Prioritizing Content and Creating Messaging Frameworks
How to cut through cluttered content and find the head-turning hook that reels in more customers to your website even if the thought of implementing a content strategy seems daunting and makes you sweat bullets.
The hardest part of creating content is deciding what content will be important for channels on a website.
Visualizing how content can be prioritized can help piece content that is truly useful and relevant.
Meaning more customers finding the web pages you want them to find. Creating meaningful experiences.
It’s cliche to say content needs to be useful, relevant, and meaningful.
I find them irritating too don’t you? I’m sure you have seen those words thrown around in many articles on content strategy and content marketing. But what does it mean to create useful, and relevant content that is meaningful ?
These aren’t just words to describe what content should be, but help guide content in the direction it needs to go.
Let me ask you this question: Have you ever been to a website where you couldn’t find what you we’re looking for?
I know I can name a few and I’m sure you can too, but with so many articles and resources out there on how to get content right there are websites that continue to provide irrelevant information no one would ever read.
For example, you don’t need information of the company on the buying page where a customer is trying to fill out the information form to get the free e-book guide. What they really need is a content form that is easy to fill out and tells them exactly what they are getting without any other content distracting them.
The goal of developing a content strategy is to develop a system that can shape content in a way that is useful, relevant, and meaningful. And of course meet specific business goals and user needs.
Content Strategy- Creates plans, guidelines, and goals for content.
If the whole goal of marketing is to change a single micro-moment that can change how a person feels then a content strategy helps guide content to provide that single “yes, they understand my pain”. I want this now” moment for the person you are trying to provide a service or product for.
Content Prioritization Guidelines and Messaging Frameworks can help shape content for specific channels to meet specific business goals.
Content Design for Content Prioritization. The graph on the left half helps visualize the important types of content needed to help support the user scenario that is on the right half.
The most important content types to meet business goals and user needs are:
- Drive- This is content that motivates a person to go through other channels and find what they are looking for.
- Focus- This type of content helps clarify the main points you are communicating with anyone using your product or service. This also the most important content type that will influence the content goals related to business and user needs
- For example, if a prospect is still unsure about your product but highly interested you may want to have them click through to a testimonial page or have them visit the main twitter profile to show how it’s changing your customers lives on social media to make them feel more confident in their purchasing decision.
- Guide- This is the piece of content that can instruct people how to use your product or return it if it is not for them.
- Credentials- This makes the least impact for business and helping users. It is mainly for showing off the rewards and show that you are respectable and trustworthy business. Don’t get me wrong credentials are important, but it is not important at all if a customer is trying to return a product.
Now that you have a visual of what to prioritize let’s apply a user scenario.
The Action Plan: User Scenario
“I’ve decided to buy this software from you and need to find out how to make the purchase”
Main Priority
- Focus-The focus can be detailed content for ordering instructions and shipping information long with costs. The impression you and your team want your Focused content to have is “easy to buy” so you can decide how to shape and create a process that is simple for the user to easily buy and go through the buying process.
Second Priority
- Drive- Let’s say in the middle of buying they have a question and call customer support. They thank customer support for insights, but it’s still not enough because it’s a $2,000 software program and they need more assurance. For the Drive you can set up links to social channels with testimonials and enhancements such as upgrades that are included to make the product better and help motivate the prospect to want the new software.
Final priority
- Guide- The prospect is finally sure and makes the purchase. To reassure them that their in good hands you make content that will make the prospect feel more comfortable purchasing the product and eliminate any doubts or fears they may have. The content will be a guide and how to use the community website to gain momentum. It can be content that communicates how easy it to return it and get money back so they don’t have to worry about being obligated if it really isn’t giving them results.
Piecing a user scenario helps you find out what messages you want to get across. I hope you noticed I didn’t need to add a credentials in this specific scenario. It would have been irrelevant to a prospect who already trusts your business and already made a purchasing decision.
Messaging Frameworks and how they tie into content prioritization
Messaging frameworks clarify what you want the audience to know and believe. The goal is to prove that the message you are sending is true in other words relevant and useful.
A message is what you have to say, but it isn’t content. They’re used to shape content across multiple channels. If you’re trying to plan how to talk to them a messaging framework will help shape how you communicate your message.
Many people stress about messaging and complicate it. All you really to understand is:
- Plan how to make the First Impression
- Explain what Value they’re going to get out of it
- Provide Proof to make the case for the Value they’re going get out of it and of course proves the First Impression.
The message framework below is another content design to help visualize content through a specific channel.
Messaging frameworks are a tool for custom content publishing. Teams that aren’t set up for collaboration across channels lead to inconsistencies and mixed messaging.
Messaging Frameworks
- Are for anyone in marketing or tied into the development for the content
- Can be used to make decisions for a specific channel the content marketing team or copywriters are working on
- Have messaging that’s for you and the people you’re working with that are working on content
First Impressions- User experience testing can help reveal what certain people think when visiting the website channel. If you don’t have a budget for user testing then a user persona or user journey map will help.
Value Statement- Is how the person should feel after visiting a specific section of the website
Proof- Is the outcome of providing users what they need. This section is important because it helps you shape the substance and structure of content that makes it meaningful to the user.
The final step “Proof” in the messaging framework can come from content that has been discovered in the inventory or audit. Or maybe you discovered from the content audit that you are missing some content (Content Gap Analysis) that can help shape the “Proof” in a messaging framework.
See how everything ties together and just in case you forgot what Substance and Structure mean they are defined below:
- Substance- What messages does the content need to communicate? What sources and content types do we need to communicate the proof that our product or service is right for them
- Structure- How the content is going to be structure (Primary message, Secondary message, microcopy)? and how is it going to be displayed (providing analytics, data modeling, or infographic structures)?
Setting up a content prioritization guide and messaging framework are one of the many tools that can be combined to create useful content. These are the guidelines to keep teams aligned with how to shape the structure and substance of content.
This is awesome for startups and small business that are growing really quick. It’s easy to lose track of how content is taking shape and being formed when there are new people working on content.
Here’s what you should do next:
If you really want to make sure that your messaging and content is right for each channel.
Test it with actual users. See if the content creates the first impression you wanted, provides the value you expected the customer to receive, and see if the proof moved the customer to use your product or service.
By testing I mean you could print out a wireframe with real content and have a customer sit down and answer some questions that will test the value of the content on the webpage they were looking at.
You can hand them three sharpies that are the colors red, blue, and black. Instruct them to circle the content that caught their attention first with the red. Next have them circle content that was questionable or confused them with the black marker. Last, have them circle the rest of the content in blue that they did not notice or did not find relevant.
This is just one way to test it out. There are many ways to be creative with content design to create visuals for how content can be shaped.
So far we have done all of this for one channel, but in reality websites have more than one channel. And the more channels there are to manage the harder it becomes to keep messages consistent across them.
Imagine doing this on a website with 27 different channels. The image below lists the common channels that are most likely being used on your website right now. Some of them aren’t even web related because there’s a message that stills to get across the audience participating.
If you’re on Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, have a twitter main account and customer support account that’s 5 social media channels you have to maintain on top of the 4 product channels with call-to-actions, the blog, newsletter, and youtube channel.
This is just an example, but I hope you can see how hectic it is trying to manage all of these channels. That’s why the guidelines and frameworks in this post will help you at least prioritize and shape the messages you want across multiple channels.
The two major problems you’re solving by using these guidelines and frameworks:
- The majority of content on site is for audience A, but you’re really trying to increase conversions for audience B
- Content isn’t written in the way that represents your desired voice and tone or it doesn’t elicit the reactions or perceptions you want your key audience to have.
The designs as you can tell were drafted on a piece of paper. You can draft ideas on a big white board or create design templates in photoshop and share with everyone on the team.