"The content strategy brief provides the common vision needed to keep you and your team focused on the correct content goals."
A content strategy brief ensures that you have useful and usable content that is well structured and easily found by a clearly defined audience.
Sets the goals for both the customer and the business
Establishes the KPIs
Determines the best content channels to reach the goals
Determines the target audiences
Decides on the content types needed for customer engagement
Drives profitable customer interactions
First and foremost, be flexible. This is a guide, not your warden. Think of this as modular by design, so you'll find anything you might want to include in a strategy brief to be successful. Keep in mind, not every project is the same, so not every module or section will apply to your project. Use only what you need.
STEP 1: Define problem statement/objective
The problem statement provides a starting point and a common vision to keep you and your team focused on the correct goals. This example problem statement example comes from the design thinking methodology.
[User/Description] needs a way to [verb] because he/she feels [emotion/adjective] when [situation/context].
For example, "As a customer, I need to upgrade my phone, and find the answers to my questions quickly without having to interact with a rep. Time is a very precious commodity to me, so I don’t want to call customer support and wait on hold or go to a retail store and wait in line forever."
STEP 2: Define success
Here is where you will talk about the goals for the content strategy. Before starting to play with data and metrics for decision making, you must have a clear idea about what you want to achieve with your content strategy.
Define the goals
You are going to need to identify the goals by working through what success looks like for both the user and the business.
What does success look like for the user?
Every goal has related user actions. What task does the user need to accomplish? Mapping your goals to those actions can let you know whether or not you’re on track. For example, the user will quickly and autonomously complete a device upgrade in the app.
What does success look like for the business?
How will success be measured?
You'll need to identify how you'll measure your content strategy's success. What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) needed for measuring the success that you identified above?
Identify the signals for each goal
Every goal has related user/customer actions. How will you know when the user has been able to complete the task successfully? These are called the signals! Mapping your goals to the signals will help you focus on choosing the best metrics to measure the success of your content strategy. For example, the user will quickly and autonomously complete a device upgrade in the app. To know if the user is able to do this, we will need to measure task success.
Chose the best metrics to measure each signal
STEP 3: What is in scope?
What’s in scope? Identify, prioritize, and organize the following content elements. Will the project impact taxonomy, navigation, personalization rules, or other elements of the content architecture? How?
Navigation
Determine the impacts to your navigation including global, contextual / categorical, and on-page navigational elements.
Utility navigation including links to x, y, and z and brand logo at the top which goes home on click
Primary navigation that drives to the primary category pages
Display mega menu drop downs on hover
Keep menu items free of jargon or unclear, branded terminology
Include site search is in the navigation
Offset the navigation callout to drive to the contact page in a different color or style to draw the eye
Global footer with footer links a, b, and c (sitemap, etc.), address, phone number, and logo
Segmentation and personalization
SEO
Distribution channels
Technical requirements
Sustainment model
STEP 4: Closing summary
Close your strategy brief with any final thoughts or additional items that you would like to flesh out or provide extra information to. You may want to note any elements you want to call out for future efforts. Consider nearby content you can't change now, missing content you can't impact in this effort or incorrect content that another team will have to address immediately (outside the standard process).
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