Content Planning
What’s for Dinner?
The shopping list:
Imagine with me – you are going to host a dinner for family and friends. You know you want to serve a protein, a green and a starch. That ‘menu’ at its most basic is your project brief for dinner. The menu is the foundation for a successful and enjoyable meal. If the menu is full of great ideas, then you’re starting off well. And vise-versa…
This menu defines the main dish of the meal, a quality cut of protein. The sides support and elevate the main – and provide a balanced meal. Whether you’re going to serve something familiar, or something more elaborate you need the ingredients. The ingredients are your content, they make up the meal and are prepared by you with skill and care. If this meal is your project, then the ingredients are your content.
“Content” is much more a social media buzzword. Content is where your reader/viewer receives value from your project. It is the objective information that you are presenting for their consumption. Without good content, the meal/project is going to be pretty light.
So, eager to start preparing this meal you drive straight to the market to buy the protein and then back home. Then another trip to the store for greens and a starch. Then another trip for the wine. And another trip for the herbs. Oh, and another trip for butter – unsalted this time. Oh, and more wine. Oh, and another trip for the garnish. And a ‘final_final’ trip for some fancy finishing oil you just saw on social media.
Sound familiar? It sounds like many projects that kick off with enthusiasm but without a solid brief and then the subsequent trips back to the market to pick up missing ingredients.
So instead of rushing to the market, let’s make a shopping list for your meal. This is your content plan. Write this list, check it twice, kick out the naughty and keep the nice. If this is a new recipe to you, think it through again and rewrite it. Ask a colleague to give it a look and poke holes in it, it’s much better to find out something is missing from the list now than once you’ve started. Once you have this list refined, it’s time to shop, so head to the market and perhaps one stop at a specialty butcher along the way if this meal is something extra special.
Ok, I’ll drop the shopping/meal/menu metaphor, it served its purpose (I hope.) But let’s talk more about this list. Depending on the complexity of your project the content list may include a wide range of assets and information, if so organize your list into relevant sections like copy, artwork, images, etc. But before then, lets visit how design may inform your content needs. Now, tf you’re building a one-off project, or something that is more visually oriented, having a complex list would be overkill, so keep it simple and scaled appropriately.
Content or Design – Chicken or Egg?
Content or design? Which do you start with? Well, that depends – don’t you love that answer? Its kind of a chicken or egg idea. The design of a project/page can help shape the nature of the content. This should be based on the project brief. That brief should include enough information about the intended audience and the project’s goal to inform the design of the project. Then the content is used for best effect towards the goal defined by the brief.
Sidebar: My thoughts on this are based on creating, producing and managing content within one company over the course of many years and through a continually evolving and expanding product line – from less than 20 styles to over 500 (per season.) Frequently with limited resources and time. So, I’m writing this as if to myself ten or more years ago. If only we had time machines and mind reading devices…
A “Good” list
Gathering all of our content up front grants us a few advantages, especially in larger projects. The product brief should include enough information about the intended audience and project goal to inform our definition of what “good” may be. Building this list ahead of the creative work gives us the opportunity to gather/generate quality content that addresses these three criteria in the following order:
1. Completeness
2. Consistency
3. Accuracy and Tone
Completeness – this is two-fold. First, is your list complete, and secondly, do you have content for each item in place. Looking about this from a catalog/ecom point of view this could be confirming your product listing/categories are complete/inclusive and then ensuring to make sure that your product descriptions, features & benefits, size & color variants, etc. are complete.
Consistency – this is the best opportunity to assemble your content in a consistent format. For example, do your product descriptions follow a consistent format? This is an opportunity for the content to inform the design/layout of the project. What’s important to the viewer? If you have multiple types of product, they may benefit by having their own standard, but be sure that standard is executable for your project. For example, having long descriptions and detailed lists may be great for an ecom page that has an infinite length, but if you’re building for a digital or print book, you’ll need to be ready to edit. If you know you’ll be doing both long and short form, now is your chance to build that content and establish those standards.
Accuracy and Tone – Accuracy is relatively easy to define and SHOULD be measured against the project’s purpose. Is the information portrayed factual? Are the claims stated accurate – like would your companies Chief Legal Officer approve what you’re saying. Now the grey areas can come from being too specific. Yes, Miss Product Manager, it is actually 6.43-oz. weight fabric, understood. We’re going to say its 6.5-oz. fabric for brevity and clarity. Are the pricing and availability details accurate as of your proofing time? Great, but don’t forget that disclaimer someplace in the fine print if needed.
Tone is much more challenging and caries the burden of being very subjective and can be time-intense ($$$) to develop. It’s also an area where people are eager to critique. If their critiques are helpful and clear, that’s great. Better yet if they offer up some ideas or recommendations. Unfortunately, it is a rare treat when someone offers useful and constructive feedback with examples. Instead, “That sounds weird.” may be all that you get. This is when having a champion amongst your decision makers and leadership team is a gem. I will fully confess to being bitten by this bug on more than one occasion. Sometimes you need to coach the team/individual providing a vague critique (opinion) to help them give you better feedback. For me, it’s an uphill battle and those soft skills are always in a state of development.
Recap
I’ve bucketed a lot of ideas (and randoms) into this shopping list idea, and each type of content will have its own criteria for completeness, consistency and accuracy/tone. For example, if you have more than one type of product category, each may need its own standard for copy, images, etc. A complex piece of outerwear will have far more information to communicate than a pair of socks and your shopping list needs to be ready to handle variety.
Showing good examples and having a written standards/guideline package will pay off dividends in producing quality content. Having those standards also go a long ways within a creative and marketing team to establish clear expectations. Make them, share them and stick to them as best as the situation allows. Not having those standards will cause confusion and cost the team/business time and dollars.
The time spent qualifying and validating your content now is an investment that will pay off in the future of this project and each time this content is used in future projects across sales and marketing channels and possibly across audiences.
For all of us above, there’s not a better time to review content than when it is in this raw state and not attached (emotionally or otherwise) into a design.
And I’m out of words. I’m not a writer but here I am writing.