From strategy to action: how to make sure you create the right content

By Berulv Tøndel

Do you have well-defined strategies supported by your business goals but find it difficult to turn them into concrete content and design solutions for your website? You're not alone.

Many companies have a well-defined strategy for their digital communication, supported by benchmarking against competitors as well as set goals and mapping of target groups' needs and behaviour. Despite this, communication departments may feel that it's difficult to translate these into actions through content and design. Why? Well, because there are missing steps between strategy and action.

The challenge

Two areas that companies tend to struggle with are the content of key pages and the site structure. There's often a big gap between strategy and what exactly should be included on key pages, and there are many questions to consider. What messages should we include? How do we want to influence the website visitor? What do we want the visitor to think and do on a given page? Is the purpose of the page to deepen the visitor's knowledge about something, is it to create a better relationship between the company and the visitor, to convince the visitor to subscribe, request a quote for a service or get in touch? Or is the purpose simply to sell a product?

The solution

A clear purpose for each key page

Communication becomes more effective when we know what purpose a given page must fulfil. The purpose must take both the visitor's needs and the company's goals into account. Success comes when the two perspectives can be combined.

A scenario could be:

A company's goal is to recruit the right talent, who will stay for an extended period.
The visitor's — in this case, the job seeker's — need is to form an idea of what it's like to work at the company.

If we ensure that these two perspectives meet, we have a clear purpose for the page. In the above example, effective key content would specify why the visitor should join the company and communicate some proof points that support this, such as employee stories along with information about compensation, benefits, and business culture.

So, how do we make sure this happens?

The process

Use the Core page definition model

One of our best-proven methods for linking the content of a key page with the company's impact goals and the visitor's needs is called the Core page definition.

The core page model with business goals vs user needs

In the model, we declare the company's impact goals on one side and the website visitor's needs on the other. These need to be relatively detailed in order to help us further. You declare where the traffic comes from — preferably, you have web analytics data on this but, if not, you can make an assumption. You define what you want the visitor to do during and after the page visit. In the centre of the model, you list the content in the order that you consider to best meet impact goals and user needs.

Include content owners in the process

Larger companies preferably include content owners or subject matter experts when working on this model. This will help to make the content more precise and will, hopefully, ensure that the content owners and the communications team are on the same page.

Do everything in the right order

Should you tackle design or content first? Sometimes it's hard to know where to start. You should actually start with both in order to keep pace. But it is primarily the design that has dependencies to the content structure, not the opposite. Based on our experience in the matter, we recommend following these three steps:

First, you need to tackle the content. You should decide on outlines of the content structure early on. It's difficult to create a design if there's only a vague idea about what content will go on the page.
Next, you need to tackle key pages and work with the Core page definition model. This also applies when working with a design concept for a website — if you don't outline the content for at least a few key pages, it's not possible to deliver a fully satisfactory design concept. For example, design and UX for navigation on the website are completely dependent on having a content structure in place.
Finally, you can start working on the design. In this way, the design work is based on well-anchored content structure. The actual content (wording, images, links) can then be tweaked during the design process.