Marketing & Brand

What do content strategists do?

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It’s a question being asked a lot these days.  By clients, the industry, fellow colleagues, creatives, technologists; the list goes on. So in June I attended an EConsultancy course on Digital Content Strategy delivered by Catherine Toole, CEO of Sticky Content to find out from a seasoned content strategist.  It was a great one-day overview that provoked a lot of lively discussion.  Then I got the slide that listed just some of the things a content strategist does.  Take a look:

brand strategy
messaging strategy
competitor content audit
format development
tone of voice
content style guide
copy deck
idea generation
editorial calendar
editorial strategy
SEO/PPC strategy
language guidelines
message map
content production schedule
terms of use
page tables
content licensing
sitemap		 style guide
taxonomy
content approval workflow
migration strategy
content analysis
content audit
content inventory
content assessment
content gap analysis
content model
editorial workflow
content types
quality assurance tools
metadata strategy
cms architecture
content migration plan
metadata framework

 

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Online CXM Solutions – CMS In The Middle

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A recently published Forrester Wave report on Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of some of the leading WCM vendors, observing that: The WCM market is growing rapidly to accommodate Customer Experience Management needs (CXM). The most effective way to do this is for WCM to integrate with a large array of CXM technologies. What … Read more

Low Effort increases Customer Loyalty

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Back in July 2010, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) told businesses to Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. HBR challenged conventional marketing wisdom and declared that satisfied customers are NOT loyal customers.

Delighting customers does not build loyalty. However, reducing the amount of effort required to get things done – does.  From a survey of more than 75,000 service-based personnel, HBR found that to really win customer loyalty forget the bells and whistles and just solve their problems.

Make it easy for your Internal Customers

These findings talk directly to the challenges faced by those managing content across multiple channels today. For example, below is a list of common problems internal customers encounter when trying to create and publish content:

  • The copywriter who struggles to edit an article.
  • The compliance officer who cannot preview content before it goes live.
  • The system administrator who cannot police the infrastructure.
  • The product manager who cannot change prices in real-time.
  • The brand manager who needs tighter control over digital assets.
  • The optimisation specialist trying to figure out cart abandonment issues.

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Baked in Analytics

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The old adage, you can’t control what you can’t measure, resonates loud and clear with marketers. If you don’t measure, you just don’t know, and businesses today cannot afford to be ignorant of their customer needs.

Technology has played a vital role in removing barriers to online measurement. Web analytics enable marketers to better measure and monitor digital campaigns. However, as marketing strives to reach more diverse audiences at the moments that most influence their decisions, the challenge is for businesses to have immediate access to ‘A’ class data (automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible, auditable, available) at every digital touchpoint along the consumer decision journey. That challenge is made even more difficult by the disconnect between those responsible for creating campaign content and those interested in measuring digital success. So what steps are being taken to close this gap?

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What is a Marketing Technology Platform

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Last month I gave a presentation on building a marketing technology platform. A few people have been in touch to share their ideas around customer engagement platforms and marketing automation. It comes as no surprise that there are numerous marketing technology platforms already in use today. But where are they and how are they being used?

What is a marketing technology platform?

Marketing technology are tools that make life simpler for marketers to market. They automate difficult, time-consuming and repetitive manual tasks to surface customer insight. Built by technologists, used by marketers. Marketing technology should aim to remove or significantly reduce the need for IT involvement. In short, to keep marketing in marketing.

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Two marketing views of your website

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Where do you think your website sits on the Web?

The folks over at Hubspot and have been quite vocal when advocating the benefits of inbound marketing over outbound marketing. They are not alone. Real-world marketing experiences reported by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) demonstrate how companies that have embraced inbound marketing are enjoying greater digital successes with less investment. The CMI have also highlighted how marketing failures are being made by those organisations that do not understand the new conversation rules and/or the lay of the “social” land. But why?

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Web Standard Template

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A Web Standard is both a guide and a measure. I believe that Web Teams that invest enough time and the enough effort into Web Standards, will reap the benefits. We covered this in a previous post. Today, we dive straight in with a concrete example: URL Naming Web Standard. Note, just to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ve had to trim it down. Rest assured it does have enough meat in there to illustrate what is a Web Standard.

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Web Standards

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northern lightsNot many web sites today are launched with clearly defined and/or enforceable Web Standards. For larger organisations, looking to execute efficiently on the Web, this is a major stumbling block.

Confession. Having worked in and for large organisations for over 25 years, I was never a Web Standards fan boy. They were always out-of-date. They were written by non-practitioners. Their format was dry and verbose. Their purpose unclear but just obey. Effecting change or providing feedback was actively discouraged.  In short, information flowed one way: down! There was not much to like about Web Standards.

However, if you can get past all, there were little gems of insight locked away in these Web Standards. Looking back through older eyes I realise that I never really hated Web Standards. I just didn’t like the way they were enforced. So I rejected them and promptly falling foul of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

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Fix WCM? But what’s broken?

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I’ve been delivering web content management solutions for a while now and like a lot of folks out there I still find it extremely challenging. It’s never a walk in the park. No two are the same. And the results lie between the two extremes of weird and wonderful. The bigger the customer, the more intriguing the experience. Customers definitely come with baggage, others with wild expectations. So when a couple weeks back, at the Janus Boye Conference Jon Marks crowd sourced opinions using the twitter hashtag fixwcm on the “How to Fix WCM” track I followed with keen interest. Firstly because I didn’t think for one moment that WCM was broken. And secondly, I thought it was just a distraction from the underlying fact that we are broken!

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Content First

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big-guySay you’ve been asked to buy a suit for someone you’ve never met. What do you do first?

  1. Buy the suit.
  2. Meet & Measure them.

For design-led projects, we’re buying that suit first. By damn, one way or another that content will well fit into that design and look good! Of course I’m exaggerating a little here. But if have been in a project where the content is delivered at the end and simply doesn’t fit, you never want to go there again.

Now call me odd, but wouldn’t life be that little bit easier if we sized up the content first and then designed the site to fit it. Measure, then fit. I dream of projects where we all work together to determine what information a site needs upfront, organise it, think of ways to be navigate it and then and only then do we create the designs to satisfy those requirements. What typically happens is something that lies between these to extremes depending on when I get involved.

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