6. Analysis
CONTENT DOESN’T EXIST IN A VACUUM. There are forces—both from within your organization and from the outside world—that shape what your content is and what it could be. Business goals, resource constraints, user needs, and competitor activities are just a few things that influence your content in a big, big way.
To make effective recommendations about content, you need to analyze the wild, wide world in which your content lives. So, before jumping into strategy, take the time to ask pertinent, important questions about all the factors that impact your content’s creation, maintenance, and ongoing success.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss different aspects of ecosystem analysis, and why they’re essential to your content strategy efforts:
• Internal impact factors: How does your organization impact your content?
• External impact factors: What effects do users, competitors, and influencers have?
• Communicating the results: How do you document and share what you’ve learned?
Please note that just because internal impact factors come first in this chapter doesn’t mean you need to do them first. Want to start with external impact factors? Need to do external and internal simultaneously? Go right ahead. The choice is yours.
No Time or Budget for Analysis? Find It
When you’re constantly being asked to deliver projects in less time with fewer resources and smaller budgets, how can you possibly slow down for content-focused analysis?
The real question is ... how can you not?
Analysis uncovers unrealized challenges, risks, and opportunities. With your analysis in hand, you can base your future recommendations on reality. And that’s not just a good idea, it’s crucial. It’s a step you can’t afford to skip.
Bite off Only What You Can Chew
Analysis doesn’t have to be some megalithic effort. Your analysis activities can be scaled according to project size and resource constraints. Please note that we said scaled, not skipped.
If you’re short on time, figure out which activities and information are most valuable to your specific project. Just remember: Every hour you spend in analysis will likely save dozens, if not hundreds, of hours during content creation, delivery, and upkeep.
Internal Impact Factors: Look Deep Within
Looking inside the organization is an easy place to start. After all, you (or members of your client team) work there. But whether you work for an organization directly or as a consultant, it’s hard to convince people to do analysis on their own company. Why spend time, energy, and budget learning things they already know?
Chances are, nobody’s ever sat down and taken a comprehensive look at the content’s purpose, process, and policy. And, even if someone has, how long ago did it happen? When internal analysis is ignored or out of date, entire strategies are built on un-researched assumptions and isolated opinions—costing everyone time and money.
How Do You “Do” Internal Analysis?
The best way to conduct an internal analysis—by far—is to talk to people inside the organization. Sure, you can spend some time digging through documentation, but at some point, human interaction is required.
You can get perspectives from people in several ways, such as:
• Interviews: One-on-one discussions are a great way to get the real dirt. You’re able to follow the interviewee’s specific interests and ask lots of follow-up questions. As an added benefit, interviews are a great way to start a personal relationship and develop trust. That’ll be helpful later, when you develop recommendations and try to implement them.
• Group discussions: Talking to several people at once will get you more general information than interviews. However, it’s an efficient way to get information and help people learn about each other’s perspectives at the same time. Be sure to keep groups to a manageable size. Fewer than eight people is probably best.
• Questionnaires or surveys: These aren’t ideal, but they can help you gather information from large groups of people, and help them feel included. Questionnaires and surveys work particularly well if everyone you’re surveying does the same job. (For example, a well-done email questionnaire to a group of sales reps could provide you with a lot of information about how they use content during sales calls.) Just be sure the questionnaires are short and easy to complete. It’s also helpful if someone with authority encourages participation.
No matter what method you use, be sure to really listen to people—even if their perspective is different than the majority’s. There is nearly always something you can learn from everyone.
Once you’ve completed your conversations, summarize the big themes and note discrepancies. You’ll want to include your interview results when you share your research later. (It probably goes without saying, but be careful not to betray any confidential information when reporting your findings. Nothing kills trust like telling tales out of school.)
Factors that Matter
When you start peeking under the covers of your organization, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Seriously. It can be ugly in there. But you don’t have to tackle everything at once. When you’re designing your interview questions, start by focusing on these four topics:
• Target audiences: Who do you want to engage in conversation? Why? (We’ll talk about actual users a little bit later.)
• Messaging: What do you want those target users to know, learn, or “get” from your content?
• Channels: What channels (on- and offline) are used to deliver content? How are they all connected? What is the business purpose of each one?
• Workflow/Governance: How is content created, maintained, and managed? Who’s involved?
In our experience, when you have answers to these questions, everything else gets a lot clearer. And although they might sound easy, answering these questions is deceptively difficult. Even if you can answer them off the top of your head, it’s likely that people in your organization will have different perspectives. And that’s where the fun begins.
Let’s take a closer look at the “big four.”
Target audiences: Who are you trying to reach?
Who is your web content for, ideally? As you ask your stakeholders this question, people will have lots of different opinions. The marketers will say, “It’s all about the customer.” Human resources will want to please job seekers. Investor relations will want to talk to—surprise—the investors. This is to be expected. For right now, just find out as much as you can about each audience. Ask stakeholders to:
• Define their target audiences clearly. For example, ask, “When you say ‘customers,’ which are you referring to: prospective customers, existing customers, or both?”
• Describe why the audiences are important to them (the stakeholders) and to the business. It may seem obvious why an audience—like investors—is important, but hearing the stakeholder specifically answer this question can be pretty informative.
• Arrange the target audiences in order of importance to them and to the business (and if the lists are different, have them explain why).
Compile all of the information you gather in your analysis findings document so you can share it later. During the content strategy recommendations phase, you’ll need to get everyone together and negotiate some priorities and parameters. (See Chapter 8, Content.)
Messaging: What are you saying?
“Messaging” is one of those words that means something different to everyone. To some, messaging is about creating specific words and phrases in an approved copy bank. To others, it means defining a “brand promise” or voice and tone (e.g., “We want to sound friendly but sophisticated.”).
To us, messages are simply bits of information (thoughts or ideas). Messaging is the art of deciding what information or ideas you want to give to—and get from—your users. Needless to say, messaging is an important part of defining your content requirements. You can use messaging to:
• Prioritize content needs
• Keep content consistent (over media and time)
• Align content owners on content requirements
During your analysis, you don’t have to define the messages you will use in your content going forward. But you do need to understand what messages exist in content today (whether it’s on purpose or not) and how (or if) stakeholders would like messaging to change in the future.
If you’re in a large organization, there might be multi-million dollar projects devoted to creating established messaging hierarchies (present and future). If you’re in a smaller organization, a web project might be the first time anyone has really thought about messaging. Either way, you need to get input from all of the key stakeholders about what they want to say to their target audiences.
Then, when you create content strategy recommendations, you will work with the stakeholders to narrow the field of possibilities—and choose the right combination of messages for the content.
Channels: Everything’s connected
A channel is a medium through which content is delivered. Users are likely going to use several channels (on- and offline) over the course of their relationship with you, so it’s important that everything is consistent and complementary. That means all of the content creators in the organization, regardless of the channels they focus on, need to work together. The first step to that collaboration utopia is just identifying what’s out there.
What channels exist?
Organizations are often stunned to realize how many content irons they have in the fire. It’s not uncommon for a large organization to have hundreds of websites all pointing to each other with no master plan. And don’t get us started on print materials or social media or mobile initiatives or SEO-focused content or ... are you cringing yet? Because we are.
To get a handle on what exists, you can:
• Talk to communications producers (marketing, PR, advertising, technical communications, etc.) and find out what they have and how it’s related to your content. For example, is someone creating a print brochure that will tell the user to go to your website for more information? If so, the website needs to have more information. Good to know.
• Ask your friendly IT people for help compiling a list of all the URLs the company owns and stats on the traffic to each one. Are all the URLs still active? Have any sites been ignored or forgotten? How much traffic goes from one site to another?
• Follow the links on your corporate website and see where they go.
• Search for your organization on search engines and social media sites—you might be surprised at what you find created by (and about) your organization.
Common channels you should watch for include:
• Public website(s): What are all of your organization’s public websites? (There are likely more than you think.)
• Social media activities: Where do you have active accounts? What types of content are being shared among social media participants, and where?
• Mobile: Is there a mobile version of your website? Do you have proprietary applications delivering content to your mobile users?
• Intranets/extranets: Are there intranets/extranets associated with the organization that your users may access?
• Public relations and awareness: How does the PR team work? Are there other awareness campaigns or tactics? (For example, does your boss do a lot of public speaking?)
• Print media: Do you communicate to your users with brochures, spec sheets, or similar? If so, are users likely to see those materials before or after they see your web content? Do they refer to your project content?
• Email campaigns: Do you communicate regularly to your users via email? Will those emails link to your project content?
• Advertisements/SEM: Are there advertising campaigns currently underway? What about paid search placements? Do they link to your project content?
This undertaking, of course, is easier said than done in midsize to behemoth-size organizations. If you can’t get the whole picture, start with your highest priority channel or area of focus. Find out what it is connected to. Repeat with the next priority channel when time and resources allow.
Once you know what exists, mapping everything out can help you (and your content partners) understand how things are interconnected. A map sheds light on how important it is not to publish, revise, or remove content without understanding what other sources may point to that content as a solution or reference for potential customers.
Here’s a simple example. AwesomeCo is a growing software company. They’re planning to redo their website, so they’ve created a channel map with the website as the focus.
How do users (ideally) interact with each channel?
The next step is to define the role each content delivery channel plays in your target audiences’ relationship with your organization. When you understand why (and when) the target users access each channel, you’ll have a better grasp on what content belongs where.
One way to do this is to compare your channels to a “user lifecycle.” A user lifecycle provides a step-by-step explanation of how the user relationship would work in an ideal situation. The most common lifecycles focus on a consumer purchase path (how we get a customer to buy something). But, you can also create lifecycles for other objectives, such as knowledge acquisition (how we get an audience to learn something) or loyalty (how we entice an audience to return to the content regularly). Check with your business strategy, communications, and marketing teams to see if any of these lifecycles have already been developed.
When you’ve established a lifecycle, you can see how your content delivery channels fit into the overall process by assigning each channel to one or more lifecycle steps.
In this example, AwesomeCo has already established a five-part lifecycle for clients:
• Learn: Prospective client hears about us for the first time.
• Consider: Client looks to see if we have the services they need.
• Try: Client decides whether the solution is a fit by looking at demos, case studies, and other documentation.
• Buy: Client makes a purchase decision and negotiates with sales representatives.
• Use/Maintain: Client uses software and requires support and maintenance.
Here’s how the channels look plotted next to the lifecycle:
Because AwesomeCo tailors each piece of software to the client’s needs, the goal of channels such as the public website and print materials is to drive clients toward a negotiation with the sales team. But, because their primary prospect acquisition tactic is referrals, they also spend a significant amount of time on social media and content for existing clients.
When you take a close look at all of the channel connections and user relationships, you are able to better focus future content efforts—avoiding duplication and improving the overall user experience. And, that makes everyone—the business, users, and you—a whole lot happier.
Workflow and governance: How does content happen?
It seems like everyone has an opinion about web content, but no one is really sure whose job it is to assess requests and implement changes. So, it’s best to find out who’s involved and how the content process currently works.
Roles: Who’s doing what? (And why?)
In most organizations, even small ones, roles that include responsibilities for web content are somewhat of a moving target ... or, in some cases, an unsolved mystery.
There are more than a few people who may be involved with your content from concept to publication. Some people may play multiple roles. Here are a few examples:
• Requesters submit requests for web content to be created, updated, or removed.
• Providers are subject matter experts who own and manage source content—or who have the necessary information in their heads—that will be used by creators to develop web content.
• Creators are responsible for actually developing the content (text, graphics, audio, and video).
• Reviewers/approvers must be consulted about some or all of the content prior to its publication online. (Note: Not every reviewer will have the same clout—do your best to understand who needs to be involved and how.)
• Publishers get the content online, via coding, a content management system, a wiki, a blog, or other technical wizardry.
During your analysis, you need to find out who these people are. Which department do they work in, and who do they report to? What are their skill sets? Is content part of their job description or an afterthought in their already busy schedule? Are there interoffice politics involved that may affect content recommendations? This can be a tricky topic to navigate, especially in larger organizations. But, the answers to these questions are essential to understanding how the content process works today—and how you can get it to work better in the future.
Process: Tasks and timing
From request to publication to archiving (or not!), your organization has workflow and governance processes for getting “all things content” done. Even if these processes aren’t standardized or documented, they exist.
Why is understanding processes so important? Because any changes to content will create changes to the processes. So, take time to know what you’re messin’ with.
• What are the existing processes for planning, creating, translating, and maintaining content?
• Do they work differently for typical content updates versus emergencies?
• What parts work well? Which don’t?
• Where are the bottlenecks and stopgaps?
• Who is overworked and who has capacity (and ability) to take on more?
• Are there tools—like style guides or templates—in place?
• How is content effectiveness measured, if at all?
• Is there anyone actually responsible for designing and overseeing content tasks?
Again, it can help to sketch out your findings by creating a current workflow map.
In most cases, documenting a workflow is an eye-opening experience for everyone involved. Who knew there were so many steps? Who knew the editors often need to chase down missing information from subject matter experts? Why are people in four different departments reviewing content before it goes live? No wonder people hate content.
Governance: What are the laws of the land?
While you’re learning about content workflow, keep an eye out for governance activities. Try to find out:
• Who makes the decisions about content standards?
• How is content success measured?
• Are there content policies, standards, style guides, or other editorial tools in place?
There might not be any governance. Or every department in the organization might have its own rules. Either way, you need to know what’s up.
Workflow and governance analysis helps your stakeholders understand the true scale of the investment (time and money) your organization makes in content. Which, in turn, leads to realistic expectations. Which then leads to workplace harmony, and probably world peace. (See Chapter 9, People.)
External Impact Factors: Look Around You
Knowing what the organization wants is important, but be careful not to fall victim to the “navel-gazing” syndrome. You know, the phenomenon where organizations spend so much time thinking about themselves, they forget there’s a real world outside with the power to bring them down. You need to analyze the forces beyond your control that impact your content.
Users: Here they Come (Or Go)
Ah, users. You know, the whole problem with users is this whole “free will” thing: They show up, sign in, or download at their own discretion. You can’t make them do anything they don’t want to do. Their actions are out of your control. So inconvenient.
No matter how they find you, your users almost always have very specific goals and expectations. And if your content doesn’t meet their expectations—and quickly—they will leave. Period.
Now, you may think you know what they want. This, of course, is silly. While you may be an expert about your product or service, you most certainly cannot read your users’ minds. In order to really know what your users’ goals are, you need to find a way to ask them. You also need to understand where they’re coming from, who else they’re talking to (competitors), what your audience segmentation is, and which messages will most likely convert and retain them.
User research: Who are these people, anyhow?
There are unlimited ways to get a good understanding of who your users are, what they want, and how they interact with you. In Colleen Jones’ book, Clout, she discusses a wealth of ways to get more information about your users—their demographics, preferences, expectations, interests, and behaviors. Her list includes:
• User interviews: An in-depth, structured conversation with a user, usually conducted in person
• Survey: A series of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions
• Multivariate and A/B test: A comparison of how different versions of important pages (such as product pages or landing pages) perform on your live website
• Website analytics: Detailed statistics about how visitors use your website
• Social and reputation analytics: Measurements of how users are talking about and referring to you on social networks
• Search and keyword analytics: Measurements of the words people use when they look for content through search engines such as Google (external search), and search on your website (internal search)
• Contact analytics: Measurements of why and how users contact you (by email, call, chat, etc.) and how they respond
• Syndicated research: Research conducted by an independent company or organization and often sponsored by several companies within an industry*
* This is an abbreviated list. For further details, see Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content.
• Focus groups: A moderated group discussion, where several users answer your questions en masse
• Customer service analysis: A survey, interview, or data analysis (where call center or support data is available) about most frequently asked questions, issues, and requests your customer service or sales people get from users
User research comes in many flavors and can work at all budget levels. If you’ve got the cash for intense studies in an official user lab, hooray! If not, you can try more do-it-yourself options, such as surveys or simply asking a few people what they think.
Website analytics: The perennial favorite
Web analytics is just one of the user research methods listed above, but analytics sure are popular. The ability to measure—with some precision—how people interact with our content has been one of the unique, revolutionary aspects of the Web. And it’s so easy. The analytics software just creates the data on its own. Sort of.
Analytics, used well, can be a goldmine of information. But, they can also be extremely misleading. For example, just because a page gets little traffic doesn’t necessarily mean users don’t want to see it—they might not know it exists. Or, if your analytics system was not set up appropriately, all of the data could be skewed.
As Colleen Jones says, “Data is your eyes, not your brain.” The data itself is not the outcome. The real value of analytics and other measurements is interpreting what they mean for the bigger picture: how your content is performing. So, work with your analytics team to understand your metrics. And remember: Analytics are only one source of information—it’s a good idea to use several types of evaluation to get the full picture.
Usability testing: See your content in action
Even though content is often the number one thing that can make or break a user experience, usability testing—observing people while they interact with a product or site—often fails to consider it. And it should. As Angela Colter (Electronic Ink) writes, “While usability testing watches what users do, not what they say they do, content testing determines what users understand, not what they say they understand.”
There’s nothing quite like sitting down and watching users interact with your content. Colter recommends using standard readability formulas, moderated usability tests, unmoderated usability testing, or a cloze test (a test that removes certain words from a sample of your text and asks users to fill in the missing words). The important thing is to find a way to test not only user behavior, but user comprehension.
If you’re working on a project in which the usability testing falls outside of your jurisdiction, now is the time to make friends with colleagues on the design or UX team. Learn about other plans and processes for user testing. Find out if, how, and when you can collaborate. Work together to get the information you need.
Competitors: The other Guys
In order to make strategic recommendations that will set you apart from the crowd, you need to understand the competitive landscape. Now, many organizations make the mistake of going to their competitors’ websites and freaking out because said competitor has x, y, and z content that their website doesn’t. Inevitably, there’s a fire drill called by someone whose main objectives are to “achieve parity” and “establish competitive advantage” by adding more content to your web properties.
Don’t audit and analyze your competitors’ websites with the idea that you need to keep up. Consider instead where you can create true competitive advantage. Nine times out of ten, this simply means optimizing your current content (in quality and structure); fixing your site search; and making smart, strategic decisions about what new content you’ll add to the site—why, when, how, for whom, by who, and so on.
Chances are, your organization has already done some competitive research—which is a valuable place to start. But, general competitive research doesn’t usually focus on content. Take another look at your competitors’ content and consider the following questions:
How are competitors’ websites organized?
By looking at how your competitors structure and label their websites, you will discover:
• Whether industry-standard labels have emerged. For example, if all your competitors are calling their technical support section “Support,” you need to decide whether to stick with the standard or go with a more differentiated option.
• If there’s a trend toward organizing similar content by audience, by target market, or by product or service type.
• Where you may be able to borrow intuitive, efficient taxonomies (ways content is organized, categorized, and structured) from websites that are clearly doing things right.
What topics are covered?
What are your competitors talking about? Again, this is not an exercise to determine what content you’re missing. Your web content doesn’t need to include every topic that every competitor includes. Instead, use this as an opportunity to identify where you can create differentiation. What aren’t your competitors saying? What content does your user research demonstrate is most important?
What content formats are available?
Are your competitors featuring mostly text, or do they have podcasts and video? Do they prefer FAQs or contextual help? Is there a community forum or a review system where user-generated content is helping to inform other people’s buying decisions? Are their employees blogging?
See how other organizations are supporting the user lifecycle with their web content types. Keep in mind any options that might be well suited to your target audiences, timeframe, internal resources, and budget.
What’s their brand and messaging like?
You don’t want to sound like all the other guys. In fact, you may find that all the other guys sound too marketing-y, too academic, or too technical; this provides you with a tremendous opportunity to stand apart from the crowd by creating content that reflects your unique brand and is clear.
Note things like key messaging, voice and tone, images, video production values, and so on. What are the brand attributes you’d assign to each competitor’s content? Is the site’s personality consistent page-to-page, or is it all over the map? And so on.
Where else are competitors active?
Try to find out what other web content initiatives your competitors have underway. Are they delivering sponsored or branded content on other websites or via social media channels? Have they launched content-driven advertising campaigns? Are they working on related websites that have their own brand identity but are really owned by your competitors? (For example, Johnson & Johnson owns BabyCenter.com.) They may be creating or curating content in places you belong, or launching mobile apps.
Influencers: The Power Players
What’s more powerful than a website? Faster than an RSS feed? Leaps over your advertising tactics in a single bound? It’s the “influencers”: People and resources whose opinions inform and shape your customers’ opinions of your organization.
Today’s technology landscape provides countless ways to research organizations and products. And more than ever, people rely on multiple sources of information to form opinions about organizations. What are your customers’ top influencers saying about you? Does your web content support, contradict, or include influencer content? Why? Why not?
Here are some influencers to consider. They may not all be relevant to your organization’s products or services, but it’s worthwhile to check out the ones that are:
• Trade journals and industry associations
• Analyst reports
• News media coverage and business magazines (online and offline)
• Television news and talk shows
• Online message boards and forums
• Consumer watch groups
• Bloggers and social media sites
• Social media recommendations sites (such as Angie’s List, Guidestar, or del.icio.us)
• Celebrity speakers or figureheads
• Friends and family
Current Events and Trends: Constant Vigilance
Everything from a new social media site to swiftly changing governmental regulations can impact your final content recommendations. Be sure to keep an eye on:
• Current events: Political changes, the economy, natural disasters, etc. can all shape your content strategy and ongoing content maintenance needs.
• Advances in technology: New technology is introduced constantly—your content can be greatly impacted when new technologies such as devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.), programming languages, content management tools, or accessibility tools are released.
• Trends and best practices: Being a good content strategist or content professional means being a consummate content consumer. That means you always need to be on the lookout for new and interesting content practices that you can use in your own projects. As you go through your daily activities online, ask yourself questions like: Could I use this navigational technique on my site? Infographics are popular right now, are they appropriate for us?
Communicating the Results
To make the analysis phase really worthwhile, once you’ve finished, you need to present your key findings to all of the project stakeholders and get them to align on project objectives, assumptions, and risks based on a common level of knowledge.
In an analysis summary document, spell out everything you’ve learned, from business goals and internal requirements to user needs and competitive advantages. This document shouldn’t include any recommendations for the future content. Its sole purpose is to ensure that everyone on the content team starts the content strategy process with the same information about the complex ecosystem your content lives in. This alignment is key to collaboration and buy-in later.
Your analysis summary document also will serve as a stellar reference guide for the project. It can help focus resources appropriately, prevent scope-creep, and identify opportunities. Finally, it helps the team remember where you started from and why early decisions were made.
Mission Discovery: Complete
So. Here we are.
Your discovery phase is coming to a close. In Chapter 4, Alignment, you began the process of getting all of your stakeholders involved in the project. In Chapter 5, Audit, you did a deep-dive audit of your content. And, here in this chapter, you analyzed all the factors that have impact on your content.
And now?
You’re ready to set your course for the future. It’s strategy time.
(p.s. After all this, can you believe people are always waiting until the last minute to figure out their content? Seriously. Blows our minds.)