One of the best quotes on content strategy I've ever come across.

“If your goal is to keep your customers engaged, then you better be sure that you are engaged as well.  You can plant the prettiest garden in the world, but unless you water and tend it, it will end up dead or feral.  Freshness and frequency count, both in the customer’s mind, and to search engines that are judging what’s relevant.  But beyond the fear of failure, the exciting promise is that if you maintain your reliability and pertinence, you can create an ongoing relationship with your customers on topics that matter to you both.  Demonstrating reliability earns trust, and publishing on a regular schedule can turn that first customer visit into a habit, whether it’s for video, news bits, white papers, or other compelling reasons to return.  Whatever you deliver it’s important that there is someone in charge who understands both your messaging priorities, and what keeps customers coming back.”

John Alderman, Creative Director- The Barbarian Group

My interest in content planning has been growing over the past few months.  Drawing heavy inspiration from the folks at Razorfish, specifically the team behind the Scatter/Gather blog, planners like Rachel Lovinger and Robert Stribley are really setting the industry standard for what it takes to create, schedule, plan, and post compelling content on the web. 

First, we can look at the basic definition of content planning.  While the wikipedia definition sums it up pretty well, I’d like to instead refer to the less textbook version provided by  Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic.  In her article, The Discipline of Content Strategy, she defines content strategy as the following:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.  Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

In a recent post titled, “Busy Times for Content Strategy” Lovinger outlines some of the most influential blog posts surrounding content strategy.  Through visiting these articles, it’s not hard to see that content, the way we use it, and the way we gather it truly is reshaping the way we act in the marketing industry.  

Content Driven Design

In his blog post titled “Toward a Content Driven Design Process,” Matt Brown, owner of Things That Are Brown,  identifies how content is changing the web design process.  

“One of the biggest and best side effects of content strategy’s activism is that it’s encouraging agencies to reorder their design process. It’s no longer: discovery, information architecture, design, templates and development.  Instead, we’re doing: content strategy, information architecture, web writing, content production, design, templates and development—or some version of this.”

Content Driven Relationships

Nicole Jones (ex-Apple) current Content Strategist at Mule Design Studio says in her recent blog post Parts of a Whole, “Your site should help tell your story; any content you publish should speak to your reader and the relationship you want to build with them.”  This isn’t an automated piece of the puzzle, rather it’s something that must be worked at, planned, and perfected.

Content Driven Everything

Content Marketing consultant and founder of Content Marketing Strategies Newt Barrett believes that all businesses will be content driven within the next 12 months.  In a recent blog, Barett outlines some of his top takeaways from the 2010 Content Strategy forum in Paris.  

1. From the very moment you launch your website, you are in the publishing business.
2. You must assign a content strategy leader with both responsibility and authority in order to succeed.
3. Effective content is much more than words on a virtual page.
4. You must have a clear assessment of what your target customers expect to find online when they are searching for answers to their problems. 
5. Determine what internal and external resources will be required to generate every element of the content that will become part of your online strategy. 
6. Design your content so that results are quantifiable and easy to measure. 
7. Content strategy will be as hot as social media and 12 months.

It’s not hard to understand why content strategy is becoming such an integral piece of the marketing puzzle.  In the past, design was enough, but now, it all comes to down to creative, relevant, interesting, and insightful information to get consumers, users, followers, and fans to remain entertained and intact with a brand.

Do you produce content?  Does your business?  Who’s in charge?  Why aren’t you planning for the future? We should all be asking ourselves these very simple questions very soon, if not now.  Content isn't just words or images on a screen and it most definitely needs strategy too.

Looking at advertising and what it is now, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s nothing like it used to be.  Sure some elements remain the same, there’s a client, an agency, a brief, and a creative execution, but the channels, the platforms, the programs, and the strategic thinking have all changed drastically over the years.

It’s good to be in something from the ground floor.  I came in too late for that.  I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end.  The best is over.  Advertising will never be the same.  I think many Americans think that way.   I think many advertisers do too.  The good thing is, I don’t think this is the end of an era.  I think it’s the beginning of a new one.  There’s a lot more opportunity around the corner, we just need to realize that things aren’t quite as easy as they used to be.  

Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen, has a lot of great insights on the topic of what it takes to be a successful agency of the future.  He states, “Digital isn’t about technology, it’s about the people.  We want to do business with people, not companies.  The focus shouldn’t be on telling a story, it should be on getting other people to tell it for you.”  With all of this, I couldn’t agree more.  As consumers, we have new sources of information (RSS, Delicious, Twitter, Buzz) and the platforms and tools to create quality content (flip cams, blogspot, wordpress, web cams).  The goal is no longer about producing the content ourselves.  It’s about conceiving ideas that generate content from consumers.  It sounds easy on paper.  Getting it to happen is a different story.

In the past, advertising was about buying impressions.  The future is all about earning them.  As agencies evolve, we will continually need to focus on adopting new practices that cater to this new, radically different business model.  The consumers have spoken, and continue to get louder and louder as they go.  This isn’t going to be easy, it isn’t going to be fast, but we must evolve.  If you can’t be a digital native, at least be a digital immigrant.  It would’ve been easier from the ground level, but it’s far too late.  This isn’t the end.  It’s the beginning.  There’s still much more to come.

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