Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits by Rahel Anne Bailie & Noz Urbina

Author:Rahel Anne Bailie & Noz Urbina [Bailie, Rahel Anne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: technical communication, content strategy
Publisher: XML Press
Published: 2013-04-03T14:00:00+00:00

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[44] Why would they do this? Because to the buyers, the reliability of supply is so important that if only one organization is supplying a certain technology, it can be considered too risky to buy. A manufacturer that invents something might be forced to partner with a competitor so there can be more than one supplier.

Multimodal, Customer-centric Content Strategy

On a mobile device with a small visual interface and keypad, a word may be quite difficult to type but very easy to say (e.g. Poughkeepsie). Consider how you would access and search through digital media catalogs from these same devices or set-top boxes. And in one real-world example, patient information in an operating room environment is accessed verbally by members of the surgical team to maintain an antiseptic environment and presented, in near real-time, aurally – and visually – to maximize comprehension.

If everything is content, does a content strategist need to worry about everything on a printed page, in a PDF, in a mobile device app, or on a website? In one sense, yes. A content strategist is responsible for all elements of content and for deciding whether the various types of content make sense in terms of comprehension. The strategist needs to determine whether the colors on a button affect the comprehension of the text on the button or whether other elements interfere with how a user understands the text. A strategist would know whether cross-references work better than repeated text or whether an animation is needed instead of an explanation.

Customers are not concerned that it’s the engineering department that produces the specifications in a brochure, they’re concerned that the brochure is accurate and allows them to evaluate the product. Similarly, if they’ve already bought the product, but have received poor training, they’ll be unhappy. If they call in an engineer to repair the product, they don’t care if the engineer doesn’t have the right tools or the maintenance instructions are wrong or the diagnostic procedures in the manual haven’t been updated for that model. Customers want what they want, and when they don’t get what they want, the relationship suffers. And the moment a customer shares a bad experience, the brand will suffer, too.

Most organizations do not optimize for many of the modalities we’ve described, and their content strategy, if they’ve ever developed one, is to bury their heads at varying depths in the sand. Some content strategies prioritize the Web and web-formatted content, ignoring a large portion of the content that goes in between the lines and is behind the buttons.

A good web content strategist will tell you that you need to map the whole customer lifecycle. You can’t expect customers to “walk a path of breadcrumbs” from your home page to find relevant content. Search and offsite inbound links bypass our navigational structures, and multichannel publishing gives users even more paths to our information. These changes mean that having a single “home page” is less important than it was previously.[45]

A better content strategist will remind the client that social media is a major factor in brand management and lead acquisition.

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