Building a Content Development Plan That Works

I was talking this morning with an old friend, and we were commiserating about the lives of busy people – busy marketing managers, specifically. The average marketing manager today seems to be single-handedly juggling what would have required a full team just five years ago. Deadlines are shorter, emergencies are more common, and stress levels are higher than ever. For every one marketing professional who loves their job, twenty others seem trapped on the hamster wheel today.

One major downside to all this busyness – besides, of course, the eventual burnout of good people – is that the great opportunities that advance careers and markets are easily overlooked.

We find this particularly common in the world of corporate content development. White papers, case studies, website content, you name it: each represents a very profitable, competitive opportunity for profit and visibility. But only if those projects actually get done and released before the relevant trends and market advantages eventually fade and attention shifts to something else.

At Load Bearing Creative, we’ve learned that an absolutely necessary step in any successful, long term corporate marketing strategy is the creation of a realistic content development roadmap. Here are a few strategies that we’ve found invaluable in building content plans that work.

Take iterative steps to pay off your “technical debt”. How do you climb Mount Everest? You put one foot in front of the other, and take it one step at a time. Achieving big marketing goals works the same way.

In the software development world, the term “technical debt” refers to a situation where you don’t have the time or resources to realize overly ambitious goals, but only discover that once you’ve started working. As a result, each task ends up incomplete and broken, wrapped in the sincere intent to fix problems later. Each of those completion gaps adds to your technical debt, sapping important resources from the next round of project tasks. Growing technical debt makes it increasingly difficult to successfully get anything done.

To dig out of that productivity hole, you need to pay off your technical debt and then take steps to avoid incurring new charges. In the software world, one strategy for managing this debt is to work iteratively, starting each project small and building up in stages, making sure that each release stage is self-complete and functional. It is okay to release a quick and small project version that only implements a tiny subsection of the larger plan – so long as it works with a minimum of loose ends. If you only ever release things that work, however small scale, you won’t incur damaging technical debt.

As a content development strategy, iterative tasks get results. A short blog article can be expanded at length into a larger whitepaper. A quick plug about a great customer can be further developed into a comprehensive case study or video testimonial. A growing mass of evergreen article content can become ebooks, video presentations, sales proposals and new website materials. If you don’t have time to build big, build small. Make it work, focus on one step at a time, and save the mountain climbing for later.

Plan hierarchically rather than linearly. Lists are fine organizational tools, but they have limitations. In 1956, psychologist George A. Miller posited that the average one-dimensional working human memory can only manage between five and nine distinct objects at once. A linear expression is simply not the most efficient way of handling more than nine tasks, even on the best days.

An effective marketing content strategy is actually a knowledge strategy, and we’re hard limited to a handful of simultaneous working knowledge points. So how do you effectively beat that? Plan your content hierarchically rather than linearly. Chunk your planning into more manageable subgroups, and keep some sort of branching content roadmap that allows you to group your tasks.

There are several great and freely available software packages that can help you build hierarchal and branching content maps. The one we use most is Freemind, an open source mind mapping program designed specifically for hierarchical lists. Another good one, though not quite as intuitive as Freemind, is TreeSheets. The important thing is to find the system that works best for you.

Develop personas to guide content planning. The “persona” is another concept borrowed from the Agile methodology of software development. The general idea is that, when we think about our intended audience, we can’t help but imagine them as folks mostly like ourselves: who likes what we like, finds intuitive what we find intuitive, and comes from the same perspective as we do. And that’s almost never the case.

A “persona” is an important tool for working around that problem. Personas are fake audience members, expected archetypal sets of eyes and ears who will interact with your marketing at some point. The most complex personas include invented names, headshots, backgrounds and goals, as well as the problems they typically face on an average day. The idea is to create a fictional character that can serve as a guide to effective communication.

The power of personas is that they remind you that you aren’t talking to yourself, or to only one type of person. As you plan your content, you can refer back to your personas and ask, “Is this article going to capture Tim’s/Anne’s/Mark’s/Julie’s attention today?” Personas let you clearly target your audience.

Work towards uncovering tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is all the stuff that your organization knows but doesn’t have written down anywhere. It lives in memory only, often in the brains of the most experienced and educated people in your company. Maintaining a realistic content strategy that keeps its edge needs to include an effort to find and document some of that knowledge.

A tacit knowledge strategy is all about working with subject matter experts to uncover the details of your particular product or service, documenting and collating it, and then finding new ways to simplify and communicate it. This is where communication professionals with technical experience come in handy, people who can listen and understand and translate. Working towards knowledge, rather than simply message, is a highly effective way to stay ahead of changes in both industry and innovation.

Maintain a flexible and simple content mission statement. Finally, always know where you are going. Set out the ultimate goal and get it down on paper in the simplest, most concrete terms as humanly possible. Use that mission statement to constantly inform the decisions you make in developing content.

However, allow yourself a great deal of flexibility in your statement. If you follow the above strategies, your long term goals will evolve and grow, and you don’t want to be hamstrung by a goal that you are now outgrowing. Goals are ideas. They should be designed for iterative improvement.

So don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to do. As a marketing professional, you are extremely busy. And there’s no sign that the storm is going to start easing up anytime soon. Effective content development, however, doesn’t have to leave you out in the rain – not if you stay flexible, plan ahead, and accept that you have natural limitations.

You’ll be happier and healthier, too.