Analyze Your Content, Customers, and Context
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Understand your current situation so you can plan the right change.
CHANGE BRINGS OPPORTUNITIES. ON THE OTHER HAND, CHANGE CAN BE CONFUSING.
—Michael Porter
YOU CAN’T STOP THE CHANGE, ANY MORE THAN YOU CAN STOP THE SUNS FROM SETTING.
—Shmi Skywalker
In Chapter 3, we walked through envisioning your content future. Now, let’s consider why and how to assess your content present.
Why Analyze the Current State
Never advise or decide on a content strategy without assessing the current state. Sometimes, companies question whether the assessment is necessary, especially if they are eager to make a big change or do not have much existing content. You might question the need for such analysis or, if you’re already convinced, face the question yourself. So I’m sharing a few reasons why your organization needs to conduct this analysis.
Prevent Your Content Strategy From Failing
If I had to pick the top reason businesses fail at content, I’d say it’s because they don’t have an accurate understanding of their content situation to inform their strategy. Such organizations build their strategy on a house of cards that, sooner or later, collapses. For example, I once worked with an online retailer that reached out after they tried to do thought leadership content, or content to advise and guide potential and existing customers, but did not get results. The company assumed that because they knew how to develop great sales content, they could also develop great thought leadership content. In our analysis, we discovered that customers felt the thought leadership content was too pushy and focused on sales. The retailer could have avoided this misstep—which involved revamping hundreds of content assets—by analyzing the situation first.
Businesses often suffer from delusions of content grandeur or delusions of content failure—or perhaps both, if content stakeholders have different and conflicting perspectives. These delusions can lead to a content strategy that fails.
Delusions of Content Grandeur
Companies, or teams within a company, sometimes see the existing content through rose-colored glasses, thinking it’s much more important or impactful than it is. For example, you would be amazed at how attached companies can become to mediocre corporate blogs. Inertia also comes into play here; people prefer to maintain the status quo rather than make a change, so they cling to any reason to do so.
A related delusion I encounter is about content capacity. Company executives repeatedly overestimate their ability to sustain a sophisticated content strategy over time without making changes to content operations, such as hiring the right people or improving processes. (Last I checked, content is still not created and delivered by the content fairy!) And content teams are feeling the pain of this delusion. In Content Science’s 2017 study of content operations, 53 percent of participants (content team leaders and members) reported that they did not know the budget for content. How can a company plan realistically for a new approach to content without knowing the existing budget and planning how it will change?1
Although an extreme delusion of content grandeur can lead to misguided content decisions, a slight delusion can be helpful. Research shows that one key to a successful long-term marriage is being slightly deluded about how amazing your spouse is.2 (My spouse must be deluded to stick with me for 20 years, which I’ll be the first to say I do not deserve.) The slight but not extreme misperception helps us gloss over minor shortcomings and do the work to stay connected through hardships. In a similar way, if a business has an affinity for some existing content, that business is more likely to care about maintaining and improving it over time.
Sometimes, businesses suffer from the opposite delusion: failure.
Delusions of Content Failure
Occasionally, I come across an organization, or a team within it, that thinks the content situation is much worse than it is. The organization wants to scrap everything and start over. But usually there are strengths and lessons to learn even from content that seems underperforming. For example, in the case of the online retailer I mentioned earlier, we found that the topics covered by the thought leadership actually were the right topics—topics that interested customers and were not covered well by competitors. So the strategy focused on adjusting the tone and substance of the thought leadership, not on starting over from scratch.
Nothing corrects these delusions other than sound analysis of the content situation. I have never seen a content situation that is 100 percent “good” or 100 percent “bad.” You will likely see a mix of expected and unexpected strengths and weaknesses.
Align Your Team and Stakeholders Before Change
Whether or not your company is under a delusion, you will be much more likely to unify your content team and stakeholders by starting your content efforts with analysis. Involving your stakeholders in the analysis process and sharing the results gives everyone a common understanding of the current state. When your stakeholders agree on the current state, it will be much easier to engage them to support change later.
Set a “Before” Benchmark
Few things persuade people more than a clear comparison of before and after. The evidence is indisputable. The analysis of your current state can give you a number of “before” benchmarks—such as content effectiveness, content operations maturity level, or even the number of content assets—that set the stage for a compelling before and after story. As an example, Scott Rosenberg began a content consolidation effort at Intel in 2015 by documenting the proliferation of content assets, including
12,500 Intel.com web pages
715 microsites
38 mobile apps
This benchmark enabled Rosenberg to document and communicate progress effectively, such as showing the consolidation of 1500 web pages in less than a year.3 That progress helped him sustain momentum for change at a complex enterprise.
Uncover Details for Realistic Implementation Plans and Estimates
When you conduct a thorough analysis, you document items that will not only inform content strategy but also aid in planning the implementation and execution. For example, I find that content assets are a lot like the mogwai in the movie Gremlins. If you break the rules about caring for mogwai, they multiply and go rogue. In a similar way, when organizations don’t have a strategy and good practices for creating and managing content assets, the content proliferates uncontrollably. Consequently, most organizations have significantly more content than they think they do.
Simply understanding what content you have and its key characteristics, such as its format, goes a long way toward making more accurate estimates for activities such as migrating content into a new platform. There’s a meaningful difference between migrating 50,000 assets and 150,000 assets, for instance.
As another example, understanding the quality level of your current content helps you plan to what extent the content needs to change and, consequently, the level of effort needed to change it. There’s a meaningful difference in effort between changing the value proposition explained in a product and replacing a product name with the most current name.
Begin a System of Ongoing Content Intelligence so you Don’t Have to do Most of this Again
If you’re smart about your content analysis approach, then you can use your methodology and data sources to start setting up a system of content intelligence. I explain content intelligence in depth in Section IV, “Prudence: Develop Content Intelligence.” My point is that conducting content analysis in many companies involves a significant amount of money as well as setup work and grunt work—especially if content analysis has not been done recently or ever. That work can give you repeatable value in a system of content intelligence. The next time you want an insight about your content, it should take a few hours or days, not weeks.
I hope by now you’re convinced why content analysis is important. Now, let’s look at how to do it.
