In a recent article on the Content Marketing Institute site in posits that you need two types of content strategists - one for the front-end and one for the back-end. I contend that one person should be able to do it all, and if you don't have one person that you have a high risk of missing content or their components and getting bogged down with processes and approvals. The more people you have managing the content the more rigourous your governance and processes need to be.
Here is my take on what a Master Content Strategist does, in comparison with the article's division of front-end/back-end person:
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| Front-end content strategist | Back-end content strategist | Master Content Strategist – My perspective |
| · Who’s our target audience? · Why (for real) are we creating content for those people? · What content do they need most? · How well do we meet those needs today? · How can we meet those needs better tomorrow – while also serving the goals of the business? · How can we better coordinate the efforts of all our content creators? | · How can we organize content so that our authors can easily store and retrieve it, and prepare it for automated selection and delivery in the relevant channels? · How do we structure the content so that modules are consistent and can be easily assembled (mixed and matched) on-demand to meet customer needs? · How do we make sure that we aren’t creating, recreating, and recreating content over and over for each channel? · How do we scale our processes so we can do more with the same resources? · How do we take advantage of the wealth of content we have and surface it for our customers in a way that is fresh and valuable? · How do we future-proof our content to take advantage of the next big thing? | · Develops strategy and objectives based on business objectives · Defines audience per objective (if necessary) · Defines content per sales cycle stage · Continually assesses and evaluates content and its use · Develops processes and workflows to support content development · Develops taxonomies and structures for scalability and accessibility · Understands all channels and appropriate use of content · Repurposes content for various sources · Establishes evergreen content as well as dynamic content · Manages an editorial calendar · Understands writing for the web – inclusive of SEO, tagging and social · Is an editor and a writer |
| Tasks | | |
| · Define customer personas. · Define customer journeys. · Analyze and map customer needs to the business strategy. · Determine what topics to address when, including content marketing offerings, to support the customer at multiple points in the customer journey. · Choose the best content types (text, visuals, video). · Develop SEO guidelines to ensure that people searching online can find the content. · Develop style guidelines (on how to write for the audience). | · Identify how content varies based on customer needs and where each need arises in the customer journey. · Identify how content can be modularized so that it can be automatically reused (mixed and matched) to meet customer needs. · Develop format-free structured content models so that content can be written in a consistent way and automatically published to any channel (mobile, web, print). · Define the structure of the CMS repository so that it supports authoring and content retrieval. · Develop metadata to tag all content modules for dynamic content retrieval. · Develop business rules to identify how content should be assembled automatically upon customer request. · Define structured-writing guidelines (on how to write for each content model). | ·Develops personas ·Maps customer journeys ·Maps the sales cycle, the customer journey and content, including content type and format per customer need and preference ·Develops styleguide for tone and brand per channel and incorporates robust SEO strategy ·Defines structure within technology solutions including CMS so where it is modular it can be incorporated in various ways, with tagging utilized to showcase content in various modular. |
This post first appeared on Website And Communications Best Practices, please read the originial post: here
