The Key to a Successful Content Strategy? Listening
/How do you know if your content strategy is successful?
Here’s the short answer: It’s successful if it mirrors what your audience has told you they need.
Here’s the longer answer:
A while back, Dan Oshinsky posted about a news organization’s use of surveys to inform their newsletter strategy.
Here’s what Dan said:
After working with hundreds of orgs on newsletters, here’s something I now know to be true: If your newsletter strategydoesn't include regular surveys of your audience, you don't have much of a newsletter strategy at all.
Surveys are absolutely crucial to building a great newsletter strategy. They help you figure out how to build a better email product AND how to best market it to readers.
(By the way, I highly recommend subscribing to Dan’s monthly Not A Newsletter series on all things email).
Dan’s same point applies to content strategy.
If your content strategy doesn’t include regular input from your audience, you don’t have much of a content strategy at all.
Because here’s the thing:
A strategy isn’t a strategy if it doesn’t reflect what your audience needs.
Let’s say a hair product company hires you to build their content strategy.
Yay!
You come up with a strategy full of informative ways to showcase the all-natural ingredients used.
But what if, after surveying customers, you learn that’s not what they care about?
What if you realized they need tutorials for using the products?
Perhaps products like these don’t exist anywhere else yet — so no one knows how to use them!
Perhaps these products are sold in Target rather than in salons, where a hair stylist could provide a tutorial.
Whatever the reason…
Your strategy would be totally different once you’d heard from customers.
Your strategy won’t be successful if you haven’t listened to your audience.
Listening is where the magic happens.
Listening is where your strategy superpowers can activate.
Listening is what will point you to everything your strategy needs to include.
It’s your responsibility to listen, synthesize, and mirror audience needs in your strategy.
Here are some of my favorite ways to learn what the audience needs.
Team workshop or a listening tour with company stakeholders. I like to hear from team leads across marketing, sales, product, and operations. I want to learn what they think their customers need, and how their company helps them.
Customer interviews to hear from the horse’s mouth. It can be tough to get this time; I find my clients (rightly) protect access to their customers in most cases. As a fallback, I listen to recorded sales calls or customer success calls.
Competitive analysis to learn how other companies address a similar audience — or even the same audience.
Customer success data or surveys that shed light on customer pain points, goals, and wins. I look for data or surveys that have already happened. I don’t want to disrupt the CS team and add another project to their plate.
Content audit of customer case studies or testimonials.
Content analysis of what types of existing content resonate most with the audience.
Industry research to better understand persona needs at a macro level.
As a strategist, listening is the most powerful tool in your toolbox.
Because a strategy isn’t a strategy if it doesn’t reflect your audience needs.
So, we listen. We hold the stakeholder and customer interviews. We run the competitive analysis. And so on and so forth…
… But what comes after the listening?
I usually feel overwhelmed, to say the least, when I’m done conducting research.
I feel information overload!!
I think to myself:
What am I supposed to do with all this information?
How will I organize this into something that makes sense?
How does this raw data turn into a coherent strategy?
(I still feel this way with every project, by the way. It’s totally normal!)
So rather than jump into creating a strategy informed by my data, I take a pause.
I call this the insights stage
In the insights stage, you’re organizing yourresearch to suss out a few key learnings.
Doing so will bridge the gap between your research and your strategy.
I talk tactics for this stage in my free content strategy email course (revisit Lesson #2 if you already have the course in your inbox).
So I won’t repeat myself here.
Today, I’m challenging you to take on something critical to the insights stage:
Giving yourself time and space for freeform thinking away from your computer.
You’ve done the listening.
You’ve gathered the research.
Now you synthesize.
I call this the deep thinking work.
As a strategist, it’s your job to synthesize what you’ve heard into a cohesive plan.
It’s easy to view a strategist’s thinking work as super high-tech and fancy. Perhaps expensive tools and complex Google Sheet formulas come to mind.
That’s not the case.
I try to keep my deep thinking as simple as possible.
Here’s how I do it:
Spend 10-15 minutes scanning my research.
Give myself a prompt, such as:
What recurring trends do I see in this research?
What is my client doing that’s resonating with their audience?
What isn’t my client doing that their audience is asking for?
Go on a walk or sit outside. In either case, bring my phone with the notes app open or a notepad and pen. No music, no podcasts, no calls.
Getting away from your computer is key!
Deep thinking at a computer isn’t the same. I end up switching tabs, interrupting my concentration, or looking to how someone else would act on this data.
Once away from a computer, it takes me ~10 minutes for my brain to sink into deep thinking.
I give myself that time without judgement.
I blank out. I stare at the trees. I get a little bored… before I know it, I’m wrapping my brain around a few learnings from my research.
Then, it’s easy to get back to my computer and compile my thoughts.
Here’s my challenge to you, fellow strategists:
Whether you’re in an insights stage or not, simplify your deep thinking process this week.
Give yourself a prompt.
Get away from your computer.
See what you come up with.
Read more about conducting research (aka listening) in my content strategy email course.