Pre-production stage

The pre-production stage is all about understanding existing content, gathering requirements, planning what content to create, and building an ecosystem to best support that content. The three stages of the pre-production phase include:

- Research

- Editorial strategy

- Back-end management

 Research involves a content audit and a needs audit.

Content audit is an analysis of the content that already exists. In other words, taking stock of what you have. The analysis can be quantitative (literally an inventory of what exists, in what form, where it exists, and who owns it), or it can be made richer with a qualitative analysis, which determines whether what exists is any good, whether it is up-to-date and whether it conforms to user needs, brand values and business goals?

We generally start any exercise or project in content strategy with a content analysis because it prevents doubling efforts later, and more importantly, it highlights any glaring gaps in content. It also allows us to retire the ROT (content that is redundant, obsolete and trivial).

Next comes a Needs audit.

Depending on the size and complexity of the project, a needs audit can include:

User analysis (before you generate any content―or design for that matter―it is absolutely critical to determine who you’re creating it for. To make your content successful, you have to put yourself aside and focus entirely on your user. The idea is to evoke empathy and keep reminding yourself that you are writing or designing to help someone else, not yourself.

You can collect this data through observation, focus groups, interviews, surveys. The data you collect will help you determine who your primary and secondary personas are.

[As a designer, you too will be required to produce a lot of the deliverables of the needs audit in a design context – especially for largescale projects. So, a collaboration at this stage can bring a lot of conceptual clarity to both teams.] 

Gap analysis: the difference between the content you have and the content your audience needs is your gap analysis. It can be done by clearly articulating user/customer journeys and determining what content they need at each stage. It can also be done through site analytics, A/B testing, competitive analysis, etc. Design similarly relies on testing and observation to determine gaps. This is another stage where user testing can be done for both content and design – rather than in silos.

Competitor analysis: takes a deeper look at your website and the websites of your competitors. It looks at the differences in how the competitor describes their products and services, how they write press releases and what their content silos consist of. It also helps you determine how your direct competitors are better or different from you. Why your prospective customers choose you over your competitors? What are the gaps in their content that you could help fill? How can you differentiate yourself? Designers too stand to benefit from a competitor analysis. So, it’s worth asking your content strategy colleagues to share their findings.

Data Analysis: analytics give you insights into pageviews, common search terms, devices and browsers used, and traffic sources. This is key information for designers as well. 

Business Objectives: You cannot create content without having a good idea of your business objectives (You can collect business objectives through stakeholder interviews and meetings). This again is common and critical to both disciplines. Consider being at the table together.

Editorial Strategy

Next, we come to editorial strategy. Consistency of tone, voice, and brand are extremely important for a business to be successful. But with multiple contributors and stakeholders, it can be quite difficult to achieve.

A content strategist helps align these voices by creating guidelines for content or serve as a gatekeeper for all the content created.

So, it is a content strategist’s responsibility to:

Determine the right Voice / Style / and Brand guidelines: User analysis and stakeholder interviews help determine the voice, style and tone that appeal to your users, and align with the brand. Tone, voice and style heavily impact design choices as well.

Voice and tone guidelines can be as simple as outlining the general feel of the language, or as specific as identifying shared vocabulary and branded language. As mentioned in the previous module, it helps greatly for designers to be familiar with the content style guide for consistent voice, tone and branding.

Editorial calendar: An editorial calendar establishes what content will be created, in what format, for what channels, and when it will be published. A digital editorial calendar also tracks how a piece of content will be repurposed for different channels. You need to be mindful of your personas and their needs to come up with relevant topics. You can also draw on your competitor analysis to see what gaps you can fill in.

Workflow: Who will create and maintain content, what processes will be followed? Many editorial calendars also incorporate the production process into the mix, which is a great way to ensure content creation is on track. This can include who’s responsible for individual content elements, the due date of a first draft, who conducts the copyedit, and a date for receiving and proofing the final draft, entering it into the CMS system, and when it will go live, or be published.

Governance: This takes into account how the content will be managed over time? How changes will be initiated and communicated? A Maintenance Plan can be either a calendar or more general scheduling guidelines for removing and/or archiving outdated content, as well as adding new content.

Management involves making decisions on the back-end structure of content: in other words, how content should be best prioritized, organized, and displayed? It entails: Information architecture, content management systems, content migration, analytics, and archives.

So first, Information Architecture: Content strategy borrows and learns from IA in order to prioritize content, create navigable site maps, and ultimately help users find the information they need, in the places they expect to find it. As a designer, even though you may not be required to double up as an information architect, you might be required to work closely with one to determine how the web content will be structured? How the navigation should work? What pages will live where? What content should go where, or on what page? How things ought to link together? What elements need to appear on every page of the website? How to label them? What metadata goes with each element? You may also be required to work closely with IAs to help determine informational hierarchy and how information should be structured for discoverability, and usability. You could also be asked to weigh in on what kind of terminology, or keywords to use for navigation labels. Again, these decisions are best made with both design and content strategy at the table. (We will delve deeper into Information Architecture, and how it relates to design, in modules 4, 5 and 6)

Content Management Systems: Before content strategy became a force to contend with, CMS decisions fell mostly to IT departments. So, a CMS was chosen based on features and price rather than the nature of the content. But since a CMS is a bunch of software tools that help host and post the content, the process of selecting and customizing it needs to be based on the needs of the editorial teams.

Good CMS choices are based on a task analysis of the how editors will interact with the CMS. The best CMS will also depend heavily on their goals, and their team’s abilities. For example, if the team has no expertise in development, they’ll need a CMS that can be managed with little to no additional code. And that’s why content strategists need to be at the table when decisions about CMS are made.

Content Migration: Migration is often needed so an upgraded, and more appropriate CMS can be installed. The need to improve the workflow of content managers can also demand content migration. Content strategists take the lead on deciding how much of the existing content (or back files) you need to bring forward into your new digital environment.

Analytics: Content strategists also need to be familiar with analytics tools that measure how content is performing and direct team efforts on strategies that deliver results. Once they identify pages that are converting well, they get a clearer picture of the content that most interests their audience. They investigate the reasons behind pages with high bounce rates and adjust their content approach to make the content more appropriate and appealing for their target audience. Analytics will also reveal what type of content users are searching for on your website. This information is invaluable in further understanding audience needs, and as designers, it can help you determine what content models and formats perform better for your audience.

Archives: Content strategists are also in charge of retiring and archiving content that’s no longer current. It is their responsibility to ensure your organization’s website stays lean and current. Bloated websites can die under their own weight.