What is Content Strategy?

The answer depends on your focus. Lately, Web 2.0 and mobile have riveted the world’s focus on the subject of customer engagement. The what, how, and where of engaging customers is changing so quickly that few organizations know what to do. And it is not just how to engage the customer on Web 2.0 and mobile—it goes beyond that to Web 3.0, Web 4.0, and whatever comes after tablets and phones.

Marketing departments are used to pulling off miracles with limited resources. They simply throw enough effort and determination at a job, and it gets done. But what happens when that doesn’t work anymore? What if things have changed so much that you need new processes and technologies for any hope of success?

Unstructured content has always impeded enterprise processes, but like marketing, most departments overcome the problems through sheer effort. The effect of unstructured content is areas such as IP preservation, governance, and Business Intelligence may be almost invisible, and easy to ignore. However, the Internet changes all the rules for business viability seeming overnight, and that grabs everyone’s attention.

It’s not surprising that the discipline of Content Strategy, along with the new role of the Content Strategist, jelled in response to a Web Marketing crisis. But content affects nearly every aspect of the business, and Content Strategy is long overdue at the level of a department, a business unit, or the entire enterprise. One of our goals is to help organizations reap the tremendous ROI hidden in unstructured content across the enterprise.

As the scope of Content Strategy broadens, the same basic principles hold true, but the character of the analysis and the actual activities change to match the type of content being optimized. At an organizational level, Content Strategy becomes increasingly tied to Enterprise Architecture as opposed to project implementation, something that makes Content Strategy much less resource intensive for every project that needs it.