Why Content Strategy is Important, I: the Bagel House
Content is King.
This statement first appeared in the ‘90s, and has only become more valid over the years as digital content in every form has become ubiquitous. There’s no point in designing a website that has great layout, and good colour choice, and lovely fonts, if your users:
- Don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them;
- Don’t know what they should do about the information.
For us at Reassemble, though, the statement still lacks something. What we would say is:
Content is King; and every King needs a Strategist.
Content strategy is important — and it is important in a separate way from the creation of content. This, we’ve observed, is what seems to confuse some, which in turn makes some organisations slow to embrace the need for a strategy. The thinking goes:
If we can create content, why do we need to strategise about it? And why should we put resources into planning content, if that won’t generate any content in itself? If I can hire a copywriter, why should I hire a strategist?
These are all good questions. Let’s think about them using something Reassemble loves: bagels.
When it comes to bagels, we take it for granted that management is necessary.
We love bagels, but it’s not easy to find a good bagel in Singapore. So you can imagine how excited we are to find such a joint, somewhere in Tanjong Pagar (we’re not announcing the location, for wholly selfish reasons).
They make a mean lox, and excellent brisket, and there’s about ten varieties of bagel to choose from. And best of all, the entire kitchen is glass-fronted, so you can see the entire process by which the bagels are made. Everything from cutting the risen dough to forming the ring, until they come out of the oven to be piled up against the window, then sliced and stuffed full of different fillings. It’s just like how they do it New York and London.
When the bagel-making process is in full flow, it looks like a well choreographed dance between the five or six people inside, complete with laughter and banter. It really looks like a lovely workplace, where people are doing good work, and we customers are enjoying the fruits of their labour.
As big fans of getting content right in a website or app, we want our clients’ content operations to be like that bagel house too. People know what they’re supposed to do, the tools they use are working well, and your customers and users get to enjoy useful information. All is well.
Now consider this question. Who provides the bagels?
Just by looking at the bagel, it’s actually really hard to tell. I mean, look at how brown and glistening it is. It’s gorgeous. I know that’s from baking, so I’d probably say that the baker provides the bagels.
Where content is concerned, the analogous role to the baker is the copywriter. If you look at a company blog post or a draft product introduction, then — judging by the grammar, the content and the writing — you’d conclude that it’s mainly the copywriter’s job to produce it.
This judgement — that the people who actually make the content should be wholly in charge of it — is very common in many companies. And it does make sense in a way. The baker’s impact on the bagel is very direct and visible. So it is with the copywriter and the content.
But consider the kitchen.
It is immediately obvious, once you look, that the baker is not the only one who ‘makes the bagel’. He is a link in a chain, and depends intimately on his partners. If the dough guy didn’t get the dough ready last night, there won’t be bagels. Likewise if the oven isn’t working and no one fixes it.
Even the front staff, who might not have touched any dough or trays, are a part of the chain — if they’re not here, who gets the bagels to the customers?
So, ultimately, how does the bagel house keep delivering? How does it keep on satisfying its customers?
We already know the answer to this, of course. It’s called management. Good management — good planning, prompt maintenance, clear delegation, keeping morale up — is what enables a bagel house, as a whole, to keep churning out the good stuff.
And here’s the problem. When it comes to bagels, we take it for granted that management is necessary.
We must do the same for the content of a digital product.
And this cannot be left just to copywriters or video creators, in the same way that you wouldn’t leave the baker to manage the whole bagel store. Someone, a strategist, needs to consider a whole bunch of other variables, such as:
- The goals,
- The processes,
- The resources,
- The people,
- The tools,
And so on and so forth.
And this is what content strategy is really about. Making the content is only a part of it — to be made well, it needs to be planned well.
This post is about the here and now. It’s about how a coherent content strategy, today, solves issues today that relate to a product’s content.
For the next post, though, we’re going to look at something I really enjoy — my mum’s cooking. (You may be seeing a pattern here about the things I like.) What does her cooking style have to do with content strategy?
Well, we’ll see. For now though, let’s consider two questions about your organisation’s content:
How does your organisation produce content?
Who is involved, and what do they do at each stage?
