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Do you want to know what content your audiences really want from you and how to execute it? Our experienced team specialise in delivering long-term strategy with your audience at the heart.
Over the past two decades, we’ve provided content strategy services and support for clients from a wide range of verticals – from financial services to charities – helping them connect with their audiences through content to meet their organisational goals.
What is a content strategy?
An audience-led content strategy is a roadmap for all future content creation based on an agnostic assessment of how you can meet user needs through content. It provides recommendations for content based on users’ needs and the potential impact.
Brands that trust us with content strategy
The importance of being audience first
Understanding your audience will help you prioritise and create content that truly resonates, helping you reach your business objectives.
Only by identifying what your audience needs from you can you effectively identify the best mediums and media to deliver your content.
There are six universal user needs
We tie together our audience research using six universal user-need states to understand the emotional context of your audiences’ needs and create a jumping off point for content solutions.
Surprise me
Users need fun and entertainment. They want something unique.
Educate me
Users want expertise and competence. They need the right information.
Reassure me
Users need comfort and to feel safe. They want to make the right decision.
Thrill me
Users need excitement and they need it fast. They want it short, sharp, and shareable.
Impress me
Users want to be wowed and influenced. They're looking for prestige.
Help me
Users need practical guidance to achieve their goal(s).
Content strategy to meet your goals
A content strategy is the foundation for all your content activities. Without a true understanding of your audiences’ needs and a shared strategic direction, your content will only deliver against key metrics sporadically.
A lot of content is still created with a medium-first approach, where marketers with the capability to create a specific type of content (e.g. blogs or video) pick the means of delivery and style of content before they identify the need, resulting in frustrated users and a lack of ROI.
Our strategy work will give you a comprehensive roadmap for content driven by your audiences’ needs, helping you deliver against your targets. Typical reasons for a content strategy include:
- You want to understand your audience and their content needs better to drive improved ROI
- People across your business are creating content for various stages of the user journey without strategic alignment
- You have a skilled team, making ‘good’ content, but none of it is working
- You’re not sure what your audience needs from you across all stages of their journey
- You’re about to launch a campaign but you’re not sure about what you need to create in the long term
- You’ve undertaken some audience research but you need some help to fill in the gaps and identify the right content to meet your users’ needs
Our content strategy service is driven by your audience and the content they need. Our documents are packed full of actionable information that our clients can take away and begin to implement immediately.
Better yet, we get together with our clients to help prioritise actions together so that web best practices, internal client resource and development restraints are all taken into consideration at the point of document delivery.
Ryan Ogilvie, director of content and social media
What does a content strategy include?
Your strategy should be unique to you, so the exact scope of your content strategy will depend on your needs and budget but it will include all or some of the tactics from each of the following overlapping stages:
1. Kick-off workshop
We start with a workshop where we draw on your knowledge of your customers to identify your audience segments and to complete empathy maps and content journey maps for those groups. We often follow up from these sessions with stakeholder interviews to get further in-depth insights into your organisation.
These mapping techniques are also great frameworks to help you plan campaigns and content production going forward.
2. Audience research
The scope of research will depend on what you want to achieve, your audiences, and your budget but research at this stage includes audience interviews, search intent, social and media monitoring to identify how users are interacting with and talking about the brand, competitors and relevant products/services online, surveys, and focus groups.
3. User testing
At this stage, we use our experts to user test your current content and journeys. This stage can also include testing of competitor content against your own.
4. Data and landscape
We complement audience research with a look at your data and the wider landscape around your brand, including search landscape and competitor analysis, backlink research. This helps us further contextualise users’ experiences.
5. Strategy delivery workshop
We pull all our research together to create a strategic roadmap with recommended key tasks to help you deliver it. Depending on the scope of the project, this can include suggested designs and prototypes of new content. We use a workshop format to prioritise tasks with you, creating a realistic task roadmap to deliver against.
Then, it’s all about…
Putting your strategy into action
Setting out your strategy is just the beginning. We can help you implement recommendations with flexible ongoing support that lets you lean on us as much as you need across the content cycle. Ways we support our clients across the cycle after delivering a strategy include:
Planning and setup
- Creating a CRO strategy and roadmap to test your changes
- Supplying detailed content briefs for your internal teams or partners to create new content that meets identified user intents
- Providing training for in-house teams and partners across several disciplines, helping them upskill to execute your strategy
- Working with your team to organise and plan content production, aligning your internal teams around a single source of truth
Execution
- Creating content in coordination with internal teams or other partners, expediting content production and ensuring content is aligned to your strategy
- Helping ensure your content is optimised for user experience and for search
Reporting, analysis and insight
- Reviewing data in Google Analytics and Google Search Console
- Analytics on an ongoing basis to spot trends, weaknesses, and opportunities
- Reviewing new changes to ensure they don’t jeopardise user experience or organic search performance
- Forecasting the impact of specific actions, giving you a benchmark to measure against
Refinement
- Ongoing conversion services, including user testing and split testing, to inform content development and iterative changes
- Data-led content reviews to create recommendations to further improve and optimise content