Mark Hopkins, Client Services Director, ORM 30 June 2015

#DigitisePS

Content with your content?

Why content?

Need or marketing idea > Internal approval >

Brief >IT implementation or agency >

Design/build >Content load >

Test >Deploy

But… What about mobile? What about search?

Who is you audience? What is your data telling you?

Is your content working? Is it frequent enough?

Of value?

We’ve got to get away from this…

No personalisation, bad UX Old-style marketing… no value to me.

Lengthy article templates, not mobileNo hierarchy of content; hard to find valuable content

And get to this…

Content merchandising; consumable Brilliant narrative; instructive; persuasion architecture

Brilliant, UX, content that breathes and is succinct Poor UI, but valuable content distributed well

So what is Content Strategy and why is it important?

Content is…

Email

Web Video

Social

Mobile

Tablet

DM

“The strategic planning and management of content creation for maximum effectiveness.

“It involves elements of UX: designing content that is user friendly and meets user needs”

@contentchampion

It’s now more integralOld digital

Brief Project SOW Design Develop Content

load Testing Deploy

Content Content

New digital

ContentContent

Brief Discovery Content load Testing DeployDevelopProject

SOWDefine Maintain

Content ContentContent

AuditMapping

It is also now a discipline

So why is this relevant to me in my professional services role?

Case study: • In 2013 I worked on a global template for a large Professional Services firm.

• The brief was innovation focused: to push the boundaries of UX and browsing behaviour.

• The result was a set of wireframes and designs that did that…

There were, however, problems: • Content wasn’t part of the planning

• Each member firm had to load and prepare their own content

• The site had multiple breakpoints, which made hyphenation a common problem

• They had under-estimated the state of their content and its lack of preparedness

• In short, they had a site – with no content

The result… • In short, content wasn’t part of the planning… and it cost US$$$

to fix and maintain

• Meanwhile, the current site sat untouched and continued in its place for another 9 months

The key is to make a content the focus of your marketing activity

Digital consumers are losing patience:

• Since 2000, attention has dropped to eight seconds

• 40% leave sites that don’t load in 3 seconds

• 43% of us abandon emails if they take > 30 seconds to read

• 32% tune out if you don’t make the point in 15 seconds

• And, most worryingly, 74% lose interest in presentations if the key point is not made in 60 seconds

Customer expectations are higher than ever before: • They want analysis – so consider time to market

• They want content that engages AND inspires – so think about relevancy

• They want it distributed to them, when they want it – so think about channel and time

• The want it where they frequent and on device they prefer – so consider off-siting

• They want it in a format that makes it digestible, memorable and useful

• Lastly, tone of voice. Pick a consistent narrative that explains you

• Importantly, set your standards and stick to them

Heard about the Marshmallow test?

How do you make your business focus on content?

ZMOT

As this amazing book by Google demonstrates, digital content done well will win the battleground for micro moments in our daily lives

“Don’t make decisions related to content based upon assumptions.

There are no mandates. Best practice may not apply to you.”

@halvorson

Create rules… • If you don’t know your audience, I.D. them

• If you don’t have content you’re proud of – pull it

• If I.T. are driving digital change, make sure they don’t have the keys

• Metrics: if you’re not set up to monitor behaviour – start now

• Place content and data people in your marketing function

• Consult a specialist… content strategies, done well pay for themselves

• Audit

• Personas

• Make story-telling a focus

• Tone of voice

• Take ownership – process

• Create rules for your comms

• Personalisation

• Comms architecture

• Content mapping

• Content calendar

• Contact strategy

• Search

10 differences a content strategist can make

A few last words…

“If the holy grail is a customised and personalised experience at every touch point,

then you are only going to achieve this with the help of a content strategist.”

– Digital marketing magazine

“No one’s going to care about the implementation, it’s the content

we’ll be judged on.”> Marketing Director in this room

“No-one remembers the facts, they only every remember the story”

Thank youMark Hopkins, Client Services Director, ORM

mark.hopkins@ormlondon.com

ormlondon.com@ormlondon

Case study:

• McKinsey’s Insights app.

• It has been downloaded 500k times.

• It serves me content to my preference during my commute times.

• It is served in a consumable format and is extremely well written with takeaways, infographics and video.