10 Creative Content Strategies for Designers
A great Content Strategy is what builds and drives strong communities even more especially for designers. Great content not only meets users’ needs but supports key business objectives. It engages and informs. Content first is absolutely the only way to work to produce meaningful, valuable design work. Let’s learn how some great strategies designers can use to create and deliver useful, usable content for their online audiences, when and where they need it most.
1. Aggregation and Content curation
Find the best content online and share it with your community. In aggregation, two things are key: Sourcing the right content, and how to present this content to your fans in new and exciting ways. If you can ace this, you will never be short of content to keep your community thriving and engaged.
2. UGC
UGC is the acronym for user-generated content.UGC has been proven to increase brand affinity, engagement and even boosts in on-site awareness metrics like time spent browsing and page views. It’s about creativity, authenticity and perspective. As a designer, you too can harness UGC to bolster your community, to connect with your audience, and to celebrate some of your most influential fans. E.g Rawz by http://abduzeedo.com/
3. Content Roadmap
Organize your content planning, production and delivery. A strategic road map is essential for your content initiatives, as it helps you understand the opportunities and challenges involved, prioritize projects, and execute on each effort with a clear purpose in mind. Use tools like GatherContent for organization.
4. Research
As a designer it’s important to explore the constraints of the audience before starting to create content; what’s going to be fit for purpose? What’s going to provoke the strongest response? What’s adaptable? What’s most desirable? It’s both about being inquisitive and exploring the limits of what’s possible.
5. Create a content inventory
Typically begin with the creation of an inventory in an excel doc. The inventory is a catalogue of all the content you have already created. For some projects, the content is listed as pages. For others, it might get as granular as content elements, such as text paragraphs, images, videos, and PDFs.
6. Audit -& Analysis:
This is the qualitative analysis of the inventory. There are many types of content audits, and the right one to perform depends on the goal. A content audit can be compared to competitor content for a competitor audit, or it can be turned into a content evaluation, where the strategist rates each content according to specific goals. The content audit can then be repurposed as a report with prioritized types of content to create, edit, retire, or migrate to a new channel, all depending on the project.
7. Distribution
A designer must be aware of the ways in which content is consumed by people, and how content delivered through all channels must be planned and maintained.
8. Competitor analysis
What language and labels do they use? Any patterns emerging? How granular is their content? What content elements / attributes do they include? What content mediums are they using and how? What tone of voice do they use? What content do they leave out? What content are they translating? Review your peers’ content and learn some insights.
9. The renegade
Take a foray into designing thoughtful content outside your core specialization or unconventional content.
10. Design and Content Conferences
Attend conferences where content strategists and designers encourages conversation, collaboration, and cross-team discussion. It’s a wonderful opportunity to get up to date with what content strategy other designers in the industry are using and what’s working and what’s not.
