Daniel Eizans: Content Strategist, Geek

Sometimes, first dates can leave us with mixed feelings. We take special care to make sure no hair is out of place, that we smell nice and do our best to make sure everything goes according to plan. First dates can be an expensive, exhausting and – depending on your skills – either be a very rewarding or entirely dissapointing experience.

Practicing content strategy for the first time is very much like a first date. It requires careful planning, a lot of get-to-know-you-type conversations and, ultimately, will probably cost you a little more money than you expected it to. If all goes well, that strategy will pay off and bring many years of happy returns, but like any new relationship, content strategy takes time, examination and refinement.

It’s here that many strategies, and relationships for that matter, fall down. If we don’t account for reflection and refinement, we can’t determine how successful we could really be.

Good content strategists start with an audit and inventory of all the content you currently have. This process can be done specific to your online properties, if you’re looking only at the Web/Mobile/Location mediums or acrosss your entire organization at the enterprise level. From that initial audit and inventory, gaps should have been identified and opportunities to refine existing content to fit existing or new audiences (personas) would have been properly communicated to the you, the client.

Executing the production of new content according to our strategy would be the next step. If they’ve done their job, your content strategist will have synched up with your analytics team and determined some success metrics for our content. And with metrics, content that’s on strategy and a usable site in place, everything should go swimmingly right? In theory, absolutely. Here’s how you go about testing to find out if that’s really the case.

So, here’s how you start setting up for the review of those success metrics to determine how to further test and refine your process and existing content.

1. Test to find out if your content is easily consumed

You spend time testing your Web site’s usability, shouldn’t your content get equal treatment? Some kind of test needs to be put into place to test the viability of your content. It’s not as simple as increasing clickthroughs or user time spent on your site, though that will provide an initial baseline as if it’s even being found.

Start with basic questions. Is the content readable? Is it too long (this applies to video or text) Do your users understand it? Could re-wording things be the key to creating influence? Is your message solving your user needs or potential problems? These are all questions we can start to answer with A/B Testing, or simple focus groups. You can be as scientific (think A/B testing, Eye Tracking or utilizing fMRI) or as basic as you want (Usability Testing, User Interviews) to be when it comes to testing for whether or not your content can be easily consumed. The name of the game here is not to launch and leave it, assuming that our strategy is the right one.

2. Take Personal and Situational Behaviors Into Consideration While Testing

Are your personas working hard enough for your content strategy? Did the content strategist account for personal behaviors when developing a content plan? What situations were generated as potential scenarios that require content? If context were acconted for in the up front planning, we’d have already accounted for factors beyond basic socio-economic and media consumption habits and looked at our content as a task or fuciton that helps address a need to a specific user situation. If we haven’t, that should be accounted for in testing for refinement as context will always make our content more useful, meaningful and relevant to users.

Test, refine and test again
This process is never over. You have to keep at it. As content strategists, we owe users increased levels of context and usability. Our job is to not only get them to our Web sites, but to make their lives easier, answer their questions before they have them and leave them feeling satisfied with the overall experiences on our sites. Content is the vehicle to that satisfaction, so we need to keep testing it. Just like that relationship… we’ve gotta keep on keepin’ at it.

Photo used under creative commons license. Photographer: Stuart Bell

For the first time in my professional career, I took a pretty big leap. I told a room full of very, very smart user experience professionals at Internet User Experience 2010 that I believe content strategists are not doing enough to adequately prepare for the next big thing. I also mentioned that I believe that Context, not content, is the real king when it comes to the web.

I’m happy to report that my thoughts and early stab at setting up the foundation for Context Strategy were both well received (see slides below).

Still, I’d like to reiterate that this process still needs refining and that we need to start finding better ways to account for personal behaviors (personal behavioral context) and personal situations (personal situational context) in order to take content strategy to the next level. When we combine personal behavioral and personal situational contexts we have the basis for what we’d potentially need to create a contextual based content strategy.

My next steps are to start exploring fields for content audits and persona development to begin accounting for context, while researching tools (including Eye Tracking, Functional MRI and biometric data) that can be synthesized on a project by project basis. Like I say in my presentation, I really need help formulating this discussion to get to a place where we can all start creating more meaningful content for users on the Web.

Comments on my presentation or the idea of Contextual Content Strategy in general are more than welcome. Let’s hash this thing out people!

I have a love/hate relationship with A/B Split Testing, especially when it comes to Web copy. Love that A/B testing can deliver significantly improved response, but hate that many brands may base all future copy decisions on a single test that delivered or over delivered on expectations.

Relying on a singular result, creates missed opportunity to refocus or edit content for other circumstances, site users, time periods or changing business factors. This is why it is crucial to have a sound content strategy to help determine variables, governance and success metrics for copy based on the user personas that were developed for your Web site.

If we can agree that content is your Web site’s greatest asset, the user persona should be the guidepost you’re using to increase its value any time we change messaging, and we can validate this premise through A/B copy testing.

And only through repeated and frequent testing will we be able to make changes that help us:

What factors should be considered in A/B Split Copy Testing?

1. Start with a metric in mind.
What are you trying to accomplish with the test? Are you after more subscribers, conversion rate increase, or a greater return on investment? Just like wanting to know what we want our users to do helps us define content strategy, goals for testing will determine parameters, which in turn will determine the potential success of our efforts.

2. Establish a control copy page/persona
Think back to your elementary school science class friends. Establishing a control persona will help us to establish the copy that we will test all varitions against, always keeping step one in mind as we develop considerations for variables.

If you are just getting started with A/B testing, your control page will be your current copy that is underperforming before any variation is served. When new copy outperforms the existing control copy, consider it your new benchmark (control persona) in any subsequent testing.

3. Determine a reasonable interval for the test
Determine how you’ll gather the data and for how long you need to gather it. This time period will vary from site to site, but should allow for the gathering sufficient data to gauge real insight about your A/B tests. If your site has a lower number of daily unique visitors, the test may run significantly longer to determine a clear copy winner.

4. Significantly vary your copy
Go big or go home. Slight word changes won’t necessarily give us enough of a true variable. Be radical with copy changes. If we’re spending the time and money to test differences, be sure they’re clear enough to users to determine if the change should really be made. If two to three radical variations can be tested against the control, make it happen!

5. Test, refine and test again
Test the alternate copy against the control (there are lots of different software suites and services that you can use to do A/B testing or you can do it yourself through something as simple as CGI Scripting). Ideally, each copy/persona will be tested against every other variation, but if you don’t have the funds or it becomes impractical to run multiple tests, test two pages at a time and keep the best as your control for subsequent tests as mentioned above.

In a perfect world, our brands, bloggers and friends have the time and the resources to follow a process like this and perform true split testing, but even if we have neither we can still create sequential A/B testing through throwing up one version of our site with one version of copy for a given period and then test alternative versions for the same time period after gathering data. Results may not be as reliable as true A/B split testing, but we can still gather incredibly valuable information from the exercise.

In Conclusion
Copy testing will help us maximize conversion rates, solve site problems, and challenge our assumptions. If you’ve got a fussy client, who continually wants to beat his chest about a product claim, good A/B testing might just show that all the user really cares about is what color it may be or the fact that it fits into their back pocket. And if we can start showing wins on this level, we can open the door for HUGE opportunities when we get beyond testing small changes.

Once initial factors and bugs in content are worked out, we can do bigger things, like designing and writing radically different versions of our pages, for brand new personas, where almost everything is different. And when we can test dramatic changes for new audiences, we’re most likely to achieve breakthrough improvements in conversion rates and potentially that all-important ROI.

Pssst … Hey you. Yeah, you with your marketer hat on. Is your Web content becoming more and more important to your client? Is your client upping her spend on content creation for the Web?

If the answer is yes, and your Web content strategy hasn’t started influencing (if not shaping) your enterprise content strategy, you could be in for a rude awakening.

For good reason, content strategy and user experience design have a nice long process in place to assist in content and site creation. Through persona development, messaging mix and the creation of a content governance plan, we should be able to create content that can be delivered as scattershot as we’d like or as precisely as the bullet from the Army’s best snipers. We already know a lot of folks don’t follow these processes when they develop new content for the web, but if you do, what’s stopping you from flipping the process on its head and applying it to your enterprise work?

Here are just four (and there are a lot more) reasons why you should allow a well-established Web content strategy to start influencing the enterprise stuff:

1.Good Content Strategy starts with personas, which essentially means you know the individual needs, drivers and habits of the various potential content consumers (customers, etc.)

Who wouldn’t want to start delivering different enterprise materials to their audience based on their habits? It has the potential to prevent creep on project scope, reduce printing costs or highlight deficiencies in your enterprise messaging mix. If we have a better understanding of who the content consumer is, chances are we may even be able to eliminate certain messaging mediums altogether. Does 89-year-old Uncle Morty really need a big glossy photo in the local city magazine for a sale on his bed sore cream? Probably not.

In bed-stricken Uncle Morty’s case, should we really be messaging to his caregivers? What are the best ways to do that in a non-digital way? Personas and a content plan based on those personas help determine exactly what we should be producing.

2. Governance Plans keep messaging fresh and on target.

How many times do you see the exact same asset, or message or mailer from a company on a weekly or monthly basis if you even notice it in the first place? It doesn’t take too long for some messages or assets to get incredibly stale. Governance Plans are in place on the Web to combat this and they can certainly be used for non-digital communication plans. We don’t have to do look any further than our daily stack of mail and the custom publications we receive from brands we’re affiliated with to see whether or not the content we’re being served is still being effective.

Good Governance Plans put expiration dates on content.

3. Adoption Of The Web Approach For Enterprise Solutions Leads To Accelerated Release Of Content To The Market

Marrying your Web content strategy to your enterprise approach allows for content that is rooted from a proven process. Through synthesis of strong consumer, social and product insights that lead to several personas, content creators have shorter creation cycles due to laser focused content goals and reduced maintenance cycles.

Our creators spend far less time repeatedly authoring new content because they reuse existing content wherever possible, supplementing it with modified content where appropriate. (Uncle Morty only needs you to change some sentence structure to speak from a position of authority about bed sore cream as opposed to trying to educate him about its potential benefits).

With a unified process in the driver’s seat, Editors also spend less time reviewing content across channels because they only have to review the content that is new or changed; existing content has already been reviewed and signed off. With more work done on defining needs up front, we can drastically affect the publishing and production cycles by reducing the scope for our content creation teams.

4. Content rooted in strategy is BETTER CONTENT!

This one sort of seems like a no brainer, but it’s worth pointing out. We’re not guessing or doing creative solutions for the sake of doing creative solutions because our reasons for doing print, web, broadcast, mobile apps or any other medium are clearly defined. Content that is clearly modeled for consistent structure; improves things like readability and usability. Most importantly, content is accurate and consistent wherever it appears. Issues of inaccurate content, inconsistent content, or missing content are reduced or eliminated because it all has a reason to be there.

This process is incredibly repeatable and can be applied to a variety of organizational situations. Think about marketing materials, advertising, internal Web sites, corporate communications or even your news releases. It’s time to stop thinking of the Web content strategy as a separate monster and start thinking of it as the driver for a more unified publishing vision.