Content Strategy: 7 Practical Tips for Getting Stakeholder Buy In

By Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval) Aug 19, 2010 Comments

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Content Strategy (CS) as a topic has gained significant recognition and momentum, but that doesn't mean all stakeholders get it, nor that they will buy-in to your CS-driven priorities. Here are 7 road-tested tips on how to make that happen more successfully.

The What exactly is Content Strategy? question continues to enjoy lively debate in the blogosphere and in niche listservs. Nevertheless, most of us clearly agree that we need to think about content in a methodical and strategic way, using planning and processes to create and maintain its value.

Needs More Evident Than Execution

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Web writer, marketing officer, IT freak or UX designer — we all know our users are coming to our sites for content. And we’d better be prepared to plan, create, deliver and maintain our content so that our users keep coming back for more — or successfully complete the task at hand.

You’re probably reading this article because you’re trying to decide how to introduce CS to your stakeholders — or you’re encountering some resistance to implementing one. When you have a small website, it’s possible to create, implement and maintain a CS. But, what if you’re managing a huge website with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages? What if your website’s content development is decentralized, like so many organizations — so that you have very little control over content creation and deployment?

How do you:

Create a content strategy for others to follow?
Ensure delivery of content in a timely fashion?
Implement a governance policy?

7 Tips from the Road

I was recently on vacation (Toronto and Niagara Falls) and thinking about the topic of this article — how to convince your stakeholders to buy into content strategy. What became clear to me in the more than 1,000 miles we drove with our three kids was that planning a vacation and then making sure everyone is happy is similar to getting buy-in on CS from your stakeholders.

Seven strategies for convincing your stakeholders to buy-in to your content strategy (or how to have a successful vacation with three kids):

1) Ask for Feedback

Our kids really liked it when we involved them in the planning. From looking at the maps, to picking out where we would eat, or deciding the order of activities of the day, we got a much more positive response when they felt included.

My assumption is that you’ve talked to many of these stakeholders before you wrote the overall CS for your website, but it’s possible that you had those conversations with executive-level folks, and never heard from the people in the trenches actually producing or maintaining the content.

If so, get to know them, and well; they will make or break your success. That means meeting with them individually, or in small groups and explaining things clearly. On the other hand, if you’re running a large shop, delegate those meetings to your employees, so that every group has one point person they can contact with questions and concerns.

2) Show Them Where They're Headed

We found that if our kids saw pictures of Niagara Falls and the water park nearby, they got much more excited than when we just said, "We're heading to a hotel." Similarly, you should be prepared to demonstrate why your stakeholders should adopt the CS when you have that first meeting.

It might be worthwhile to take a wasteland part of your website (checking in with the owners of that content first) and applying the CS to those pages. Build a case study for why the CS improved certain critical scores; prove that following the CS makes it easier to create and maintain that section of the site. Then, you’ll be able to show why it makes sense to implement the CS.