Content strategy within agencies (and even for clients) tends to be still very elusive. It’s often either thought of as someone who manages site maps and content audits or someone who does “editorial”.

But in the content world, content strategy can often make or break how a customer understands what to do within a product or service — and whether or not they are successful.

I consider content to play in a few key roles for agencies or clients:

  1. Defines content as it relates to a product or service.
  2. Defines content as it relates to marketing & acquisition (SEO / SEM).
  3. Defines content as it relates to engagement (branded content & editorial) and how this drives awareness, relevancy and retention.

Today I will focus mainly on Number 1 and propose a simple framework to do content strategy for a product.


Here is a basic 1–2–3 approach that hopefully should give you and the teams you work with a way to tackle what content needs to do — and the role it will play in the product.

p.s. — it’s also a great workshop exercise to do with clients.

1. Define the the higher level customer motives and situations: 5 minutes

  • What am I coming here to do (and why)?
  • When and under what circumstance am I doing this?
  • What is the expected outcome of my doing this and what do I expect to happen next?

2. Write objective statements: 2 minutes each objective

The idea is to write an objective statements for each main screen / view using the following for each type of customer / job-to-be-done. If you get stuck on #1, #2 is something you can do to help you.

You do this by filling in the blanks below (obviously you’ll need to know customers and their main JTBD).

We / I want ______ (desire or action) _______________

because ____________ (reason) ___________________

so that __________ (objective / benefit) _____________

It’s very important you do this first as without a clear objective it will be hard to rank or create content hierarchies in Step #3.

3. Determine content hierarchy: 8 minutes

This is about asking yourself “what are the 3 key pieces of content that will enable me (customer) to achieve my objective, in order of priority”?

Each person or team (if you are doing in teams of 2 or 3) should start with 3 key pieces of content and and post those up against the objective. You can even write out a top 10 list and then take the top 3.

1.

2.

3.

(As a pre-exercise: Before you start this you can even take 5 minutes to sketch out the pieces of content you will use)

You can (and should) also take this into testing by doing a hierarchy of needs sort with customers.

Below is an example of a real hierarchy of needs exercise I did with a customer (I sketched these out on pieces of paper and cut them out — took about 10 minutes).

Chaz Mee

Written by

Chaz Mee

Creative Strategist. Product guy. Swiss Army Knife. Dot Connector. Creative Problem Solver. http://chazmee.com

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