EPISODE 156 | Derek DeWitt, communications specialist for Visix
Whether you’ve already started mapping out your content strategy or are still looking for inspiration, this episode is packed with actionable advice on creating a comprehensive content strategy and turning that vision into a practical content plan.
From defining goals and identifying stakeholders to understanding your audience and crafting content calendars, we break it all down into manageable steps. Listen for insights on tools, metrics and storytelling techniques to make your messaging more relevant, impactful and efficient. This episode will give you the framework and ideas you need to hit the ground running in the new year and set your team up for success.
- Understand the difference between a content strategy and a content plan
- Learn the different elements that need to be mapped out in both
- Discover how this process can streamline workflows and increase engagement
- Explore lots of online tools to help you at the macro and micro levels
- Get lots of content ideas to start building your plan
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Transcript
Derek DeWitt: It’s the end of the year, and now it’s time to plan out what’s next for your content team in the new year. Well, frankly, you’ve probably already started this process, but nonetheless, here are some ideas on how to create the most effective content strategy and content plan as possible, as well as a consistently improving system that makes things better and easier each time you do it. Content planning and content strategy are somewhat different things, though they do overlap, and we’ll talk about both.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Digital Signage Done Right. I remind you that you can subscribe, you can review us, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.
If you are a DSDR listener, then you’re probably familiar with some of the basic tips that we give on how to refresh your signage, like clean out and refresh designs that have been running a long time; change your layouts, your themes and background artwork; put in some new auto-updating content or stream a new feed; and make sure your team is up to date with training on newer features in the software. But today we want to cover a more high-level approach discussing content strategies and content plans.
Content Strategy
So first, let’s talk about content strategy. The creative agency Column Five says they found that brands that have trouble making their content strategy effective, don’t have the skills and resources necessary to implement it correctly (or fully), or they don’t have a complete strategy, or sometimes they don’t have a strategy at all.
Now, first, you need to get your stakeholders on board as early as possible. This helps you generate objectives, brainstorm ideas, gather data and get early buy-in for your strategy. Some people might include designers and photographers or copywriters, videographers, marketing communications and HR folks, internet and social media managers, the C-suite, department heads and line managers, subject experts for campaigns and, of course, all of your digital signage contributors. Basically, anybody who’s gonna have anything to do with your messaging throughout the year.
Then you need goals. Every content strategy starts with goals. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve first and then figure out the steps to support those goals. Content Five has a handy content strategy checklist you can use, and there’s a link to that in the transcript. So, think about your goals. Are they realistic? Are they relevant? And can they be measured?
Which, of course, brings up measurement. How are you going to measure the effectiveness of your communications? What constitutes success? What does a win look like? You’ll probably need KPIs, projections and other metrics to be able to really drill down and get the kind of granular insights that you need. These insights help you justify your decisions and adjust as needed, as well as give you benchmarks to strive for. With good measurements in place, you also get solid ROI, which is vital for marketers and communicators alike.
Next, you have to know your audience. This means actually collecting data on them, not just guessing. You might ask them questions directly using platforms like SurveyMonkey or Tally or Typeform. You might want to do some market research using AnswerThePublic, which is a useful website, or the Marketer’s Almanac on Think with Google, which is another website. You can look at web traffic to see where on your website people go and where they linger. You can find trending websites out there on the web using Panda, and you can use things like the Intercom Blog to get lots of other ideas and helpful resources.
Anyway, you get all that information, however you do it, and then you use that to create target personas. And then from there, content themes. This helps you communicate far more effectively. And by the way, according to Column Five, only 55% of marketers actually use personas. So, if you start using them, this is gonna give you a huge leg up on 45% of the competition. What you’re basically doing here is taking what you’ve learned about your audience and matching it to what they’re interested in.
Then think about the communication journey. In retail, it’s known as the buyer’s journey, and it’s not really that dissimilar. Your content should deliver the right message at the right time and move people through the content itself towards that ultimate goal, which is some kind of an action that you want them to take, an action that you can then measure. Figure out how to move people to that final stage of the journey.
A very effective way to do this is to use storytelling, which requires some planning. Every single act of communication should, at the very least, support the overall story of your organization and your brand. But also think about other kinds of narratives as well. For example, if part of your mission is that we create a supportive environment, but then you only have messages that are deadlines and telling people what they shouldn’t do, then you’re kind of sending out the wrong message; it doesn’t mesh with your narrative.
Think about which channels are best for which content and/or which subsets of your audience. Obviously digital signage, sure, especially for people at the physical location, but what about people working from home? Is the content also relative to a wider more general audience? Do you want it to be? If so, maybe social media. If social media, which kind? Don’t just say TikTok because it’s in the news all the time. If your audience isn’t on TikTok, don’t waste your energy doing things for that platform. Figure out which channels you might want to use in advance.
Think about the most efficient ways to distribute all of your communications, and create designs that might work across different channels and platforms that can be adapted to the different formats. And yeah, you probably have to think about budget. If you can do it all in-house, great. But you might need to plan for outside help with graphic design or video editing services or just software subscriptions to help you create your visual messages. A good content strategy helps you better allocate that budget before a single dollar has even been spent.
Then you set up your tools and your infrastructure. You should have a content calendar, some way to keep an up-to-date document of some kind that all relevant parties have access to, which means it’ll probably be cloud-stored. This will come into play when you get to the content plan and help you schedule what’s gonna publish where and when. For now, try out some tools and find the ones that are best for your team. It can be something as simple as Google Calendar, but there are other helpful tools out there on the web that you can use as well, like something called CoSchedule.
Now, think about the content process. While you’re not creating machine parts, there still are several steps involved in getting a piece of content out there to your audience. So, divide that whole process into those steps and then make sure that the right people are in charge of each step. We’re talking designing, scheduling and publishing, measuring success, documenting those results and then sharing feedback with the team. Make sure everyone knows who owns what and what kind of approval processes are in place. Everything should be so clear that a new hire could come in and, in just a day or two, get up to speed. This will become integral to your content plan, which we’ll talk about shortly.
You’ll also need to create a task list that can be checked off as items are completed, so nobody ends up duplicating work that’s already been done. And make sure that the right people have access to it or, at the very least, know who they should go to.
Now you’re ready to start coming up with actual ideas for actual content. Use the personas you created to kind of test out ideas. This helps focus the brainstorming process. Now, one of the best things you can do is to tell a story that only you can tell or tell it in a way that only you can tell it. Another way to approach some content is to find ways to frame it as, like, a problem and then a solution. This helps your audience make a decision and hopefully take that call to action. Or you can teach people something, either information they didn’t have before or how to accomplish a goal. Again, think about, always, getting them to perform that action.
And make sure you’re telling the right stories to the right groups. If you send out messaging about how to cook the perfect steak to a bunch of vegans, they’re probably not gonna thank you for that, and the action that they end up taking will be to ignore the rest of your content because clearly it’s not relevant for them.
Or you know, you might take old stories and kind of give them a spit shine. Tell people something they already know, but maybe need reminding of, and tell that in a new way. Or maybe there’s something your audience is having difficulty coming to grips with. So, explain it in a really simple, straightforward, easy-to-digest way.
Now, these days, empathy is big, a trend being championed by younger people in your audience, and I think that’s great. Anything that shows or encourages empathy will probably be received well. Stories that are somehow meaningful and tap into emotions also now tend to be more successful. Anything that shows that you understand one of the most basic truths about communications, that it’s people talking to people, with all their complexities and neuroses and worries and desires and ambitions and the whole package.
Now, of course, all of this still needs to fit within your brand guidelines. If you don’t already have a brand style guide for content creators, then you should probably make one. This includes things like logos and colors and taglines, but also maybe more abstract things like voice. One of the most important things you can do is to remain consistent through all of your communications.
And whenever possible, think about how you can get something across visually. A bunch of bullet points with data is boring, but an eye-catching chart or graph with that same data is not. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words or more, and there are many image bank resources out there on the web like Pixabay. And there are dozens of AI image generators as well and more all the time, and they just keep getting better and better and better. So, you could actually create some unique bespoke content in just a matter of moments.
But you can never forget that the goal, ultimately, is to get your audience to take an action. So, make sure taking that action is as easy as possible. Now, QR codes are a great way to not only give people more detailed information than a particular communication channel like digital signage might be able to get across, but it also can take them right to an online webpage where they can sign up or make a reservation or answer a question or get a coupon or whatever it is you’re prompting them to do.
You’ll also want to find ways to maximize your content reach. Can some of those digital signage messages be adopted to a social media feed or vice versa? If all your social content might be relevant for people at your location, maybe just add a social media board to your digital signage or at least a social media feed.
Make sure to document all of this and keep that documentation up to date and readily accessible by everybody who needs to be able to access it. Again, figure out your overall distribution plan and all the channels you’ll be using throughout the whole year, and then which metrics you’ll use to measure their effectiveness.
But also, don’t forget to be flexible, so that you can be agile as new information comes in or as things change on the ground. So, all these considerations are your content strategy, your overall plan of attack. It’s what winning looks like, how we’re gonna know we won, and how we’re going to accomplish that win, in rather broad terms.
Content Plan
A content plan is a little bit different. This is where these generalized ideas from the strategy become truly a detailed step-by-step process. It’s the how to the what and the why of the content strategy. To use a military analogy, the content plan might be considered to be the tactics that will be used to further the overall strategy.
So, obviously you need to have that content strategy first. This gives you that macro view, the overall objectives and the supporting, ancillary and additional subgoals. So, in your strategy, you’ve outlined stakeholders, goals, success measures, audiences, personas, visual themes, channels, budget tools and roles, and hopefully you’ve also generated some content ideas around these things. Now, all of these things are used to generate the content plan.
As always, you have to constantly keep in mind the overall goals, and then you need to come up with the steps needed to achieve those goals. The whole idea of the content plan is goal oriented, so first, keep in mind those goals. Then next comes the target audiences, then which topics you’ll cover, and finally, timelines for getting it all done. And at the very end, a detailed day-to-day plan for exactly what will be done, when and by whom.
Your content plan should list each piece of content or campaign detailing the goal, the audience, the call to action (which is almost certainly gonna be tied to how you measure success), any design parameters like copy, themes and imagery that you know in advance, and, of course, where and when it will be published.
Make sure you list who’s responsible for each step in getting that content from concept to completion, and who is gonna gather the ROI and then present those results. This is the essence of a content plan versus a content strategy. Everything you worked out earlier now has to inform each individual content piece.
And quite a bit of that is going to end up being calendaring tasks. Most organizations plan things out on a week-by-week basis, so this let’s say gives you 52 content periods to fill. Some items will be based on actual calendar dates like holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, the spring equinox, the last day of school, certain particular deadlines. These things are easy to calendar, because you’ll probably know in advance the date on which they happen and then can work backwards from there to create an awareness raising campaign as that date approaches. Then there’s all your recurring content like wellness messaging or safety messaging, for example, which are always relevant.
Next, there are things that your organization does every year, like a holiday party or a charity drive or a fun run. If you do something like a fun run every year, when do you do it? How far in advance should you start messaging about it? Do you attend any kind of industry events, or do you host any? When should that messaging start? Will you do countdowns towards the event to get people excited? Do you want to encourage participation or are you just letting people know? If you’re just letting them know, what are they supposed to do with that? Do you need to create QR codes? What about separate landing pages on the web for those QR codes to go to? This is the kind of stuff that needs to be listed out in the content plan for each piece or campaign along with the goal, the audience and all the other things we’ve talked about already.
All this stuff being listed in your plan may seem kind of overwhelming, but you can start things off at the beginning with placeholders in your calendar and then develop the details for each one over time. You don’t have to have every single hour of the next year mapped out by January 15th. And a calendar is really useful. You put all this stuff in the calendar even when you don’t have specific dates, you can have a range of dates for something. This way, you can see very quickly that you have a steady stream of content, and you can also see if you have any content holes or if you have any choke points where maybe there’s too much going on in your communications. Consistency is really key.
Now, at this point in the plan, you probably filled up a lot of those 52 weekly content periods already, so what’s the rest of the content gonna look like? Is there flexibility in the plan to allow last-minute additions? If not, why not? If so, how will they be handled, and who will handle them?
The whole idea is to allow that content strategy you worked so hard on to get implemented in a goal-oriented way that is focused and streamlines the entire process for everyone involved. You and your team can track progress, adjusting as need be, and everyone is answerable for their part in the overall plan.
Then as the year or whatever you’re using as a planning period starts to wind down, you then need to evaluate how things went – where were there successes, where there were challenges – and then you’ll make a new strategy and plan for the next period, incorporating everything you learned from the previous one. Now, if you’re doing this right, this evaluation process will be shorter and shorter over time as you approach the optimal balance of content and workflows.
And so it goes, on and on and on forever. A constant cycle of strategy, plan, evaluation, optimization, adjustment and then a new cycle. This makes the entire job more pleasurable for the people who are doing it and gives your audience the most interesting, relevant and engaging content possible. And after all, isn’t that the real point of doing all this work in the first place?
So, there you have it, taking an entire year and chopping it into manageable bite-sized chunks, first by creating a content strategy and then specifying steps to implement and actualize the things in that strategy through your content plan. Here’s hoping your next year is a very successful one and, at the end of it, you will have so much information that the year following will be even more successful.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. I remind you again that there is a transcript on the Visix website under resources where you can find lots of helpful links to things that were talked about in this episode.