Actually Completing a Real Enterprise Content Strategy for the Entire Enterprise and Getting it Right

 The leaders of this workshop, Kevin P. Nichols and Rebecca Schneider, led participants through understanding what enterprise content strategy is, knowing what needs to be done to sell that strategy, and developing a guide to create your own enterprise content strategy. 

Enterprise content strategy is more than getting the right content to the right user at the right time. It's elevated to making content meaningful and engaging, aligning with business objectives, relies on performance, increases profits, decreases costs, and please employees and customers. It positions content as a business asset worthy of governance. 

In short, enterprise content strategy is a commitment to position all organizational content for success so it can grow every consumer relationship with the brand.

There are lots of excuses to not adopt an enterprise content strategy. Not enough resources can be solved via outside consultants. No money can be resolved by pointing out potential ROI. Entropy can be countered by pointing at competitors. Not seeing problems often means issues aren't being communicated. "More important things" can be countered with the fact that a better content experience is a better user experience, which brings in more business. 

A good content strategy is like a swan on a lake. It may look smooth, but you don’t see all the work going on underneath, behind the scenes. 

As Dawn Stevens explained in her morning workshop, first, you have to know about the content you have. Some things may not be relatively apparent. Content over the years could have been developed on a variety of platforms and stored in many different places. 

Content types make the world go 'round. The introduce consistency across the organization. Content types should describe the intent of the information. They insure you meet audience needs, inform content requirements, and enable creation of reusable content. 

Content types are not a format. 

Define your content types before you select a tool vendor. Why? If you don't, vendors will try to push their pre-defined content types on you. 

A competitive audit investigates what cool things your competitors are doing. You should have 3-5 direct competitors, no more, and one outlier. Define what aspects of content you want to review, such as what's provided for product releases, their technical documentation, and their marketing content. The outlier shouldn't be in your industry, but doing interesting things. 

Your content strategy should be based on our stakeholder interviews, your content inventory, and your competitive audit. It should emphasize practicality, focus on corporate strategy initiatives. implement a few shorter-term objectives, identify a performance strategy, create a governance structure, and identify immediate next steps.

Governance is enabled by people, tools and well-defined processes. Requires executive support. If you don't get it, you'll find yourself eventually back where you started. Executives set the tone. Then also need cross-organizational involvement and commitment. 

The point is not to make things more bureaucratic. The point is to keep everyone in the loop for major decisions.