, along with indications of the type of vocabulary and iconography to use: in short, it provides the editorial guidelines which make it possible to actually apply the content strategy.
Initiate and pursue the conversation
When all is said and done, the made-to-measure (not recycled!) digital content can be used in a variety of places, shared, exchanged. The content will have its own life, independent of the brand and its website, outside of the “official” space that may be too restrictive, to confining. For in the end, the goal is to make it possible for online consumers and Web users to appropriate the brand’s message and make it their own, so that it seems perfectly credible and natural – self-evident, if you will.
And when a brand achieves that (and it is something we can measure) then you can say that the content strategy has been effectively developed and that the content production has been a success.