7. Core

CONTENT STRATEGY is a bit like going on a trip. If you’ve done your audit and analysis, you know where you’re starting from. With alignment, you’ve ensured your travel companions are ready to go. But, before you start planning the specifics of your journey—you need to answer one extremely critical question: What’s your destination?

Back in Chapter 3, we introduced the content strategy quad. Right in the middle of that bad boy is the core strategy. The core strategy is what connects all the other components of your content strategy together: It provides the all-necessary “guiding light” that keeps you moving in the right direction, no matter what might happen along the way.

In this chapter, we’ll answer three questions:

• What is a core strategy?

• How do you develop and define a core strategy?

• What does a finished core strategy look like?

What is a Core Strategy?

In any industry, things change constantly. Unfortunately, that means your content needs to change constantly to stay relevant. As a result, you may find yourself in constant content catch-up mode—always reacting to the next thing that comes down the pike and never seeming to make progress.

This is where your core strategy comes in. Again, your content strategy defines how an organization (or project) will use content to achieve its objectives and meet its user needs. The core strategy sets the long-term direction for all of your content-related initiatives—ensuring all activities, big or small, are working together toward the same magnificent future. Tactics might need to change, but your core strategy stays consistent. It helps you withstand the changes and keep moving forward.

An effective core strategy is:

• Flexible: It withstands the changing content environment, accommodating various tactics and team configurations.

• Aspirational: It’s a stretch for the organization, focusing on what you want to become ideally (not what you can feasibly do).

• Memorable: It’s an easily understandable concept that is used constantly to guide activities and decisions.

• Motivational: It’s worthwhile and somewhat exciting—something people want to be a part of.

• Inclusive: It leaves room for a wide variety of individual and team contributions.

Defining your core strategy doesn’t have to be a six-month odyssey that results in a 50-page document. Often, the majority of it can be hammered out in a series of workshops with your core project team ... but don’t exclude your other stakeholders from the process altogether. Remember, content is a team sport. Whether you invite stakeholders to brainstorm with your core team or to react to work the team has already done, the key is to take their opinions into account. Your strategies will be better for it.

How do you Develop and Define a Core Strategy?

Brain Traffic’s Lee Thomas helps organizations define their core strategy using a concept he calls “Achieve-Be-Do.” This approach helps answer critically important questions:

• Achieve: What does your content strategy need to accomplish (for the organization, for your industry, for your product, etc.)?

• Be: What “content product(s)” will we create? (In other words, what will we produce for our users/consumers? How will those content products be valuable to the users/consumers?)

• Do: What will the organization need to do to support the content effort?

Let’s take a look at how this works.

First, Get the Tactical Stuff Out of the Way

When you first consider these questions, you’ll probably find yourself jumping to tactics and solutions to immediate concerns. And that’s fine. Go ahead. Get it all out. Brainstorm all the Achieve-Be-Do tactics and solutions you can.

Then ask yourself:

• What do these tactics have in common?

• What are the business or cultural themes underlying them?

• What about these tactics or immediate concerns prohibits us from doing better, cooler stuff?

• If I didn’t have to do this stuff, what would I like to do with our content instead?

• If I had a magic wand, and I could instantly solve these problems, what would I do next?

Then, Get all Aspirational

Unlike plans, your core strategy shouldn’t be based in today’s reality. Achieving it should be a stretch for your organization, something to aspire to and build toward. So, just for this brief moment, don’t think about what “is” today, what you need to do immediately, or what you think can realistically do. (We’ll get back to that stuff in a bit.) For now, think big.

You’ll know you’re getting closer to your core strategy when your brainstormed ideas start to sound:

Nobody gets motivated by “Let’s try to keep up with the competitor” or “Let’s make our product content slightly less crappy.” Those may be the realities of your next few months, but they don’t have to be your destiny. And, they certainly aren’t your strategy.

Do not Fear the Magic Layer

Content strategist Shelly Bowen refers to something she calls “The Magic Layer.” For consultants, it’s the place between research and deliverables. If you’re inside an organization, it’s the space between your research and your next promotion.

The magic layer is where all the unique and differentiating ideas—like the core strategy—come from. It’s all about invention. And that can be scary.

In her blog post, “Just Make It Up, Already,” Shelly says:

This fear or resistance of invention—of making something up—is holding a lot of us back. It’s as if we’re looking for a book or resource or expert to point us to page 428, second paragraph, for specific and correct directions on what to do. (Then we can annotate it!)

But how did that resource come up with the solution in the first place? They made it up. Sure, they tested it and shared it and revised it. They may even have come up with the idea from a range of sources and experiences. But some individual had to invent it and write it down.

This business of “making it up” is [part of the Magic Layer] and I don’t really talk about it to many people. For obvious reasons. Invention is welcomed in the art world, but within business strategy, it’s much harder to accept.*

* http://www.shellybowen.com/2011/10/magic-layer-invention/

Do not fear the Magic Layer. You can do it. It’s okay. And, what’s more, you can’t do content strategy without it.

What Does a Finished Core Strategy Look Like?

There are no hard and fast rules for what a core strategy looks like. Contrary to popular belief, strategies don’t have to be huge documents with “thud factor.” In fact, at this stage of the game, big treatises are counterproductive. Nobody reads them, much less gets motivated by them.

Your core strategy can be as short as one sentence—as long as that sentence holds meaning for your whole team. It can be a graphic with a caption. We’ve even seen successful mnemonic devices and Top 10 lists a la David Letterman. The key here is short, memorable, and focused on your content. Feel free to make up your own format.

The Core Strategy Statement: An Annotated Sentence

The core strategy statement is one of the tools we regularly use at Brain Traffic to communicate core strategies. We use this tool as a quick, memorable summary of all of the core strategy details we provide to our clients (often presented in a several-page document, which likely can’t be easily repeated from memory).

Here’s how it works. Remember diagramming sentences in grammar school? This is kind of the same, except you don’t have to remember the differences between the participles. Instead of diagramming the parts of speech, you diagram a sentence that represents your strategy. Carefully select each word or phrase with your team, and then annotate the sentence to explain your selections.

This is an internal document. So, make sure the sentence sounds the way you would normally talk to your peers—not some formal rhetoric. You might even want to go through your stakeholder interview notes from the research phase to find effective phrases your stakeholders used themselves. Seeing their own words in print will up the ownership factor.

You might be surprised by the response to this scrappy little diagram. The key is to make it short, memorable, and meaningful.

So, What’s the Plan?

We almost never present a core strategy without including a sneak preview into the first few steps of a tangible, executable action plan. The tactics in the plan that demonstrates how the strategy works in practice. We don’t want to waste all that new-strategy energy and excitement. And neither do you. So let’s keep rolling.