Content Strategy
Many elements go into making a strong and effective content strategy. Here you’ll find a selection of case studies from some recent projects I’ve worked on that demonstrate my approach.
Design a multi-question online assessment that serves customers in three ways: help business owners who feel overwhelmed by choice understand their options; reduce misconceptions about the complexities of business technologies; and provide personalized product recommendations that align with business-specific goals.
Technology Assessment Tool
The Ask:
The
Audience:
Small business owners
As it usually is, the first step for me was audience research. Once I had a handle on that, I mapped out the structure of the assessment, creating representative scenarios/questions centered around current business status, current business challenge, and future business goals.
Because the assessment needed to provide education as well as drive to products, I also completed a content audit to identify appropriate assets to serve up alongside the products within each of the four business categories the assessment focuses on.
Next, I collaborated with a business analyst to develop a scoring system and if/then logic tree, which was leveraged to determine which products and resources were served up to the user at the end of the assessment.
Finally, it was time to write the copy, which included 24 results overview explanations and 120+ personalized product recommendations.
The
Approach:
Example question
Example question
Example personalized report
Content Pillar Overhaul
The Ask:
Rethink existing content pillars, explore additional topics/themes, and create unified messaging and continuity across online platforms and other sales enablement materials.
Small business, medium business, enterprise, and public sector
The
Approach:
When starting this project, the primary content pillars for this technology company had been largely unchanged for several years, but there had been an effort at the start of the pandemic to add in work-from-home and business continuity messaging across platforms, which hadn’t been deployed in a consistent way. So the first step was conducting a competitive analysis, which was supplemented by website analytics and an SEO gap analysis.
I also leveraged stakeholder/SME inputs to get a better idea of what mattered to actual, current customers.
Once my proposed topics were approved, I then began creating messaging frameworks for each pillar, which identified its key themes, audiences, customer pain points, keywords, and associated products. These frameworks were ultimately used both internally and by third-party agencies that produce content for the company.
The
Audience:
Proposed content pillar structure
Online Support Unification
Consolidate support-related pages and content living across 16 domains into a single ecosystem with improved UX.
The Ask:
The
Audience:
Product owners across all business segments
This was an incredibly collaborative cross-discipline endeavor between myself and a team of UX, BA, and brand strategists. My primary role was to first identify and catalog all support-related content, which was spread out over 650+ pages. After reducing content redundancies, I worked with the UX and strategy teams to identify the ideal user flows and to design a way to organize the content in a more user-centric way.
We were ultimately able to streamline the support content into ~70 URLs, and improved the overall navigation.
The
Approach:
User flows
Support routing page
UX-Influenced Content Analysis
The Ask:
Create customer archetypes across multiple business segments and map the needs and expectations of those archetypes to website content elements.
First-step UX analysis
All business segments
The
Approach:
This smaller foundational effort was part of a large-scale website redesign project. The redesign was meant to streamline existing product pages, both in number and in volume of on-page content, as well as improve the overall user experience.
Because the majority of the 100+ product pages were intended for customers from businesses of any size and in almost any industry, the components used on each page type needed to accommodate a variety of content requirements simultaneously.
Using both data-driven insights and anecdotal evidence, I created website user archetypes that looked at the primary motivations any customer would have in coming to the site, regardless of their business segment or industry. Then I outlined the shared considerations of each business segment based on those archetypes and did some high-level content mapping to show all the different types of content elements that would need to appear on each page type to offer the most effective user experience. The UX and design teams on the project used my analysis to create hard-working page templates.
The
Audience:
Website Content Tracking
Master content tracker
Maintain consistency in messaging during an extended rolling launch of a massive website redesign effort.
The Ask:
The
Audience:
Business technology customers of all sizes and industries
Content audits are important, but those tend to happen after the fact. For initiatives like large demand-gen campaigns and websites, I like as-it-happens content tracking. For this particular website project that unified hundreds of disparate URLs into a single ecosystem, I created a master tracker sheet to give at-a-glance access to all content on the site. This didn’t just include traditional sales enablement assets, but all on-page content, including messaging, promos, SEO, design components, and more. It was populated at the R1 stage and updated with each round of edits, so we always had an accurate accounting of content.
This comprehensive aerial view made it easy to evaluate content and identify crosslinking opportunities. Also, because the pages in this effort were being launched on a rolling basis, often product messaging would update, or a stat would change, or a promo would expire that would impact both in-progress pages and pages that had already gone live. Having a searchable tracker made it easy to identify affected pages and make standardized universal content changes when needed to help ensure a more consistent user experience.
The
Approach: