Give your content the priority it deserves

Content is an essential part of your website or digital product. It’s content that your customers interact with at every touchpoint along their journey with your organisation. Content reinforces your brand identity and communicates with your customers. It’s an extension of your customer service and the reason that people come to your website in the first place. Once they arrive, if the content is what they’re looking for, easy to understand and helps them complete what they came to do, your credibility is boosted and trust in your brand and services grows.

That sounds pretty clear and straightforward. In practice, though, defining the content that needs to be created, who it’s for, why it exists, and where it belongs can be surprisingly challenging.

When was the last time you assessed the performance of your digital content, or took stock to understand what your content is, how much of it there is, and where it’s published to?

If it’s been a while since your last major website redesign and rebuild, it’s likely that over time, the responsibility for content management has changed hands more than once, across roles and departments. Content may have been published to places that you’ve lost track of, or it may no longer support your organisation’s goals. 

Perhaps your target customers and their needs and expectations for your services have evolved, but your content hasn’t been updated in response. Or you might be planning a website upgrade and are wondering whether your legacy content is going to cut it with the new information architecture, visual design, and content management system.

All too often, content is tacked on at the end of a project, after the website has been designed, built, and delivered, ready for content to be added. It’s at this point that the team tasked with adding content to the content management system finds that the content doesn’t fit the new design and has to be adapted. When you’ve invested in rebuilding your website, the last thing you want is to give your customers a poor experience with substandard content!

The best starting point for tackling your content challenges is a strategic content plan - providing you with direction through clearly defined strategic priorities, success measures, and a timeframe in which to achieve your ambitions. While strategic plans are often seen at an organisational level, they’re not that common when it comes to digital content - which means if you’ve got a strategic content plan, you’ll have a huge competitive advantage.

Before you get started with a strategic plan, you first need to know what you’re working with. Consider these questions: 

• How helpful, credible, and useful do your customers find your content? 
• Does your content provide the information they’re looking for and use language they understand?
• Does your content help your customers take action and accomplish what they came to your website or digital product to do?
• Who’s planning, creating, approving and evaluating your content?
• What are your measures of success and is your content meeting them?
• Do you have a long-term plan for how you’re going to sustainably maintain your content?

If you haven’t got all the answers, you’re not alone. We can help you give your content the priority it deserves, starting with defining the eight foundations for content performance.

High-performing content doesn’t happen by chance. Content can work harder for your organisation when you’ve defined and set in place the eight foundations that will set your content up for success. We work with your team to scope, understand, and define the following:

1. What the content is
   We outline exactly what your content is. This includes the types of content you’ll create, the formats it will be created in, the purpose for each piece of content, and the topics and core messaging.
   
   
2. Where the content belongs
   Your content ecosystem includes the channels and platforms that content is published and distributed to, and identifies why those are part of the ecosystem.
   
   
3. How you make your content
   We scope your end-to-end content development workflow, and define roles and responsibilities.
   
   
4. Who responsibility lies with 
   This is your content governance plan, which defines who the decision-makers and stakeholders are, and who has ownership of all standards, processes, and content performance.
   
   
5. Who your content is for and why
   We identify how your content meets the needs and expectations of your target audiences. If you’re missing audience details, or if your audience insights are out of date, our UX Research team can provide comprehensive audience research to build out this critical information.
   
   
6. What your content will achieve
   We define your success measures and identify how to measure the impact of content on your organisational goals.
   
   
7. What your content standards are
   We outline the requirements for your content standards, to set you on track for achieving content excellence - and therefore trust and credibility.
   
   
8. What your content must comply with
   Compliance requirements will vary depending on your sector, or the services and products you offer. You need to ensure that your content meets all relevant policies, legislation, and other regulations.

At Pollen, we work in a highly collaborative way to learn from you everything we can about your content, your organisational goals, and your customers. Our data-informed approach, paired with rich qualitative UX research insights, identifies the content your customers need, at the time they need it and in the way that they expect. We audit and assess your content to surface inefficiencies and gaps - as well as learn what’s working well.

Great content takes a team effort, united behind a common vision and direction. We tap into your knowledge and expertise to define your eight foundations for content success and co-design tailored solutions to your unique content challenges. We identify how to measure your content’s impact on organisational goals so that you can prove its value. All of this is wrapped up as your strategic content plan, paving the course ahead.

Your path to content success doesn’t end here, though! Keep the momentum going by equipping your team with the knowledge and capabilities they need to ensure your content continues to meet best practice standards. We offer tailored training, supported by resources such as user manuals, toolkits and playbooks, all designed to meet your unique content requirements.

Every day, we’re bombarded with more digital content than ever before. How will you ensure your content stands out and attracts your customers? Once they find you online, how will  you know whether your content resonates with, and meets the needs of, your customers? If you’d like to learn more about how Pollen can help you transform your content and connect it to tangible outcomes, get in touch with us today. We’ve heard just about every content challenge there is, and would love to help you solve yours.