Content Strategy
Your content strategy is your why, what and who.
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Overview
A user-centered content strategy concerns itself with the vision—the ins and outs of how and why your content will be created and maintained with the end user in mind.
- Using narrative to clarify your message (video)
- The difference between content strategy and content marketing
Value Proposition
What inspires your audience to engage?
Three ways to determine this is found within the why, what and who. Once you’re done answering these questions, you should be ready to create the necessary content to achieve the project goals.
Why is this important?
- Why do your products/services matter?
- Why do you do what you do?
- What are you passionate about?
What do you do?
- What problem(s) are you trying to solve?
- What is it that you do to solve that problem?
- How do you differ from your competitors?
Who is this for?
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What do they currently think about you?
- What is the most persuasive idea we can convey?
Clarity
Make information easy to find and understand.
Try and keep your messaging short and to the point, your users are at the site to get something done, not to read paragraph after paragraph. Over-explanation gets in the way of people digesting meaning and moving quickly to the deeper content — the reason why they are at the site in first place.
Voice
Tailor language and tone to your audience.
By knowing your audience, the people with whom you want to be engaged, you can tailor the language and tone to them. Using this approach consistently in your content is known as voice.
- Use words in a more conversational manner.
- Avoid overly long page titles that are jargon-heavy.
- Look to use concise statements in layman’s terms whenever possible.
- If you need to use more in depth, peer-to-peer language, think about creating support articles to convey that information.