What Is Content Strategy and Why Do You Need It?

Author, consultant, and speaker Kristina Halvorson is the Web’s most passionate content strategy evangelist. Dan Levy interviewed her for Sparksheet about magazine websites, corporate blogs and her “love-hate relationship” with content marketing. Abridged with his permission. Read the rest of the interview here.

Halvorson is the CEO of Brain Traffic and author of Content Strategy for the Web.

Let’s start with the question you’ve probably answered a million times. What is content strategy?

Well, I started out as a freelance Web writer. And what I quickly started realizing on the projects I was working on was that by the time they called me it was sort of at the end of the project. And it would be a disaster.

There would be 10 times more work than they originally scoped for, which also meant 1/10th of the time in which to do it. The source material they thought would work hadn’t been looked at very carefully. It was outdated or redundant or not very useful. The information architecture wasn’t detailed enough or didn’t give enough direction about what the messaging hierarchy should be. I could go on and on.

What would end up happening is I would either write what I could, as quickly as I could, and then not want to put it in my portfolio, or the client would decide at the last minute to just retrofit whatever content they currently had and then try to fix it later.

So I started asking questions and offering ideas about how things can be avoided the next time. I told them that if they would give me a few more weeks, I would do the work to get everything better prepared before starting to write.

And what I didn’t know at the time was that I was backing into something called content strategy.

While “content” has become a media, marketing and Internet buzzword, “content strategy” is still relatively obscure. Why do you think that is?

Content strategy has been around since the Web. It’s just that for Web professionals and practitioners it has been easier and more interesting to focus on the visual, on front- and back-end programming, on user experience design and now on application development.

All those questions that I said were left unanswered are not very exciting. No one wants to think about them. But those are the questions that are going to bridge the gap between the high-level strategy that’s been defined and the tactics that people will be able to use to implement that strategy.

The question is whether those tactics are really realistic with the time and the money and the internal resources that they have.

In a presentation at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo, you quoted authors John Gerzema and Ed Lebar who wrote, “Brands are now used more than they are preferred.” Does it follow that branded content is only valuable insofar as it is useful to the consumer?

I have such a love-hate relationship with content marketing. Pushing people to do better content that audiences care about is great. Pushing people to acquire or create content and then try to get people into their site because of their content is doing those organizations a disservice.

If you’re an agency, yes. You need to be creating some sort of intellectual property to demonstrate your expertise. If you’re an e-commerce site, yes. You need to be creating content that positions you as having useful, usable, relevant information about whatever it is you’re purchasing.

But if you’re a construction company, your website is a one-stop hit where customers go to check out your credentials before engaging you in conversation. Why would you want them to keep coming back?

The first time I contacted Joe Pulizzi it was because I was so incensed by the title of his book, Get Content, Get Customers. I called him up and said, “You can’t just tell people to get content. That’s not how it works.” You can’t just go to the content website and load it on the content dolly!

I think that continued conversation between content marketing proponents who are saying, “This is what you need to do,” and content strategists who are saying, “This is how you need to do it and what you need to think about first,” is really critical.

Dan Levy is the editor of Sparksheet.

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