You already know that shoveling brochures up onto your website isn’t getting the traction you need with customers.
The blogging and tweets get a little more attention, but after a couple of weeks or months, they get repetitive. Your marketing team can produce more content but somehow it's not delivering tangible value to customers and prospects.
What’s missing? A coherent, long-term content strategy.
Content strategy starts with the big idea: what you stand for and what you know that’s most important to your customers. Working with your marketing team, I translate your company’s products and services, values, culture, information and market positioning into a short, unique set of statements that will be the foundation of all content creation.
The next step is creating a practical and detailed blueprint for producing content in the long run. This includes editorial plans, design decisions, audience analysis and creative brainstorming. I evaluate your in-house resources, data and existing content to align it with the strategy, and identify key players who will execute on the strategy in print, online and in social media.
For details on the process of creating a content strategy, download this 3-part plan.
Sample Work
babson
The Big Idea: Global Entrepreneurship Stories
Babson College is the world's No. 1 school for entrepreneurship education. A key current initiative at the school is to expand to become a truly global brand. In partnership with a new web and design team, I created a narrative-driven, people-based strategy called "Real People, Real Stories." It featured the entrepreneurial journeys of current students and recent alumni from many countries, telling their stories of global impact. The editorial topics expanded into a separate web site run by the Babson team, entrepreneurship.babson.edu, for which I wrote a number of articles on current business topics.
monster.com
The Big Idea: Employer Branding
Monster.com was known as the world's largest online job board, but pricing pressure from competitors was making the sales cycle transactional. At the same time, companies wanted to standing out from the crowd as "employers of choice," and reduce costly turnover.
As part of a larger push to make Monster stand for employer branding, I joined with Executive VP Steve Pogorzelski and Chief Information Officer Jesse Harriott to write Finding Keepers: The Monster Guide to Hiring and Holding the World's Best Employees. The book was used by sales representatives to change the customer conversation from price to value. For three years, I toured American metro areas as a featured speaker, explaining the basics of employer branding using the book and fresh information from Harriott's Monster Employment Index.