Content Strategy

Create content that caters to the needs and interests of target audiences and secondary user groups. Every piece of content should be well researched, written, edited, and copy edited whether the content is text, images, video, or audio. Perhaps most important, every piece of content should neatly fit into the information architecture; do not create orphan pages. Consider the following:

1. News: Choose a style guide appropriate to your content and your mission, vision, values. The AP Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, and APA  Style are among the top stylebooks. Every news article should have a standard set of elements: slug, headline, deck, date, byline, featured image, body text, and tags. Post fresh news content every day; keep track of it using an editorial calendar.
    
2. Visual Content: Use only high-quality images, videos, and infographics to enhance the visual appeal of the website and increase user engagement.
    
3. Testimonials: Feature testimonials from students, alumni, faculty, and staff to build trust, highlight culture, and demonstrate the impact of being a member of your community.
    
4. Accessibility: High-quality content is accessible. Every image should have alternative text. Every video should have closed captions and a transcript. Learn more about creating good content on accessibility.columbia.edu.
    
5. Social Media: Integrate social media posts on the website and be sure that branding and key messages are consistent across platforms.

Ensure content is optimized for search engines to improve visibility and organic traffic and to maximize digital marketing efforts. Conduct keyword research regularly to identify most-used search terms and incorporate them strategically into page titles, subheadings, meta tags, alt text, captions, and body copy. Perform keyword gap analyses often to understand how you compare to top competitors. Content that is not accessible will have a negative impact on SEO.

Regularly review, update, and unpublish content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and freshness. Remove outdated information, update faculty and staff profiles, and create a content publishing schedule to ensure a consistent flow of new content, particularly on key landing pages.

Contact forms and surveys encourage visitors to share suggestions, concerns, and inquiries. They are also a great way to keep users engaged and establish dialogue.

Decide which tools you will use to measure success and set up training for your team. Gather data on user behavior, traffic sources, popular content, underperforming pages, and issues that negatively impact SEO. Analyze these insights to refine content strategy, improve user experience, and measure the effectiveness of your content.

Establish a governance structure, editorial process, and content quality standards to ensure consistency, accountability, and alignment with the content strategy across all platforms and communications vehicles. Assign roles and responsibilities for content creation, review, and publication.

Define roles and chain of command for the entire content production process. The roles and responsibilities listed below are very traditional. Many of these roles can be combined. Schedule a series of regular meetings for vetting content and check-ins.

Formalize an editorial process to professionalize and optimize your content, whether you have a full editorial team or only one person. All content should support the editorial mission. Decide who’s responsible for maintaining the editorial calendar, editing, fact checking, etc.

Editor in Chief
The buck stops with this lead editor, who sets the editorial missions and is responsible for all communications vehicles. They review and sign off on content, develop strategies, and manage all other editorial roles.

Executive Editor
The executive editor role is sometimes combined with either the managing editor or editor in chief role. Executive editors supervise the content creation process and coordinate all aspects of the production process, including liaising with printers and outside consultants.

Managing Editor
This role is indispensable as the managing editor directly supervises day-to-day operations. They determine the importance of content, decide where content is posted or published, assign content to specific content creators, edit content, manage staff and consultants, and keep everyone on schedule.

Copy Chief
The copy chief manages the credibility of your content, and therefore your reputation, by proofreading your content for grammar, punctuation, clarity, accuracy, fairness, wordiness, and completeness. For web publications, this role is often meted out to each content creator, meaning each creator copy edits their own content. This can result in a lack of consistent use of brand and style guides, but if you put an emphasis on socializing your guides—and make the guides easy to access—content creators should have no problem maintaining consistency.

Content Creators
Content creators produce the content that will be distributed across all of your platforms (i.e., newsletters, websites, social media, etc.). They are responsible for engaging your audiences by producing text, images, video, and audio that will increase traffic or engagement. In most organizations today, they conceive, research or fact check, create, and refine content throughout the production process.

Data Analyst
The data analyst will gather, clean, analyze, and create reports on the data that will drive your content decisions. Data analysts track, research, and interpret data to help you decide what content to create, how often to produce it, where to post or publish it, and when not to post.