Read time: 7 minutes
Creating good content is like making pancakes.
The first pancake you fry is small and a bit squiffy. It’s not the one you put out on the breakfast table. You eat it standing in the kitchen. It’s not perfect, but it proves that the pan is hot enough.
Over the last few months, our undergraduate marketing team have picked up the sticky batter of our open day content and started making better content. It’s not been perfect, but it’s enough to prove that the content design approach can be applied at the University of Nottingham.
It started with an email from a Senior Person
“Bookings are down. What are you going to do?”
I’m the Head of Marketing. I need to respond. I think the usual reaction would have been to hastily create some more marketing content and push it out. More content, more advertising spend, more bookings, right?
I looked at the web analytics. We were still getting the same number of leads from our advertising. But I spotted our menu navigation was hidden for mobile users. 46% of users were mobile and they weren’t navigating to the travel information. Instead it looked like they were leaving and coming back again via search — a frustrating journey.
The analytics dashboard was showing me something: we didn’t need more content, we needed smarter content.
We gathered data about our users
Better content starts with discovering our users’ needs. Here, it started with three people from my undergraduate team — Michael, Lizzy, Liberty — and myself clustered around a laptop. We asked questions about our users. In this case, our users are our open day visitors: Who are they? What are they looking for? What do they need? What is going on in their heads?
We outlined the sources of insight we could access. And then we dived into a frenzy of activity.
- We set up heatmaps and user polls on the webpage
- We signed up for our competitors’ open days to understand what other communications our users would receive
- We mined our web analytics (and Michael taught himself google analytics in order to do this!)
- We read forum posts
- We dug through previous open day survey responses
- We sifted through all the email enquiries received by the events team to understand what questions they were getting
- We planned how to gather insights on the day about how visitors were using our content
We gathered these various data sources and insights together to shine a light into the dark: what are our users’ needs?
Quick fixes
Through this discovery, the team found some problems they could quickly fix.
From my earlier analysis, we knew that people were looking for travel information — and they couldn’t find it. Our webpage heatmaps showed that people were clicking on the campus postcodes but it didn’t do anything. So the team created a new travel information button, clearly visible to mobile users. And the postcodes became links to Google maps.
Result: Getting travel directions to campus on a mobile was now 2 clicks. Previously it had been 6 clicks, 2 google searches and (probably) a handful of expletives.
This is iterative content design. Making content that is based on insight and designed for our users. Spot an issue, fix it. Repeat.
The initial content changes were simple but meaningful. The most significant change would be the change in our ways of working.
Finding a new way to work together
If you’ve worked in HE marketing I imagine you’re familiar with the challenge of content sign off. You email your artwork PDF to someone. You get your PDF document sent back covered in comments. Then there’s a flurry of emails back and forth for the first round of amends. Then the second, third, and — no please just one more — final round.
This isn’t much fun for marketing. But it certainly isn’t fun for the other teams to check and sign off content in addition to the mountains of other work they have.
Could we find a simpler, easier way to work together? Could we separate ownership of the facts from how they are communicated?
Our events team are a helpful and committed team so I thought they might agree to a new approach. We wanted to share our insights with them and find a new way of working together. So we set up a discovery workshop.
Sharing insights with the events team
Ahead of the discovery workshop, I had given Liberty my copy of Sarah Richard’s Content Design book. She had read it and re-read it, making notes along the way. Now Liberty was about to explain content design to the events team. We were going to do this by the book.
The morning of the workshop came. I was nervous. We all were. Just as we were setting up our slides, the Head of Events, Wenonah, arrived and pulled me over to one side:
“The team are worried about this,” she whispered. “They think you’re going to criticize their work. To take it apart.”
I gulped.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not like that. We’re here to share insights. To make things better.”
The rest of the events team arrived. They sat clustered together on a table at the far side of the room.
I gulped again. I was nervous. But I didn’t need to be.
The workshop kicked off. First Michael and Lizzy shared the data and insights they had gathered. Then Liberty explained how she had turned those insights into a user story and a series of job stories.
These job stories outlined the tasks we knew our open day visitors wanted to complete. For example:
When I have booked onto the open day
I want to find out what activities are happening
So that I can plan my day
As Liberty wrapped up her explanation, I felt my worry lift. The mood in the room had shifted. The team were nodding.
We split into groups and moved to different tables, each group taking a different job story. We outlined how we could create content to meet the user needs and sketched out the content headings. We decided what we could realistically do for September, and what we would have to save for next year.
A new way of working
At the end of the workshop, I asked the events team if they would be happy for us to work in a new way.
“You own the facts. We own how they are communicated,” I suggested. “You are the subject matter experts. We are the content creators. Our decisions are based on insight. What do you think?”
Smiles and nods from around the room.
Wenonah took a felt tip pen and wrote APPROVED and a smiley face over Liberty’s job stories. My heart sang. Thank you, Wenonah. Thank you, events team. Thank you, open day content team.
And now we create smarter content
Two weeks’ later and I’m back from leave. Liberty is grinning ear to ear. Yesterday she ran her first ‘crit’ — a face to face meeting in which she (the content designer), the graphic designer and the events team had critiqued the new programme content.
“The crit went really well,” Liberty smiles. None of that back and forth of PDFs, the designer had walked away from the crit with the amends in her arms.
Liberty handed me the new version of the programme.
Now I know that as Head of Marketing I’m responsible for critiquing and signing off such things. But, how am I supposed to critique and sign off content if I don’t truly understand what the content is for?
Now, with the insights from the workshop fresh in my mind, I could see how Liberty had translated those user insights into content.
The content wasn’t perfect, but it was smarter. Much smarter. And I could see the recipe we’d used was right. Here, in my hand, was our first pancake.
The next batch
Now the programme is finalised, the web content is slowly improving (within the confines of our existing CMS!), and the team are planning improvements to the email content. For our open days this September our content will be better. Next year it will be better still.
We have begun an approach that won’t end.
Content design is iterative. It’s agile. Now we must continue this process: to gather insights, to test, to create, and to learn as we go. The team have proved that content design at UoN is possible. Now we can do this for more campaigns, users, and journeys.
I challenge you to make a pancake. The first one might be small and a bit squiffy. But it proves if the pan is hot enough.
Let’s make more pancakes.
p.s. I didn’t spend an extra penny on advertising and our open day bookings are up. Not more content, smarter content
