Content Strategy: Keep Your Eye on the Hole

Flickr Creative Commons photo by David Joyce

Anyone who has ever played a round with me knows I'm a dismal golfer.

But there's one piece of golfing advice that has served me well: When you’re standing over a putt, your final sustained look should be at the hole. Not the ball.

This same advice also applies to content strategy.

In this case, the hole is your targeted audience. Those are the people you are trying to influence, engage, inform, and, ultimately, drive to donate, buy, advocate, or act.

Yet, a lot of content folks aren’t really taking a long, sustained look at those audiences – their attitudes, interests, motivators and preferences -- when crafting messaging and editorial calendars. 

Quite simply, too many people are keeping their eyes the ball. But they should be focused on the hole.

The reasons for this are many and largely understandable. Too little time. Preconceived, and likely misguided notions of exactly who your audience is. The quickening pace of change which means what connected with your audience two years ago completely misses the hole today. 

Really knowing your audience well takes some work. But it's far from impossible.

If you take the time to follow these three simple steps, you start sinking more putts with your content:

1. Work your beat

Back in my days as a newspaper reporter, I would spent the first two hours of each workday checking in with sources. I’d go from office to office in city hall, chatting up everyone from the administrative assistants to department heads. It was through that effort that I got a much better sense of what was going on. And it often was quite different from the stories chronicled by the city’s press releases.

Approach your job like a beat reporter, talking with as many people in the organization, particularly those the front lines working directly with customers or donors you are trying to reach. 

2. Rely on analytics

There is just too much good technology out there to rely solely on your gut when it comes to content. Your gut still matters, so trust it. But verify.  Get to know your analytics team or tap an outside source for expertise.

Data can reveal a lot of nuance and details about the people you are trying to reach that can then inform your content strategy.

And on the back end, good data and metrics can give you a steady feed of what’s working and what’s not so you can course correct accordingly.

3. Create and update personas

Personas provide a readily accessible and detailed profile of the people you are most trying to reach. As a composite of your most important audiences, personas can keep your content on track and help others in your organization focus their efforts as well.  Further, the process of building those personas reveal tons of great insights that help the content team get a much clearer picture of the challenges and opportunities that others in the organizations face, and how great content can address them.  

If you're new to the world of personas, check out some sample personas we’ve worked on. You can find them in the online appendix to Modern Media Relations for Nonprofits.