An organization’s thought leadership – blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and other informative content demonstrating industry and subject matter expertise – typically spreads across several website categories separate from product and services pages. Culling that thought leadership content for infographics, comparison charts, checklists, and other visually expressive assets, and identifying and tagging insightful snippets, provides an opportunity to enhance the user journey on product and services pages with contextually relevant content.
Imagine each product and service page having a small but conspicuous space where content authors are challenged to place a contextually relevant illustration or video, captioned for perspective, or a call-out snippet that grabs attention and moves a user to scroll or link for more content. If creative and relevant, the additional content will further engage site visitors and inspire their confidence that you are providing information and solutions to guide their research and decision-making.
In a previous post, “Organize the Organization for Thought Leadership,” I summarized four steps for shaping a site-wide content strategy to maximize thought leadership content. The four steps span content assessment, content guidelines, CMS optimization, and content governance and prepare an organization to multipurpose its thought leadership assets. For starters, it is quite likely that your organization already has plenty of assets to draw from for contextually relevant content to insert at points or pages in the user journey. You can begin there to evolve a content-authoring process where each piece of content is structured for multiple uses.
Strategic thought leadership for page-level, contextually relevant content is encompassed within four interrelated activities:

Content Modeling

A content model describes formats for the types of contextually relevant, structured content, so that components can be developed and applied to a page layout. The content model can apply to existing or new pages, including pages dynamically assembled based on the user’s profile and behaviors. Ideally, the content model should have few and repeatable components for ease of use and management.

Multipurpose Content Authoring

Consider the purpose of each new piece of content, where it will reside on the site, and what information it provides that is especially valuable to support a product or service. Develop a modular approach in which key snippets can be repurposed with engaging headlines or annotations that brief the user and that may entice them to scroll or link to the larger article.

Taxonomy and Tagging

Tag and index modules of content for easy association with a product or service for any webpage. Snippets can be delivered to the page to reside in the component defined in the content model.

Content Delivery

Your CMS or an API is crucial for turning strategy into action, using the taxonomy and tagging to deliver contextually relevant content into the component defined by the content model and onto the page where the user will find it and be delighted with the depth of relevant information your organization provides.
Once you begin delivering page-level, contextually relevant content, analytics will indicate the types of assets and presentations you employ that users find most appealing. That valuable data will help you determine the content best suited for your product and services pages. In turn, you will gain insights about assets that might make your whitepapers, blog posts, and other thought leadership content more engaging and better servicing your users.

Leveraging your brand’s subject matter expertise is like herding cats if your organization lacks a cohesive web content strategy. Web pages, blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, guides, interviews, webinars, or other informative and solution-oriented content spreads across several categories and formats, often residing in multiple repositories.
Scattered content complicates your ability to deliver useful information and solutions to your audience based on their interests and challenges. In addition, your organization might be missing opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership, including detailed product and services information, reports on successes, and best practices, and insights on industry trends. As a Marketing Insiders Group article reminds us, “Thought Leadership can come from any source—executives, customers, product managers, designers, customer service reps, sales people,” which can mean lots of cats to round up.
Admitting you have a problem begins a road to improvement: “Only 12% of respondents feel successful in their current efforts to strategically manage content,” reported The Content Marketing Institute in their 2018 Content Management & Strategy Survey. A holistic approach to reviewing and renewing your content strategy can begin with a few high-level activities that involve collaboration across the enterprise. That kind of collaboration has the desired effect of helping socialize and then reinforce content guidelines and governance necessary for a cohesive content strategy.

Purposeful Content

Reviewing and revising content guidelines will better position your organization for delivering the right content at the right time and promoting thought leadership. A page-level audit with analytics is a strong starting point for assessing current content. You can begin identifying a critical mass of current content that performs well and continues to be purposeful.
The assessment is an opportunity as well to review content guidelines for format and structure. Guides for web writing have long advised articles and posts comprised of small sections of text spaced with informative headlines and enlivened with images. That modular approach offers an opportunity for content managers to identify key content snippets that can be delivered at critical points of need in the user journey. Your review of current content will also help shape a cohesive strategy for content creation moving forward.

Your content management system is crucial for turning strategy into action. Newly established guidelines should focus on optimizing your CMS capabilities, taxonomy, and strategies for indexing and tagging. Additionally, content guidelines that promote modularity can ensure portions of content are tagged for multipurpose use.
Your content strategy will remain incomplete and vulnerable without a plan for enforcing and evolving content guidelines, policies, tone, and SEO. Without governance and plans for enforcing it, your organization risks falling back into the same processes and habits that led to disorganization. Knowledge sharing by executives, customers, product managers, designers, customer service reps, sales people, and others adds up to lots of cats to round up.

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist…I am a person who does those things.” —Edward Gorey

Being greeted with your name and recommendations for products and services is common for return website visits, but personalization is evolving rapidly. And rightly so: “More than three-quarters of consumers see personally relevant content as the key to engaging more deeply with a brand and considering the products and services they provide,” concluded a report sponsored by Marketing Insider Group and Onespot.

Developing superior consumer website experiences involves engaging users more directly. An example of enhancing personalization is already happening in retail, as shown in 2018 survey results from Forrester.

Source

“Individualization” has emerged as the term describing the effort to develop more uniquely engaging website experiences specific for each person. Individualization differs from segmentation, where personas are developed to represent different pools of users in order to deliver targeted content to defined groups of customers. Segmentation is valuable for identifying an individual as this or that type of consumer, but it stops short of recognizing, as Edward Gorey declared, “I am a person before I am anything else.”

Authentic, tailored content adds value to a consumer shopper’s journey, as noted in an eMarketer Customer Experience Roundup, reflecting that individualization is value-oriented. Expanding on personalization with the goal of encouraging users to engage more deeply with your brand, products, and services provides website owners an excellent opportunity to recast their content strategy. If personalization is indeed now more about content and context, content strategy should span from data collection through content delivery to ensure relevant content is present precisely at points of need and interest in the user journey. Your content management system (CMS) will play a crucial role in identifying the right content for the user.

Know Thy User

Of course, data collection is vital for identifying user characteristics, but it is increasingly being enriched by user participation. Engage users to develop their personal profiles. Among other benefits to brand identification, involving the person helps mitigate the creepiness factor concerning what you know about them only through data collection.

Continuing advances in the use of artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces, and chatbots present opportunities for engaging and individualizing your customers. As data collection spurs further development, analytics can simultaneously help you measure and evaluate content effectiveness and performance. Personalization leads to a greater desire to know how content is actually working.

Prepare to Deliver

Individualization brings into strategic focus the context in which to introduce relevant content, and your content management system is crucial for delivering the right content at the right time. Consider your legacy content—product and services information, marketing copy and press releases, blog posts, articles, white papers, and other content. Personalization offers the chance for multiple uses of that content.

Drawing users’ attention to pertinent legacy content at the right time, in context, enhances the user experience. Take all those blog posts, for example. If posts are intelligently tagged, relevant blog content can be made accessible and available when the user is showing interest in a topic featured in a post. Your CMS should drive the goal of creating a piece of content once, but having it available from multiple access points, places in the user journey where context drives content.

As personalization evolves, the stakes are high and beyond what you might normally use as benchmarks for content and user experience. Customer experience expands beyond your immediate competitors to best web practices. “No brand is safe from the awesome power of a superior customer experience,” observed Mike Sands in Forbes: “Consumers — particularly young ones — have shown that they will rapidly shift loyalties to brands delivering an overall experience that is more personalized and easier to use, both online and offline.”

We know the tipping point has passed: more web traffic comes from mobile devices than desktop. Still, your web content strategy, if it has embraced the “Mobile-First!” mantra, is probably in an early stage of transformation, most likely reflected in UX, design, and technology solutions to optimize how your content displays on mobile devices. Of course, the purpose of your mobile-friendly content—to convey information in words and images—needs to be considered and optimized as well.

 
Chances are, your site has amassed a substantial collection of legacy web pages authored under editorial best practices. A mobile-first strategy evolves best practices to include what we might call “Content Authoring Optimization,” an approach that aligns content strategy with UX, design, and technology optimization solutions.
Regardless of your state of digital transformation, using a mobile-first approach can help you review legacy content and ensure it aligns with the authoring optimization you are applying to new content. Also, a webpage-by-webpage review with analytics at hand provides you with a formal opportunity for assessing clarity, improving SEO, ensuring content supports business goals, and weeding out content that is no longer relevant.

Do We Really Need All This Stuff?

If content migration is in your future, you will especially benefit by evaluating the effectiveness and value of your legacy content.  A content audit with analytics is essential for guiding your decision-making and for tracking migration on a per-page basis.
But even if migration isn’t looming, an audit is a valuable tool for assessing your content from a mobile-first approach. Think of approaching your legacy content, then, as you do when preparing to move to a new home or a new workspace. All that stuff in the attic, basement, and garage, or in, on, and under your desk… Do you really need all of it?

The Mobility Now! Approach to Web Content

All that content seemed important once upon a time. That was then, when “more web content” was a strategy and the bandwidth for it expanded to the clouds. Recent content strategy trends, however, emphasize purposeful, targeted content “focusing on quality and actual value, as opposed to quantity or output,” as summarized in a Marketing Insiders Group outlook for 2018. Another view to consider in your evaluation is expressed in the Gartner post, “Think Mobility, Not Mobile,” where “Mobility” represents content optimized in its messaging and display for access from any source.
Those representative articles on content strategy trends are helpful for your evaluation of legacy content (keep what is valuable) and new content (create new content once for access on any sized screen). So, armed with analytics (measured value) and best practices (Content Authoring Optimization), it’s time to evaluate your legacy content.

The Four Rs for Evaluating Legacy Web Content

We recommend the “Four Rs” approach—Renew, Refresh, Repurpose, or Remove—for assessing and taking action on each webpage with legacy content.

Renew

The page is good as is. For this review outcome, think in terms of managing your personal subscriptions and making a formal decision to renew rather than having a subscription automatically renew through your complacency.

Refresh

The information is valuable, but the content is dated, requires scrolling on mobile devices without engaging headers to break up walls of text, and there are opportunities for improving SEO. If the content is worth keeping, it is worth refreshing.

Repurpose

You will find content that overlaps with the same topic on another page, one or two lines of text occupying a full page but associated with a larger topic, or lengthy passages without helpful context, including engaging headers. Consolidating content from multiple pages, guided by authoring optimization, is an excellent way to improve content, display, discoverability, and navigation. As a bonus, you will cut the number of web pages a user has to navigate and you will have fewer pages to maintain.

Remove

The page has few recorded views over an extended period. If it serves a current business goal, then it’s time to refresh or repurpose. But, say to yourself, “if we are really moving forward with Content Authoring Optimization and Mobility Now!… Do we really need all this stuff?”
Upgrading your legacy content, including trimming excess, will result in a more holistic and cohesive content strategy that considers all access points and helps you prepare to evolve further as the next big thing comes along.