Mark Hopkins, Client Services Director at digital strategy agency ORM, talks about the importance of content strategy and the potential pitfalls of not placing content at the heart of any digital project

1. Mark Hopkins, Client Services Director, ORM
30 June 2015
#DigitisePS
Content with your content?

2. Why content?

3. Need or marketing idea >
Internal approval >
Brief >
IT implementation or agency >
Design/build >
Content load >
Test >
Deploy

4. But…
What about mobile?
What about search?
Who is you audience?
What is your data telling you?
Is your content working?
Is it frequent enough?
Of value?

5. We’ve got to get away from this…
No personalisation, bad UX Old-style marketing… no value to me.
Lengthy article templates, not mobileNo hierarchy of content; hard to find valuable content

6. And get to this…
Content merchandising; consumable Brilliant narrative; instructive; persuasion architecture
Brilliant, UX, content that breathes and is succinctPoor UI, but valuable content distributed well

7. So what is Content Strategy
and why is it important?

8. Content is…
Email
WebVideo
Social
Mobile
Tablet
DM

9. “The strategic planning and management of
content creation for maximum effectiveness.
“It involves elements of UX: designing content that
is user friendly and meets user needs”
@contentchampion

10. It’s now more integral
Old digital
Brief
Project
SOW
Design Develop
Content
load
Testing Deploy
Content Content
New digital
ContentContent
Brief Discovery
Content
load
Testing DeployDevelop
Project
SOW
Define Maintain
Content ContentContent
AuditMapping

11. It is also now a discipline

12. So why is this relevant to me
in my professional services role?

13. Case study:
• In 2013 I worked on a global template for a large Professional Services firm.
• The brief was innovation focused: to push the boundaries of UX
and browsing behaviour.
• The result was a set of wireframes and designs that did that…

14. There were, however, problems:
• Content wasn’t part of the planning
• Each member firm had to load and prepare their own content
• The site had multiple breakpoints, which made hyphenation a common problem
• They had under-estimated the state of their content and its lack of preparedness
• In short, they had a site – with no content

15. The result…
• In short, content wasn’t part of the planning… and it cost US$$$
to fix and maintain
• Meanwhile, the current site sat untouched and continued in its
place for another 9 months

16. The key is to make a content the focus
of your marketing activity

17. Digital consumers are losing patience:
• Since 2000, attention has dropped to eight seconds
• 40% leave sites that don’t load in 3 seconds
• 43% of us abandon emails if they take > 30 seconds to read
• 32% tune out if you don’t make the point in 15 seconds
• And, most worryingly, 74% lose interest in presentations if the key point
is not made in 60 seconds

18. Customer expectations are higher than ever before:
• They want analysis – so consider time to market
• They want content that engages AND inspires – so think about relevancy
• They want it distributed to them, when they want it – so think about channel and time
• The want it where they frequent and on device they prefer – so consider off-siting
• They want it in a format that makes it digestible, memorable and useful
• Lastly, tone of voice. Pick a consistent narrative that explains you
• Importantly, set your standards and stick to them

19. Heard about the Marshmallow test?

20. How do you make your business
focus on content?

21. ZMOT
As this amazing book by Google demonstrates, digital content done well will
win the battleground for micro moments in our daily lives

22. “Don’t make decisions related to
content based upon assumptions.
There are no mandates. Best practice
may not apply to you.”
@halvorson

23. Create rules…
• If you don’t know your audience, I.D. them
• If you don’t have content you’re proud of – pull it
• If I.T. are driving digital change, make sure they don’t have the keys
• Metrics: if you’re not set up to monitor behaviour – start now
• Place content and data people in your marketing function
• Consult a specialist… content strategies, done well pay for themselves

24. • Audit
• Personas
• Make story-telling a focus
• Tone of voice
• Take ownership – process
• Create rules for your comms
• Personalisation
• Comms architecture
• Content mapping
• Content calendar
• Contact strategy
• Search
10 differences a content strategist can make

25. A few last words…

26. “If the holy grail is a customised and
personalised experience at every touch point,
then you are only going to achieve this with the
help of a content strategist.”
– Digital marketing magazine

27. “No one’s going to care about the
implementation, it’s the content
we’ll be judged on.”
> Marketing Director in this room

28. “No-one remembers the facts,
they only every remember the story”

29. Thank you
Mark Hopkins, Client Services Director, ORM
mark.hopkins@ormlondon.com
ormlondon.com
@ormlondon

30. Case study:
• McKinsey’s Insights app.
• It has been downloaded 500k times.
• It serves me content to my preference during
my commute times.
• It is served in a consumable format and is
extremely well written with takeaways,
infographics and video.