How to turn your content into a competitive edge
Content strategy guides the work we do; for Hannah Adcock, it is her work, her speciality, day in and day out.
Hannah is a content consultant and leader that works with startups, fast-moving businesses and agencies – one of which found their Google organic traffic went up by 188% after just a year of working together.
Below, Hannah shares her approach to turning content into a competitive edge.
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The strongest, most compelling brands are fantastic storytellers. They have an authentic narrative that they communicate consistently across all digital and print channels.
However, these storytellers don't arrive at this market-leading position through creativity alone. Storytelling is as much about planning, structure and strategy as it is about creativity.
Take a well known brand like Mini. They do a great job communicating their brand. Their storytelling has flair, imagination and a strong sense of their history.
However, behind the storytelling is a clear, persistent content strategy. Mini are clear about what qualities they want to communicate across all their content. They go something like this:
Premium technology
Classic design
Cheekiness
Environmental awareness (a recent addition, but authentic to their roots)
Mini don't 'just' tell stories. They plan to create classic, cheeky, innovative content.
Align the team with a message architecture
In practice, many organisations find themselves pushing out content from different departments with minimal reference to what each other is doing, resulting in inconsistent messages or branding.
A quick way to immediately create alignment across teams is to agree on a message architecture (like the one Mini uses). With a message architecture, you have a flexible tool to help your organisation decide on what content supports your storytelling – and what doesn't. This alignment will result in a much stronger overall narrative.
One way of doing this, from renowned content strategist Margot Bloomstein, is called card sorting:
First, write down actionable words that may relate to your organisation and industry.
For example: trusted, down-to-earth, practical, custom, innovative, market-driven, technological, friendly, national, local, approachable. You'll want between 50-60 qualities.
Invite about 3-6 colleagues from across your organisation to take part. Include at least one member of senior leadership; if you don't get buy-in now, your efforts may not be supported later.
Second, create your categories. These could be:
Who we are
Who we’re not
Who we want to be
An example of card sorting: who we're not, who we are, and who we'd like to be
Third, start sorting your actionable words into these three categories.
It doesn’t matter so much what the dictionary definition of a word is. This exercise is about working out how you want your organisation to be perceived by users, other team members, partners and donors so don’t get distracted by internal mission statements.
Fourth, get rid of all the cards in the ‘who we’re not’ category.
Work out what qualities from the ‘who we are’ category you want to take into the ‘who we want to be’ category. This might be most of them. Get rid of the qualities you don’t want to take with you.
Fifth, group the qualities in your ‘who we want to be’ category – some might seem fairly similar (for example, professional, experienced, credible, trusted). Decide which quality (or qualities) in a group are the ones that you most want to communicate to your customers. Order the remaining qualities in order of priority.
It's hard to prioritise between many good qualities. It's essential though, if your organisation is to stand out and offer a great user experience across all content.
Discover hidden treasure with a content audit
You've got a prioritised list of qualities to keep your organisation pulling in the same direction. Now is a good time to audit your existing social and web content.
This helps you surface hidden treasure: existing content and stories buried in your social channels and web content that can cheaply be repurposed and reused.
I'll look at auditing social media content below. For information on auditing web content read Planning a content audit that works for you by content strategist Lauren Pope.
How to conduct a content audit for social media
First, inventory your social content to see what you have and how it's performing. List the social channel, the profile URL, who has responsibility for the channel and when it was last updated.
Record high-level engagement metrics or key performance indicators (like number of followers, subscribers or connections).
Use built-in or bought-in analytics to start digging into your engagement metrics:
Which posts have the most likes/comments?
Which have the most engagement/reach?
Which have led to the most web traffic?
Which have led to overall sales/revenue?
Which have led to none of the above?
Keep searching until you've built a statistically significant narrative (so don't just look at 10 posts!).
Group your content to find patterns: for example, what content types perform better?
Second, audit your social content to answer qualitative questions such as:
AUDIENCE: Who are our most engaged users? Are these also our target customers?
CONTENT: Can it be reused? Is it supporting our message architecture? Is it accurate?
Consider investigating:
Purpose (are we aiming for authority, conversions, referrals?)
Audience (which persona or audience group does the content target; do they engage?)
Accuracy (is the content well written and accurate?)
Actionability (is it clear what a user should do, if anything?)
Content messaging (does the content communicate your organisation's messaging goals?)
Third, start pulling together your findings across all your social media channels. What have you learnt? What is your biggest challenge at the moment? Where do you see the best opportunities? What content can be reused?
You could look at:
Which channels are most successful for you? (depending on your main KPIs)
Where is your hidden treasure? (good content that can be reused and expanded)
What content are you missing? (content that should be there but isn't)
Are your most engaged users the people you should be engaging?
Is your content consistent in terms of your messaging?
Is your content generally good quality and accurate?
Create a high level presentation of your findings. Include prioritised recommendations (this isn't easy, but good strategy means you focus your energy on a few pivotal objectives).
Fourth, if you're feeling brave, audit your competitor's social content to discover what works for them (or seems to work: remember that you rarely know the full picture).
Test, measure, iterate
You've just done a solid bit of work. You've learnt a lot. You're ready to implement your recommendations. But how do you know whether they will work?
Test: You might be convinced that a massive cross-channel campaign will work, but why not test it first? Testing is an easy and cheap way to spot whether an action will be successful. Pick one channel or a few pieces of content. Go from there.
If you can, discover how people feel about your new content. Even if you've just 'done' a big user research or market research project, it's important to keep talking to your users.
Let's say you're trying to communicate that you are a reliable authority on a subject: maps for cyclists, for example. Give users some new sample content: a series of LinkedIn posts, a blog post, a video, whatever you want to test. Then ask them which bits make them feel confident, or knowledgeable, or lead to an 'ah ha' moment. Which content fell flat, or was confusing for them?
Their answers will give you valuable extra information.
Measure: Plan for a rolling audit so that you can regularly spot whether your recommendations are leading to the outcomes that you want. Channel-specific analytics are useful, but limited. You need to keep track of your high-level social media performance.
Iterate: Do more of what is measurably working. Go to senior leadership with a proposal for a more ambitious project!
Use content strategy tools to form the backbone to your storytelling, strengthening your reputation and invigorating your brand.
If you're struggling to shape the strategy behind your stories, get in touch.
