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Content strategies

Content Strategy is about creating transparent, credible, informative content that enhances your organisation’s strategic goals while adding value to its target audiences. It implies that you recognise that communication is increasingly circular rather than linear, that engaging audiences is about conversation rather than message delivery.

An effective content strategy is one that acknowledges a number of realities:

• People are exposed to an ever-increasing amount of information through all sorts of media
• People’s time in any given day is a finite resource that is already mobilised by all sorts of activities
• People will give their time and attention to your content only if it is valuable/helpful to them, not on the basis of how important it is to you.

"  People will give their time and attention to your content only if it is valuable/helpful to them,
not on the basis of how important it is to you. "

Understanding your audience

Your target audience needs something. Whether their need is vague (e.g. obtain general information about an issue) or specific (e.g. understanding how your industry is impacted by a single policy measure), it is important that you understand their likely intent when accessing your content. What content will help them easily satisfy their need? What will they consider most useful, interesting or engaging? What are they most likely to be willing to share? These are some of the questions that should guide your content strategy. Understanding how they spend their time, what experiences will best motivate them to engage with your content and what will most likely turn them away from it (e.g. content that is too long or too complex to access) will also help you inform your content distribution decisions. In other words, putting yourself in your target audience’s shoes should be of primary concern to you.

Positioning your organisation as thought leader

“Thought leadership” sounds like an over-used expression in the EU advocacy circles, and it probably is. But it nevertheless remains a legitimate objective for any organisation which ambition is to influence the EU decision-making process. Defining your organisation’s thought leadership remit narrowly rather than broadly should help build credibility. In terms of content strategy, it starts with articulating clearly a positioning statement that specifies who your target audience is, what the core offering of the organisation is (what value it brings to the target audience), and possibly how different this is from what other players bring. This positioning statement should then be a permanent reference point each time your organisation produces a piece of content so as to ensure consistency, audience-focus and value-add.

 Enabling effective social media engagement

Defining a content strategy is beneficial to all your organisation’s communication activities. It is most notably so when it comes to social media engagement. Social media is highly competitive: not only is your target audience attention disputed by competing organisations, it is disputed by anyone who has something interesting to say about anything. With so many conversations taking place it is vital to understand which are the ones you can initiate/participate to that will most likely attract and hopefully retain their attention. In such context, a content strategy will help you define your target audience needs and interests, the niche on which you can be considered an authoritative voice, the tone you should be using and the array of platforms most efficient to engage with them.