Content Trends

Content Marketing, SEO and Digital Marketing

How to Plan Your Entire Website with a Content Map

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How do you create strong, meaningful, powerful content that sells, converts and engages your customers? The secret lies in creating a fool-proof content strategy that works for each and every website right from a small business to a large corporate site. In creating a content strategy for your website, essential tasks such as keyword research, content gap analysis, site maps and content audits take a back-seat to the creation of a content map, a simple diagram that places key pieces of info at your finger tips.

A content map is an invaluable tool that assists content strategists and it’s elements are the building blocks for your entire website right from content to design to development and marketing.

I like to use the content map that Joe Pulizzi and Kristina Halvorson used on slide 42 of their slideshare presentation – Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI

Here is a quick look at that slide:

Content Map diagram from Joe Pulizzi and Kristina Halvorson’s SlideShare presentation

I like to approach this map in this order:

  1. Business objectives
  2. User goals
  3. Our main offerings
  4. Website Priorities

Once you answer these simple questions such as your business objectives, user goals and your main offerings you can easily set website priorities.

#1. Business Objectives

What is the purpose of having the website? Is it to convert as many prospects to customers or are you looking to strengthen your reputation and become a thought leader in your industry? Are you looking to differentiate your brand? In many cases, it can be a combination of all three.

What is the key overall messaging that you would like to convey? In the interest of clarity, what are you trying to say and achieve? Your web strategy will differ based on the actual goals of the site:

For example if our goal is only to sell a product or service we will gear our content towards that objective. If on the other hand, the main purpose of our content is to establish ourselves as a thought leader in our industry, then our content requirements will be different.

#2. User Goals

We need to clearly define our users before we can come up with their goals and I like to divide this step into two:

  1. Persona development: Who are the users? When we clearly define our personas we can come up with their goals in visiting us once we answer these questions:
    • What are my persona’s pain points?
    • How will my product solve these pain points?
    • How will my product address the needs of my personas?

    Persona development allows us to:

    • quickly craft messaging that speaks directly to our prospects.
    • invest advertising dollars in the the best channels for engaging with our prospects and customers.
    • tap into the language that best resonates with our audience.
  2. User Goals: What are the goals of these users? Content on the web is highly task driven and knowing why they come to our website enables us to craft the type of content that will engage our users and keep them coming back again and again.

#3. Key Offerings

What is our USP (unique selling proposition)? What is it that sets us apart from other businesses like us? What is it that makes us beyond compare?

In order to write landing pages that convert every time, we need to answer this key question: Given a choice of potentially thousands of competitors on the internet why would the customer want to buy from us? What are we offering that the others are not? How is our product different from the thousands of other products in the market like ours?

#4. Website Priorities

This last step is the easiest as it involves putting together all the information from the previous three steps.

If I was a baker and I want to sell my baked goods as well as share recipes, I would need to create two personas (not necessarily separate) of bakers and buyers. My users’ goals would be to get good recipes as well as to buy baked goodies. My website priorities would be to convince and convert prospects to buy my baked wares and to share my recipes with other bakers.

Let’s say that I was creating content for a women’s wing of a hospital. Their main objectives are to educate and inform their audience about early detection for certain conditions and also to promote the various options for these conditions in their hospital. The user goals would be to find out more info, to study and research their conditions as well as to understand the various options. The website priorities in this case would be to educate and promote options for the various conditions.

Once you create this type of a content map, content creation becomes a snap and all the web disciplines can borrow from this map to create a site that has the user in mind right from it’s very inception.

This process has saved me a ton of time. What strategies do you use to plan your content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Style Guide – An Essential Tool in Your Content Strategy

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I was pleased and amazed at how passionate the web content community is on the topic of style guides. I shared my article on style guides, with one of my LinkedIn groups a few months ago. That post generated a lively discussion and some of the comments were the size of blog posts. Here is a screenshot:

Let’s revisit the purpose of style guides and determine how relevant they are today. Content marketing has changed in a big way in the last few years. Everything is geared to the customer’s tastes and an informal tone and voice to online communications is the norm. However, informal can easily meander towards being downright sloppy. Let’s discuss how we can draw the line, maintain an informal tone and voice but at the same time appear consistent across all our communication channels.

What is a Style Guide?

Your style guide’s primary function is to serve as a guide for anyone with web writing and editing responsibilities. If you are a single business owner running a blog, then a style guide could also help you set the tone for your site. At the macro level:

  • Your style guide could include the writing style you will use to set the overall tone of your site.
  • You could include a brief description of keywords that you are optimizing your site for and
  • It could also include a quick overview of your content driven seo strategies.

At the micro level, as a content writer or blogger, creating an editorial style guide will take the guess work out of the small editorial decisions you need to make everyday, such as:

  • How will you treat every day web terms: website, web-site or web site? Email or e-mail?
  • How will you handle headlines? Will you capitalize every word or only the first word?
  • How will you treat acronyms and abbreviations? What about industry-specific terms?

You could make your style guide, a small, basic 10 page document that’s easy to remember or an entire manifesto, with detailed instructions. In today’s day and age of quick thinking and deadlines, it’s not a good idea to make a style guide too restrictive.

Most corporate style guides include:

  • Official Reference Guides – CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), AP Stylebook (Associated Press) or any other reference guide
  • Grammar conventions
  • Syntax
  • Punctuation
  • Capitalization
  • Treatment of industry specific terms
  • Copyright issues
  • Treatment of numbers and numerals:
    • Dates
    • Numbers
    • Measurements
    • Currency
    • Format for phone numbers

    Main Objections to Style Guides

    Going back to my LinkedIn thread, the main discussion revolved around whether style guides were relevant anymore in this day and age of instant updates. Some content strategists and professionals had the following objections to style guides:

    • Style guides encourage a corporate monotone.
    • Style guides don’t produce uniformity in style, diction, or terminology usage, for the very obvious reason that they are far too big to hold in your head.
    • Social media has changed the way we communicate. Today’s communication world is about exchange, dialogue and interaction. It’s no longer a tightly controlled mechanism with a handful of experts at the reins.To be “real” and get as many people within a company engaged and interested in communicating they have to feel comfortable to do so. Fear that the language police will come down on their heads for hyphenating e-mail is not going to help.

    4 Reasons Why I Think that Style Guides are an Essential Tool in any Content Strategy

    In my experience, style guides are still relevant to our content marketing efforts today and here are some of the reasons why I think that they are an important tool in any content strategy:

    1. They help create a consistency in style

      A lot of the formality of yesterday has gone from our presentations but the number one reason for having a style guide for me is the consistency in style through the entire site.The most important objective for all web disciplines from design to architecture to content strategy is to create an awesome user experience. If you maintain consistency across all these disciplines, your site will automatically be user friendly. Even though blogs lend themselves to an informal style of writing, your blog will look more polished and professional with a basic style guide.

      Yes, communication has changed. Yes, it’s great to have employees interacting directly with customers and providing a human face to the company. But I don’t believe that these things and a style guide are mutually exclusive. Individual emails and communications sent out by employees don’t need to adhere to a style guide.

    2. Style Guides enhance the quality and professionalism of your site

      The fact is that if you don’t have a style guide, you don’t have rules. In a corporate environment, we may end up borrowing content from colleagues, or editing topics previously written by someone else. If the writers don’t follow the same rules, it can look sloppy and unprofessional.

      How would you view a company whose “official” marketing collateral, emails, press releases, websites, were inconsistent? Sometimes they used one term, and sometimes another? They used e-mail in one part of the data sheet and email in another? One transactional email used one voice, and another used a different one? For me, personally, that company would definitely lose a little credibility; I would question how much they care about quality and consistency in general.

    3. Style Guides save writers time, effort and research

      I’ve worked in several environments where having a basic style guide to refer to, has saved me time, effort and research. The style guide has spelled out for me the tone and voice of the site as well as basic rules of the style used that have helped me immensely to produce content in the voice of the client.

      Content authoring in many companies, is often outsourced, so a ‘style guide” – which is really a repository of agreed-upon style, grammar, spelling, and terminology usage – will help promote the one concept/one image/one brand idea which is essential to content marketing.

    4. Style Guides do not need to create a corporate monotone

      While I agree that in some cases style guides may dictate a corporate monotone, a style guide does not have to do that. I’ve worked in environments where the style guide was a 240-page master work, and in others where the style guide was a 10-page leaflet. You can decide what goes in the style guide, and what doesn’t.

      Many style guides don’t work. The problem stems from whether or not the users of the style guide (the writers) actually know what’s in the style guide, and whether the rules are usable in a regular, practical, day-to-day manner. If you find that your style guide is not usable, you should start anew with a basic, streamlined set of rules that that are easy to remember and incorporate and are not burdensome to writers with each and every grammatical rule.

    The bottom line is that style guides are not what they were 100 years ago or even a decade ago. Having a simple, basic, style guide today could make your content stand out, rise above the noise, look professional and above all be outstanding.

    Do you agree? Do you think style guides are an essential tool in your content marketing efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.