I’ve worked in some big organisations – organisations where the web team, the marketing team, and the business areas all worked in little silos. Conversing when needed, but never really crossing over or properly collaborating to create strategic plans that related to content.
Most planning efforts were driven by the web operations team. The same team charged with maintaining content, and as you can guess a lot of the planning had to do with things like publishing processes, usability, search optimisation, metrics and the like.
Unfortunately, even with careful planning many decisions were not supported when push came to shove and a business area *really* needed something on the home page and weren’t afraid to go to senior management to make it happen.
Also, campaigns would come from the marketing team with very little warning, or input. Which was a shame, because true potential wasn’t always realised. Indeed, each campaign was usually a standalone exercise – no overarching strategy of how it supported the organisation’s brand.
So what does this mean for content strategists?
If you’ve been tasked with developing a content strategy for your organisation, keep this in mind. Content strategy has to be bigger than the web team:
- It needs to be supported and signed off on by the big boss.
- It needs to be developed with proper input from all players (IT, marketing/comms/business areas).
- It needs to clearly link with the Strategic Plan of the business.
- It must include upcoming campaigns as well as existing content assets.
Get this right from the start, and the whole process becomes easier.
Need some advice? Get in touch with me.
