Now we get to Phase 2 of the project lifecycle: Production.

It involves the 3 C’s:

1. Content creation
2. Content optimization 
3. Content delivery

Content creation: This one’s simple. Get right down to it - start writing.

Content optimization: You might have the best writers on your team, and the best research guiding your writing endeavours, but what use is all that stellar content if your audience can’t easily find it? That’s where content optimization comes in.  Content strategists also need to make sure users can find the content easily both internally through navigation and externally through search engines. Structuring a page properly and using the audience's vocabulary (familiar keywords) are the first steps. It involves some back-end planning, and front-end proofing.

SEO: When it comes to SEO, the content strategist in you needs to identify the right keywords to use on the page.

Accessibility: Having accessible content is making sure everyone can get to the information they are looking for. Both content strategists and designers need to make sure assistive technologies work well with your pages, the design isn't confusing, and that the content is written in a way that everyone can understand.

Proofing: Once the content is written and vetted by sources and subject matter experts, the editor needs to go over the text with a fine-tooth comb to make sure there are no typos, grammatical or factual errors. Error-ridden content hurts trust.

And in the end, trust is king. If the trust is lost, no matter how good the subsequent content, people who have been turned off once are unlikely to consider your site/blog/or messaging as a trusted source.  They are unlikely to return. That is why, it helps for designers to be familiar with the style guide, so they too are empowered to call out and fix mistakes in copy.

Content delivery: Once the content is written, vetted and proofed, it’s time to decide the look and feel, encode it for the web, and decide what distribution tools, channels and processes to use. This is another critical stage where designers need to work in sync with content strategists.

And once the content has been created, designed, delivered and distributed, it needs to be promoted, evaluated for its performance and maintained so it remains updated and relevant.

And that will bring us to the post-production phase, of promotion, evaluation and maintenance.