Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing February 2006
	Strategy How To Build A Content Strategy By Randall Litchfield Content decisions are rooted in the very value proposition of a business - its expertise. Your customers see you as an expert in a particular field and value your knowledge. The purpose of a content strategy is to package this expertise for wider distribution and deeper penetration. Here are the strategic considerations you need to make in building that content: Match your expertise to your audience’s interests – This is another way of saying 'know your audience'. Before preparing a lot of content it pays to sit down with representative members of your community and ask pointed questions. The question isn’t so much "What do you want to receive from me?" because this can skew the answer. It is "What do you need to know that could make that portion of your life that I am involved with, better?" Define your turf – With this feedback, you can stake out your content turf. Again, this is a balance of what you know and what your community wants to learn. In the interest of focus, the boundaries of the turf may not be everything you know. Or, the boundaries may include adjacent areas outside your specific expertise but that you include anyway in the interest of one-stop shopping. It’s a judgement call that only you can make and a big reason why this requires strategy. Identify the 'buckets' – Just as your favourite newspapers and magazines organize themselves into regular departments, columns and features, you need to do this with your publishing efforts. Human beings are creatures of habit. They like to know when and how often something is coming as well as generally what to expect inside. Build to personalize – Communities, by definition, consist of like-minded individuals. But this rarely means the absence of diversity. Most communities have segments, and each segment will have somewhat different content preferences. Think of your content library as a big set of Lego, able to assume many forms and meet many needs after some reassembly. Make content an investment you can repurpose - Newsletter articles, for example, needn’t be ephemeral. They can be archived on web sites to build rich libraries of information. It takes years to build deep, content-rich web sites because you have to do it one brick – er, article – at a time.