 
# Content Strategy for Learning Content

Erick Vera

with

Sarah Meiches, James Slaton, John Koch,

Renu Jinturkar
© 2018 Adobe Systems Incorporated and its licensors. All rights reserved.

This content is protected under copyright law, furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe Systems Incorporated assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in the informational content contained in this content.

Adobe Systems Incorporated, 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, California 95110, USA.

## Why we wrote this book

There's a ton of books and guides out there that will teach you all about content strategy and walk you through all the tools and methods of building out a content strategy for your needs. This ain't that.

This book is about how the content strategy team in Creative Cloud Learn at Adobe created a content strategy to support our next-gen Learning Experience. Along the way, we picked up some super-groovy new ideas about strategies for content strategy for learning content.

So, while we're not going to go teach you a ton of dry models and procedures, we are going to share what we learned and what worked for us. Heck, you might even learn a thing or two.

### Who we are

We are the Creative Cloud Learn team and we're pretty awesome (and modest). We're obsessed with producing amazing learning experiences that help our customers use our products. Our content not only meets our customers' needs, but it's also delivered where they are.

Everyone on this team had a part in creating and implementing our content strategy, with each of them adding their expertise to the creation of this playbook. More specifically, we're a team of superheroes with amazing superpowers:

John Koch aka The Master Planner

Superpower: A mild-mannered production manager with over 20 years of experience working with content, John juggles content types, production dates, and target languages while providing directions to content production newbies.

Sarah Meiches aka The Silver Sleuth

Superpower: An intrepid marketer turned content strategist, Sarah's been the trenches of content sourcing and distribution for years. She figures out where all our content is and where it should go. Content doesn't get to the right place without her.

James Slaton aka Communicator REX

Superpower: Is he a spy? Is he a super-soldier? Is he a product manager? Who knows for sure, but James can talk to anyone and get the answers he wants. Our understanding of our customer's needs comes from him.

Erick Vera aka The Velvet Hammer

Superpower: For more than 20 years Erick's been in the content business. With an awesome stealth, he moves all the cogs behind the scenes to make content strategy, development, and delivery possible. He fights the battles needed to get content to our users. 

### How to use this book

This is book is designed to lead you through the thought process and frameworks we created to deliver the content comprising the Adobe Learning Experience. You can use it to understand the reasoning behind what CC Learn delivers, or you can use this as a guide to help you build your own content strategy. To help you out, we divided this book into sections:

Why content strategy?

Read this part if you want to understand why we created a content strategy in the first place.

Build your strategy

This section is where we outline our framework and processes for building a comprehensive content strategy for learning content—it's cooler than it sounds.

Market your strategy

This section explains how we determine what kind of learning customers are looking for, and how we make sure the people find what they're looking for.

Improve your strategy

This section explains the content-strategy cycle and tools we use to constantly review and improve our plans.

Part 1:

Why Content Strategy?

## What is content strategy?

Okay, we promised that this playbook wouldn't teach you lots of models and outline lots of procedures to create a full strategy plan; however, if you're going to get any use out of this playbook, you'll need a little background in the fundamentals. This section will quickly walk you through the basics of what content strategies are and how they're made. We'll keep it short and light, we promise. (This time we really mean it!)

Right, here's the deal, people, the world is moving pretty fast. When someone is trying to figure out if your product/service is worth their time, their eyeballs don't stay in one place for very long. So it's crucial that customers have the ability to learn anytime, anywhere. That's where your content strategy comes in. It's the rules and processes you use to figure out what content gets made, where it goes, and who sees it.

Content strategy is the rules and processes you use to figure out what content gets made, where it goes, and who sees it.

The biggest benefit of a solid content strategy is that it gets the right content to the right people at the right time, and for the right reasons. It makes sure that content is reusable, scalable, and measurable. It also ensures that you get the maximum return on your content investment. By properly managing your content, you can increase efficiencies, reduce production time, and enable learning to provide more opportunities for users to interact with your content over time, thus improving retention and performance.

A good content strategy meets customers where they are. It is a clear, well-structured learning path that provides relevant content and examples. It makes sure the content that reaches your customer creates active engagement and a hands-on experience.

### Why you need a content strategy

"The best people are the ones that understand content. They're a pain in the butt to manage, but you put up with it because they're so good."

\- Steve Jobs

So, you hear you need a content strategy... but why? Let's start with some basic questions: Do you know who your customers are? Do you have content? Did you answer yes to both those questions (or did you read them)? If so, now ask yourself, do you have the right content? Do you know the content and type of content your customers want and/or are looking for?

If you answered YES to all of these questions, then, great, you have the perfect strategy—go have a latte. If you answered NO to any of these questions, then you need a content strategy. Here's why:

Not the right content.1

If your content isn't useful or is irrelevant to the people you hope to reach, you won't catch their attention or engage with them, and, yikes, they won't use your content.

Not the right people.1

How will you know who your customers are, how to find them, or get your content to them if you haven't defined and prioritized who they are?

Not the right time(s).1

If you don't understand your audience's questions or tasks, you won't know when they need your content or what kind of content they do need.

Not the right reasons.1

If you don't understand or can't explain your business goals as reasons for producing or sharing content, you're probably wasting your business's money. "Engagement" alone is no reason to produce content.

How do you put into action your company's goals and engage with your customers? The simple answer (or maybe not so simple) is that you create a content strategy. A content strategy defines how and why your content will be created, managed, and eventually archived or updated. It assists you in understanding the mindset, culture, and approach to satisfying your customer's needs in all the places they are searching for it.

"Behold, your content. Your business needs it. Your users want it. And yet no one seems quite sure what to do with it..."

— Content strategy for the web, second edition.

### How does a content strategy work?

How does content strategy work? Well, the answer can change depending on who you're talking to and what their goals are. Every good strategy needs to balance content needs with people needs.

Content needs should center on the substance and structure of your content; people needs should center on how your people, authors, and editors work with that content. All those needs are in service of a core strategy that defines what the content will be, how it will be structured, and how people will help drive the content life cycle.

Substance: what kinds of content do you need (topic, types, sources, etc.)? What messages does your content need to communicate to your audience?

Structure2: how is content prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed?

Workflow2: what processes, tools, and resources are required for content initiatives to launch successfully and maintain ongoing quality?

Governance2: how are key decisions about content and content strategy made? How are changes initiated and communicated?

.

### Benefits of a content strategy

Content strategy connects real content to real people. Most people believe the more content you have, the better, resulting in better selling opportunities, more user engagement, more help, more everything. But content is more or less worthless unless it supports key business objectives or fulfills users' needs.

  1. Less content is easier to manage.
  2. Less content is more user friendly.
  3. Less content costs less to create.

A well-crafted content strategy helps users learn more efficiently and provides hands-on experiences, and should be available anytime, anywhere. It allows you to leverage your development time better and more easily distribute content across multiple surfaces. It engages you with your customers wherever and whenever they need you.

* * *

1 Content Marketing Institute - Does Your Content Answer Searchers' Questions?

1 Content Marketing Institute - Does Your Content Answer Searchers' Questions?

 Content strategy for the web, second edition

## Case Study: The evolution of the CC Learn content strategy

In a practical sense, we employed the basic principles of content strategy to our body of learning content. Aligning all that content to a comprehensive strategy let us deliver content that met our company's goals and business objectives, increased the engagement with our learning materials, and saw an overall rise in our customer satisfaction ratings. So yes, we rule, but it wasn't easy.

Confession time, before 2016 there really wasn't any kind of strategy used for our learning material. It was created to sell features and seen as an extension of our marketing efforts.

That worked ok for a while, but then we started hearing a common refrain: "I can't figure out how to use this !@#@$ product!" Then we started hearing that customers stopped using our !@#$& products. Then we started thinking that maybe, just maybe, learning content should actually help you learn stuff instead of being a way to just sell you stuff.

We pride ourselves on being a data-driven company, so we started to listen to our data. Product usage data told us that beginners were not using the products. Traffic data for our learning material showed that people were not finding the stuff we had published to help them figure out how to use the products. Finally, data gathered from customer interviews told us that new users felt overwhelmed, intimidated, and couldn't figure out where to get what, which led to new users giving up and stop using our products.

In short, our content was failing to provide our customers and company with a successful return on investment:

  * Customers couldn't find the content they needed because there was just too much to search through
  * We were spending too much money producing content that no one was using
  * We had a ton of outdated and incorrect content on our site because we didn't have rules to determine when/if new content should be created

Step 1: Let's make our content more visible

Something had to be done and fast. Our first approach was to get more eyeballs on the content that could help struggling customers. So, a super-brilliant idea was proposed: "Hey let's rip-off YouTube!" Thus, playlists were born.

Our goal was to organize existing content into curated playlists around content themes to help users more easily find and identify the content they were looking for or that was related to their question.

What we did: First, we did an internal content audit. We dove deep into all our existing content to catalog exactly what we had and got rid of a ton of outdated stuff. Then we redesigned the website landing page to present curated playlists so people wouldn't be overwhelmed with too many choices when they first land on our pages. Finally, we organized content by topic. Goal no. 1: get people to see the content. Been there, done that, high fives all around! Goal No. 2: create a comprehensive learning path.

What we learned: Lo and behold! People started watching more content when it was easier to find. We also saw that people tended to watch more content when it was sequential. So, yay, more eyeballs meant everyone was happy, right? Well, no, we realized we had HUGE content gaps, especially with our beginner content. Interesting, right? Our beginner users were the ones who were struggling the most, and we didn't have a lot of stuff for them.

Step 2: Let's figure out what people want to learn

At this point, we realized we still didn't understand what our customers needed to be successful. We needed to understand what content was missing and deliver it in a way that users could follow. So, we came up with yet another incredibly awesome, super spectacular idea: "Let's talk to our customers.

What we did: First, we collected search term data from our search engine optimization team and traffic data from our analytics team. Then, we did an even deeper dive and more extensive content audit on our existing content to determine what content users were looking for, what content was outdated, and where we had gaps in our instructional learning path.

What we learned: We didn't have the right content to teach anyone much. Sure, we could show-off features, but since we never sat down and thought about actually teaching our customers, they were left with only a part of the story. They couldn't figure out how to use the whole product or could only do a few things. We needed a more comprehensive approach. So, our solution was: Learning Journeys!!! (patent pending).

Step 3: Build a content strategy and a team to support it

Yes, the solution to all our problems was a Learn Journey. Carefully crafted and marketed, it would offer the perfect model for wrapping up our content strategy in a pretty blue bow with polka dots. Well, not quite. Learn Journeys gave us a core strategy for workflow, governance, and structure, but we still lacked substance. For that, we needed to bring in the big guns from the industry.

What we did

We contacted trainers for all our major products and asked them to look at our library of content and see how effective it was in teaching our customers how to use our products. These were the right people to ask as they had been teaching our products to thousands of people for dozens of years. Then we asked them to create a series of new tutorials that would teach beginners how to use the whole product.

What we learned

People want to learn! We found that people were watching this new content way more than what we had there before, and they were engaging with all our content more. There was definitely a need for comprehensive training in our user base. However, we also learned that there were people who don't want to learn a lot, so the process is sort of organic and on-going. We need to keep checking in and filling out more of our Learn Journeys to reach more customers where they are.

The happy ending

Taking those learnings, we created a Content Development Team that brought the power of outside experts in-house to build right content, and we developed our Learn Journeys to make sure that the right content is delivered to customers at the right time.

Our process is still iterating and developing, but these are the core tools we still use:

Industry experts \- our instructors are the leading experts in their industry. Not only do they have extensive knowledge of the product from years of personal use, but they are in the field working with users and teaching them how to use our product. They are dialed-in to what a consumer needs and how to best give it to them.

SEO/Keyword Research \- working with SEO specialists allowed us to identify what customers were searching for on and off the Adobe site. They provide insights into the behind-the-scenes user information.

Analytics \- traffic and usage data helps us determine what content should be created and what content should be archived. Analytics also helps us understand where users are coming from, how much content they've seen, and how much time they're spending with our content.

Learn Journeys \- the organizing principle that we use to define learning goals, plan new content, and determine how content is distributed.

Part 2:

Build Your Strategy

## What's a Learn Journey?

When you want to learn something new you have to start somewhere, right? You have to figure out what you want learn and how much you need to know before can "do" something. With your goals in mind, you go find the resources that will help you figure out what you need to learn and then you start trying stuff out until you can actually accomplish your goal. That's your personal Learn Journey. It's the path you take from deciding what you need to learn all the way to the point where you feel confident enough to accomplish your goals.

Your personal Learn Journey starts with you deciding what you need to learn and continues to the point where you feel confident enough to accomplish your goals

Our job in content strategy is to figure out what a Learn Journey might look like for someone coming to our products. First, you have to figure out what's the best path for your customers that's going to encourage them to learn but not bore them with details because no matter where they start, everyone just wants to "do" something.

Even people who just want to learn something new, eventually want to use that knowledge (unless they're like really nerdy like us and that's, well, just sad). Then, you have to decide how to present content to customers so that what they're learning is moving them closer to their goals.

That's where the Learn Journey model comes in. Using this framework, you can break down a personal Learn Journey into learning stages. Then you can organize your content into each stage so that there is always content available to support a customer no matter where they were on their journey.

If you take a personal journey and break it down into its component stages, you'll have a model you can apply to any topic

### Learning stages

Although every learner is a snowflake, everyone's brain works pretty much the same way when it comes to how we learn. Even if that's not entirely true, we need a framework that breaks down learning, so go with me for a minute.

Say you want to learn how to be a bongo player in a Chinese restaurant. Ok, that's an odd life choice, but let's see how this goes. First, you'll want to figure out what bongos are. Then you'll want to figure out which part of the bongos make noise. Then you'll bang on the bongo for a while until you make some noises that sound good. After that, you'll want to listen to different types of music so that you can play along and make better noises. Finally, you'll want to get a gig at the Peking Yum Yum House because you're a pro now and want to get paid.

That's a pretty standard learning journey, and if you break it into its component stages, you can apply that model to learning almost anything.

The model can also act as a roadmap for what type of content you should be presenting at each stage.

Begin

This is where a person first starts to figure out what they don't even know. In this stage they're looking for orientation and basics. It's stuff like "what the heck does this product do anyway?" or "where is that tool that does that thing?" The kind of content you put into this stage really needs to get people over that initial hump. It needs to answer basic questions quickly so they can move on to doing something.

Practice

This is the learning stage where people are looking to "do" something. Now that a person "gets" how your product works, they can start trying to do some things. People tend to jump to this stage really fast, so the content here needs to provide quick wins. People need to get a sense of accomplishment fast, or they'll just say this app is "too hard" or not for them. This is where you can start introducing easy projects that they can complete and then provide more complex ones to begin expanding their skill set.

Master

This is where people land after they've figured out what this product does; they have some street cred because they can do some cool stuff. Here's where people will want to figure out if the product has some real power. At this stage, you can start taking off the training wheels and show them how to do stuff waaay faster or create much more complex outputs. This is usually where you start taking about things like 3D, AI, and all those cool new tech buzzwords that your app can do sooo easily

Evolve

Now, you can use the app backwards and forwards. You know all there is to know about how to make lots of cool things with the product. Now you want to start calling yourself a pro. This stage is where people begin to move beyond the product they came to learn. They want to use that other thing with this thing to make that amazing thing those pros make. Content here really should talk about everything but the product. It's where you can start talking about that community of pros and the skills you need to become one of them.

While every Learn Journey has similar stages, not everyone follows the same path. People don't necessarily move linearly from one stage to the next.

People don't necessarily move linearly from one stage to the next. They can jump into one and then they're done learning, or they can move back and forth. For instance, someone can land in the Practice stage and try a project, make their "thing," and then realize they need to learn another skill so they pop back into the Begin stage. Likewise, someone might be at the Master stage in one product and realize they need to learn some basics in another product to finish their task, so they pop into the Begin stage again. Learn stages are not a linear progression but an organizing framework that you can use to plan your content to support a person wherever they are in their journey.

### Build a Learn Journey

Great, so now we have this framework. What's next? Well, now comes the "doing" part. Here's where you take a look at your content and start organizing it so that all different types of learners have content to support them.

How do you do that? Ok, here come the steps (because there are always steps):

  1. Understand your customers

First, you need understand who your content is addressing. How do you know what to create or archive if you don't know what your customers are looking for and what they need to succeed? Using customer interviews and usage data you can get a good sense of what people need to succeed.

  2. Understand your content

Next, figure out just how much content you're working with, where it was stored, and how it is delivered to customers. You have to understand how much content you're going to have to organize so that you can figure out just how much therapy you're going to need.

  3. Sort your content into learn stages

Figure out which pieces of content do what. Stuff like: this piece of content teaches you tools, and this piece teaches you how to program a super-intelligent machine to take over the world. That kind of thing. Then you place each piece of content in the most appropriate stage. The piece of content about "what is a super-computer anyway?" belongs in the Begin phase. Because the piece of content about "how to program computers to destroy man," is an advanced topic, it fits in the Master stage.

  4. Figure out the gaps in your content

Once you have a plan, review it to see where there are gaps in your overall journey. Do you have content in each learn stage? When all your content is plotted out into a full journey, you can start to see where you don't have content for users For example, there's all this material on "how to program that super-intelligent machine," but nothing about "how to make it take over the world."

  5. Turn your findings into plans

After you know what content you need, you'll need a plan to get that stuff you don't have. The final outcome of the Learn Journey plan is a Content Plan. This plan lists out all the content you need with priorities so that you can communicate it to your content development teams. Since the Content Plan comes out of the Learn Journey, every content request is backed up with data and customer research.

### Understand your customers

"If you don't know exactly where you are headed, then any road will get you there."

-Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe.

The first step to creating a content strategy is to identify your user's fundamental need: what they're trying to learn and how they want to learn. We had lots of assumptions before we began this process, but we wanted to really know if what we thought was good content really worked. So we did some customer research. Then we researched some more and then even more. See, we understood our products. Although we understood how they worked and benefited our users, we weren't sure how to you convey our message to them. Talking to customers helped us find our voice.

A good body of content shouldn't be completely based on what users tell you they want.

A good body of content shouldn't be completely based on what users tell you they want. If you ask children what they want for breakfast, they'll tell you M&Ms. While that's an awesome idea, it's hardly part of a balanced meal, right? The same goes for users. They may know what they prefer, but when learning is involved, often they don't know what's good for them. That's why we consulted with the experts who teach our products to find out what users really need.

Sadly, you can't just accept what instructors say as unimpeachable truth. Many instructors are used to teaching in one particular context (in-person, large groups, small groups, long courses, weekend seminars, etc.) and a particular method of instruction might not be appropriate for your users.

Here's a warning sign: an instructor says, "Trust me. I've been doing this a long time, and I know what works." There is no one size that fits all. Every learner and context is different. Ignoring this fact leads to content that only helps a certain percentage of users. Instructors should be a good source of information, but not the only source. You still need to talk to your users so you can get to the bottom of why they want M&Ms for breakfast.

### Why you need user interviews

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

\- David Foster Wallace

This little story illustrates one very important aspect about content strategy: perspective. We're so close to these products and so sure about how they work that we bring many ideas and judgements to the table simply by working at the company. We are the two young fish who have no idea that we're swimming in water.

Change your perspective. Get out of the building.

How do you make sure you aren't a fish? Well, first change your perspective. Get out of the building and talk to your users. It's the first step in understanding what they actually want and how they see your product. It might seem like an obvious thing to do, but you'd be surprised how much content is created and published without a single user interview taking place. User interviews are the most powerful tool you can use to understand what kind of content customers need. This qualitative research can make sure you're creating content users actually need.

### How to do user interviews

Interviews should be conducted in person whenever possible. You're trying to get to a user's underlying "why" for using the product. However, you can't simply ask, "What do you want to do in X app?" or "What do you need to learn?" Most users don't even have the vocabulary to talk about what they're trying to do or learn. Instead, you need to start by getting to know your user. Ask questions about who they are, what they do, where they work, what their interests are, etc. Try to get a holistic understanding of who they are and why they might want to use your product. Listen to them. People love to talk about themselves, so just let them.

#### Asking questions

You come across a man standing on one side of a river bank holding an urgent letter in his hand and looking across to the other side where he sees a post office. If you ask him what he needs, he'll say he desperately needs a bridge to cross to river so he can mail his letter. But what he really needs is just a way to send a message.

Think about user needs in terms of verbs, not nouns. The man by the river didn't need a bridge. He needed to send a message. As soon as you think about needs as nouns, you've limited the solution to just that one noun: a bridge.

A "verb" need could have lots of solutions. You could send a message with a call, email, fax, telegram, smoke signal, semaphore, or carrier pigeon. The solution will completely depend on the context. You can uncover the context and get to the "verb" needs by asking one simple question: why?

"Why do you need a bridge?"

"To get to the other side of the river, duh?"

"Why do you need to get to the other side of the river?"

"To get to the post office! It closes in 20 minutes!"

"Why do you need to go to the post office?"

"Because I have an important letter to send! Stop asking me questions and build me a bridge!"

When you ask users, "why," it forces them to actually articulate a rationale for their needs. This allows you to deconstruct those needs and get to the essence of what users really are trying to do with your product.

It's also easy to lead users down a certain path with the questions we ask. It's a good idea to remind users that (1) there are no wrong answers, and (2) you didn't design this product (even if you did) so that they should feel comfortable being as honest as possible with you.

Users often want to please the interviewer and, as a result, will avoid contradicting an interviewer, especially if they think they are connected intimately to the product. So, it's best to avoid questions like: "Did that experience frustrate you?" or "How much did you like that experience?" These questions can be leading, and users will answer based on what they think you want to hear. Instead, phrase your questions like this: "How did that experience make you feel?" or "What are your impression of that experience?" If they respond with "Frustrated," then it's totally fine to follow up with a "Why did that frustrate you?".

As a general rule, try to ask open-ended questions that allow the user to talk about a topic at great length. Some common prompts are:

"Tell me about the time when...."

"Walk me through a typical day for you..."

"Talk about the last time you did X...."

"Describe...."

During this time, pay attention to when users talk about any emotional response they've had about experiences related to what you're interested in. If you see visible frustration on their face when talking about some workflow they hate doing, ask them why they hate it.

For example, take the following interaction between a user and an interviewer:

Interviewer: Describe what you do when you need to do X.

User: X? Ugh X. I hate X.

Interviewer: Why do you hate X?

User: Because it makes me so frustrated!

Interviewer: What's frustrating about it?

User: Because I never know if I'm supposed to do Y or Z first!

Interviewer: But why does that frustrate you?

User: Because it makes me feel like an idiot and I'm supposed to  be a professional!

Just as solutions can be "noun" and "verb" based, so can problems. In the previous exchange, the user's problem was not a "noun," i.e., he didn't know the order of some workflow steps. It was a verb: the app made him feel like he wasn't a true professional because he couldn't master a workflow. We've uncovered the "verb" problem, not the superficial "noun" problem.

It's important to capture these kinds of comments, "I feel like an idiot", "I just get so excited when....", "I hate..., "I love...," etc. It is your job to then tease out the ultimate reasons behind these emotional reactions. Once you capture all these "insights," the next step is to categorize them to find common themes.

#### How many interviews should you do?

One final question you might be asking is: "How many interviews do I need to conduct with my customers before I have what I need?" You might be surprised (or simply just incredulous) that a lot of research has been done around this topic. The answer depends on whether you've already identified a target market. If you haven't identified a target market, conduct as many interviews as possible until you start to see patterns emerge. This probably won't happen until you've talked to at least 15–20 users. When you're done, categorize these users into segments and pick one to target. Then conduct another 7–10 interviews with that target. We did about 30, but that's just because we're overachievers and we knew our target audience: beginners.
Do you know your target?  | Number of interviews to conduct

---|---

No | 15-20 (until you see patterns)

Yes | 7-10

If you've identified a target user and you've screened your users to ensure a proper fit, you only really need to interview about 7 or 8 (or at least that what the big-brain researchers say). Ok, so now you you're thinking, "Dude! that's way too few interviews to get any real insights" But it's really not. For example, how many baseball fans would it take to describe baseball to you before you generally understood of how baseball works? Not that many, right?

If you've screened your participants correctly, you will have no trouble reaching initial insights after about 7 or 8 interviews. (If you doubt the data you're getting, we suggest interviewing 10 people just to be on the safe side.) There is also a purely logistical side to limiting the number of interviewees. These interviews take time; they should last at least an hour. That's when a user finally starts to get comfortable enough with an interviewer to start sharing deeper insights into their behavior.

### Build common themes

Great! Now you have all these interview results. That's it, right? You now know everything you need to get start making content. NOT! You need to go through your notes and cataloging insights derived from the questionnaire (tip: insights should be concise enough to fit on to an index card or sticky note.) Everyone who has conducted interviews then shares out their insights aloud. This allows everyone to hear all the insights and start thinking about how they relate to the things they might have heard in their own interviews.

Once all the insights have been read, categorize them together into similar groups. Insights that "sound" similar or feel like they belong together will quickly become apparent. Then label these insights and sort them into "groups." You might have a group about "workflow confusion," "time willing to spend on learning," etc. These categories will help you focus your content creation efforts.

In our case, we started seeing that there was a broad theme around "basics"; users were stymied by apps that they felt were complicated. We also saw themes around "Where was that tool?", "What does the product do?", and "Please teach me how to do this basic task".

Define success criteria

Once you have your broad categories, look at them and ask yourself: "What does success look like?" If users are confused about workflow order, what does a successful user look like as they navigate a workflow? Ask this question and then work backwards. What would count as evidence of such achievement? What does it look like to meet these goals?

Here's where it's great to have subject matter experts handy. They know the app and know what success looks like. "A successful user would need to do X, Y, and Z." So, what is X, Y, and Z? Are they concepts? Skills? Processes? From here you can start developing content around these skills, concepts, and processes, or identifying existing content that could meet these goals.

#### A word of caution

Content should be created to serve a user's needs. We should not impose needs upon the user simply because we already have created the content. All content should be directly tied to the users' end needs based on user interviews and expert input.

A good exercise is to go back and identify every single piece of content your team is planning to create and tie it back to an insight from user or expert interviews. This exercise ensures that all the content you create is in service of getting a user close to the definition of "success" that all the stakeholders have agreed upon.

## Understand your content

There's just no way to know what kind of strategy you'll need until you know just what you're working with. If you're just starting out then, you don't really need to figure out what content you have because, well, you have nothing. In this case, take your learnings from your customer interviews, and what you know about your industry, and go out there and make content! However, if you're like most companies, you're probably inheriting a body of content that you need to first organize and then expand.

Once you figure out what users need, then you need to figure out what you have to offer. That's where auditing comes in. Auditing is the process of cataloging all the content in your ecosystem. You need to figure out how much you have, its current value, and how customers should access it.

The team responsible for the auditing must be very familiar with the content as they need to understand the data they're getting

Sadly, auditing can't be done by just anyone. The team responsible for the auditing must be very familiar with the content as they will have to know what is actually good content and what should be archived. This is where you'll have to rely on content authors and subject matter experts to help you along.

#### Our auditing story

For us, the auditing process was not pretty. We assigned five writers and two program managers to keep us on track. We had to time-box the task so that it didn't consume our lives. In all, the process took about four weeks to review about 2,000 pieces of content. The truly sad thing is that before we started we didn't even know we had 2,000 pieces of content in our library. We approached our audit on two fronts: first, we enlisted our authors to apply set criteria to weed out content that was really useless and archived it; second, we used data to determine what was low impact to customers and archived that, too.

#### What we learned:

  * Define the scope of your audit: To save your sanity, you can't look at everything at once, and an analysis of what parameters are key is needed in order to be effective. In our case, we decided to look at tutorial content as that was what was driving the most engagement with our users.
  * Define criteria to apply to your content before you audit (not during): Believe it or not, the best time to figure out what is "good" content is before you even start. Yes, a shocking concept, I know, but it's best to make sure everyone is using the same criteria before you spend weeks reviewing. We asked ourselves the following questions:

"Is the content current (i.e., does our product still work as described)?"

"Does it address customer's needs (as defined by your research)?"

"Does it teach users something?"

"Does it cover the same material as another piece of content?"

  * Let your data make the hard choices: Everyone has their favorite piece of content that they are CONVINCED is used by everyone, and that the sky would fall if it was removed. Emotional arguments do not stand up to cold data. "No one has looked at your content in 12 years" is the best drop-the-mic argument you can make.

#### Auditing your content using data

Customer interviews are qualitative data. They help you describe the characteristics of your content. Quantitative data is all about the numbers: how many pieces of content do you have and how many times did someone view it. You need both to get a good sense of what you're working with.

### How much content do you have?

To get started, you need a source of quantitative data or some kind of count of all the content you have. If you happen to be really lucky, your content is stored in some kind of content management system (CMS). A CMS can be anything from a WordPress site to a massive publishing server. Most systems let you do full data dumps into some kind of report. The best kind of report format is a CSV. That will make it really easy to read the data into a larger spreadsheet where you can do deeper analysis with all the fancy spreadsheet tools.

Data dumps are fairly easy to do with a CMS, but the amount of data they produce can be massive. There are often tons of duplicates and a huge amount of information you don't need. Depending on how your CMS is set up, you may find yourself spending more time deleting information than gathering it; however, since the CMS is the system you use to actually publish the content, the data you get is the most accurate. It's a bit of a trade-off between the amount of data versus its relevance because it's a real representation of what you actually have out there on whatever surface you publish to.

Even if you don't have a CMS you can do data collection from a site map or web server. Get a dump of all the pages on your site and then determine which pages house the content you need.

We were lucky in that we have a large CMS that houses all our content. We did several data dumps and a ton of clean-up. In the end, we finally determined that, no, we didn't have 4,500 tutorials in 5 languages like we thought, but we did have a solid 2,000 tutorials. While that doesn't seem like much, we carved that out from a database that contained over 70,000 pages.

### How many users see your content?

A data dump will give you a content count, but you still need to understand what content to keep and what to archive. A good way to figure that out is to see if anyone's looking at the content.

Almost any website will have some kind of built-in traffic tracking system. Even if you don't have one built-in, you can always use something like Google Analytics to get traffic data. Seriously, you need to get data. Traffic data can be as important as customer interviews. While in-person interviews will give you insight into motivations, traffic data will provide insight into behavior.

Say your interviews are telling you that people are looking for content on "how to raise chinchillas underwater." Great. You know you have a lot of content on this topic (yes, it's that kind of site), so you figure that you're solving that need. However, if you review the traffic data and it tells you that no one has ever seen this article, then you're totally not helping your customers.

#### How many times did someone see your pages?

A Page View report will tell you how many times your people viewed your pages in a specific timeframe. There's a raging debate over whether page views or unique views is better for data analysis. It's a super-fascinating debate, and you're more than welcome to do the research on your own. To keep our lives simple, we used page views.

Depending on how much traffic your site gets, you'll have to look at page views over a few months to see a trend. The higher the volume of traffic, the less time it will take see a trend. Also, if you're going to make a decision about what content to archive, you probably want to look at the traffic over the entire life of that piece of content.

#### How do you use traffic data?

Page view data will help you identify content that is under-performing which will help you create a list of content to review. From there you can determine if the content is under-performing because it doesn't meet the customer needs you identified from your research, or if it's because people can't find it on your site.

For example: Over the past 3 months, a tutorial on "fishing in the Sahara" has been viewed 1,000 times. On average, your site gets 10,000 views. That means this specific tutorial gets 10% traffic — not bad, right? However, when you compare it with other tutorials on your site, like "Fishing on Mount Everest" (7,000 views) and "Fishing in Yemen" (5,000 views) you now see that it's underperforming. Using data like this, you can start building a list of content that needs to be reviewed and determine whether to update the content or archive it.

Traffic data gives you a solid footing when deciding what content you should keep and what you should delete. The best argument you can give is "we shouldn't make that kind of content because no one is even looking at it." In our case, we eliminated hundreds of tutorials because no one had accessed them in almost a year.

### Verify your data

Based on customer research and traffic data, you should have some idea as to what content is most useful to your customers (i.e., it fills a customer need and has high traffic). Now you can talk to your subject matter experts and find how they would create content and teach your product. For learning materials, a subject matter expert (or SME) can be anyone who has experience teaching your product to real customers, either in a classroom setting or through online learning materials. We got lucky and had both industry-leading instructors and long-time content developers on our team to consult.

By comparing the data you've gathered to the instructional methods used by your SMEs, you can start to tease apart content that people not only want to see but also need to see. This is how you can decide that a piece of content with low traffic is still essential to your overall Learn Journey. Other variables could be impacting its performance. It may have low traffic because people can't find it or it may be that the topic is essential, but the tutorial was poorly constructed. Without talking to subject matter experts, you won't really know.

Data can only tell you so much. You need to understand how people learn your product, and you can only truly figure that out by talking to people who have experience teaching it.

## Sort your content

Ok, now you've gathered a lot of information:

  * You know what your customers are looking for from customer interviews and quantitative analysis
  * You know what content you have and how much of it you have

Now, how do you get the right content to the right customer at the right time? That's where we go back to the Learning Journey stages we talked about waaaaaaay earlier (yeah, before all the fish stories). The four learning journey stages serve as the framework for sorting content into a logical order that addresses user needs as they learn a product.

At this point, it's useful to have a way to see your Learning Journey looks like at each stage. We created a tool called the Learning Journey Planning sheet or "big spreadsheet with pretty colors." Using this tool, you can track where you sorted content and start to see the logical order of your journey. Here's how it works:

  1. First, layout the learning journey stages:

Begin | text in here to | text in here to | text in here to

---|---|---|---

Practice

| | |

Master

| | |

Evolve

| | |

  1. Then, take a look at each piece of content and ask yourself these questions:

Question | Put in this stage

---|---

Is the topic covered very basic or does it provide an overview of your product? | Begin

Is the topic covered practical? Am I learning how to create something or how to apply tasks to accomplish a goal? | Practice

Is this topic complex? Do I need to have more than basic knowledge of the product to understand it? | Master

Is this topic more about the industry than the product? Am I learning how to put together skills to become a professional user? | Evolve

These are just some simple questions you can ask yourself. If you're a SME, it won't take you long to figure out what goes where. If you're not a SME, rely on your research. What are customers asking for when they try to use your product for the first time? What kind of content gets the most traffic 3 or 4 months after your product is released? Watch and re-watch your content (or read and reread). As someone who isn't a SME, it will be pretty clear where you should organize the content based on how easy it is to understand or follow along.

  1. Place content in the appropriate stage:

Begin | How to open a file | How to close a file | How to save a file

---|---|---|---

Practice | How to make file folders | How to put files together to make a file stack | How to put stacks together to make a file cabinet

Master | How to view files in 3D | How to make files faster | The nature of files in an existential universe

Evolve | How to become a filing clerk | What's a file clerk? | How filing helps humanity

Remember, the point of sorting your content is so that you can clearly see what content you're providing to customers at each stage of their learning journey.

Depending on the amount of content you're working with, sorting may take a while, but in the end, your planning sheet will be an accurate map of how you're supporting your customers as they learn your product. For us, it took two content strategists about three weeks to sort through everything we had and create our first Learn Journeys. I say our "first" because we have since revised and recreated all Learn Journeys at least twice.

### Find the gaps

Now that you have this awesome map of all your Learn Journeys, you can step back and examine each stage to see if there are any content gaps in your offering.

After you're done sorting, your planning sheet might look something like this:

Begin | How to open a file | How to close a file | How to save a file | text in here to

---|---|---|---|---

Practice | How to make file folders | How to put files together to make a file stack | How to put stacks together to make a file cabinet | text in here to

Master | How to view files in 3D | How to make files faster | The nature of files in an existential universe | text in here to

Evolve | How to become a filing clerk | What's a file clerk? | How filing helps humanity | text in here to

Here's where you look at each stage and ask yourself: is there enough content here to provide the information that users are looking for? Based on your research and data, you know the content for which customers are looking. Do you have it?

For example, in the Begin stage of a Learning Journey, your customers are looking for content that orients them to the product. You have content that helps them learn basic skills, but maybe you need a really basic overview piece:

Begin | How to open a file | How to close a file | How to save a file | What are files?

---|---|---|---|---

Each stage has criteria specific to the user's needs, so you'll want to take the time to evaluate each stage individually in addition to looking at the stages as a whole. For instance, in the Practice stage, a valid question might be: "Are there any new projects that could help users practice skills?" In the Master stage, a valid question might be: "Did you cover all the cool new productivity features that were just added to your product?" For the Evolve stage, "Should I add this interview with a data scientist?" is worth exploring.

You'll need to rely heavily on your SMEs, customer interviews, and traffic data to locate the gaps in your content. In our case, we hired a team of instructors and asked them to review every piece of content in our Learn Journey planning sheets as well as the organization of the Learn Journey. As the instructors are out there teaching the products, they can easily identify topics that they would typically cover in their training courses and find content that's missing from our content library. Having access to instructors was a real help, but you don't need instructors if you have access to reliable information about your customers and know what they need to learn.
With the gaps identified, you can start marking the content that needs to be created. So your final planning sheet might look like this:

Begin | How to open a file | How to close a file | How to save a file | What are files

---|---|---|---|---

Practice | How to make file folders | How to make files for your project | How to put files together to make a file stack | How to put stacks together to make a file cabinet

Master | How to make folders automatically with tags | How to view files in 3D | How to make files faster | The nature of files in an existential universe

Evolve | How to become a filing clerk | What's a file clerk? | How filing helps humanity | Data science and you

## Make a Learn Journey plan

Have you ever gone to your boss and said, "Next month, I want to create five pieces of content on artisan all-natural file-making"? The next obvious question is: "How do you know those are the right pieces to create?" You could answer that question with "Because," but that's not a good career choice. Instead, you now have to the tools to answer that question intelligently.

You know you need these five pieces because your data is telling you that beginners are looking for "all-natural file-making" tasks. And your SMEs are telling you that your Begin learning stage doesn't have five topics on all-natural file-making that are essential for beginners. So, the question answers itself: "Our data is telling us that users who are just starting out need basic topics on all-natural file-making. These pieces are essential to making them successful." See, isn't that a much better answer than "because"?

Just like your users, your content strategy should and will be constantly evolving, and you should always have a plan to improve your content library and keep it fresh. Your Learning Journey planning sheet lets you see all of your existing content, where all of your content fits, and what's missing. It can also be used to create a content plan of what you need to create. By taking into consideration business priorities, you can start slotting out what content needs to get created first.

#### Set priorities

Before you can build a content plan, you need to understand what's essential for your business. Business goals come from the smart people telling you where the business needs to go to be successful. Every company has them, and they can directly impact what content you create. You can use business goals to set priorities for content. If the company is trying to attract new customers, then beginner content is where you should focus. If the company is losing long-term customers, then maybe you need to remind them of the power of your product with advanced topics.

#### Build a content plan

After you have determined your priorities, you can use the information in your Learn Journey planning sheet to build out the content plan. First, list out all the topics that need to be created to fill in gaps in your journey. Then, based on business goals, apply a priority to each one and order them.
For our example, say your company's first priority is to win back long-term users who are no longer using your product, and attract new users. In that case, your content plan would look something like this:

Learn Stage | Topic | Priority

---|---|---

Master | How to make folders automatically with tags | 1

Begin | What are files | 2

Practice | How to make files for your project | 3

Evolve | Data science and you | 4

Obviously, this is a very oversimplified plan. Yours would be much longer (and about, like, real topics) and include release dates. We use this type of plan to build out our Content Backlog, which lists everything we plan to make in the next few months, and our Master Production calendar that lists the dates when everything will be released. Both of these tools are used to communicate our plans with other teams with whom we work. You won't see our versions of these tools in this book as they would confuse you and make you lose all respect for the authors.

With this plan in hand, you can tell your content development teams (or yourself if you're a one-person shop) where to focus their resources. Building out a plan this way gives your content requests real weight as each item is backed up by data.

### That's what a Learn Journey is

Now that was easy, right? Sure, it will take a while to gather the data and sort your content, but in the end, you'll have a complete view of your content library, how it fits together into a complete journey, and a map you can use to generate new content. So, let's review:

  * Understand your content

Audit, audit, audit. Find out what you have, what it's about and its relevance.

  * Understand your customers

Conduct solid user research through interviews. This will give you a good idea of what is content your users value and look for.

  * Sort your content

Organize your content into the stages of the Learn Journey.

  * Make a plan

Analyze the gaps in your Learn Journey and make a plan to fill them.

Part 3:

Market Your Strategy

## What's a Content Marketing Plan?

Okay, let's review: Since you've been reading and absorbing every word we've written so far, you now understand everything about your content and have a plan to identify and fill in gaps to create a glorious learning experience. You're done, right? Well, maybe. See, it's the content strategists' job to figure out not only what content you need to create but also where and when your content should be presented. You want to maximize the impact of your content. That's where content marketing comes into play. A marketing plan will help you identify how and where your customers want to consume and interact with your content.

A marketing plan will help you identify how and where your customers want to consume and interact with your content

If you've created a Learn Journey, you already have a leg-up. The customer research you did to determine how to organize your content can also be used to figure out how your users want to consume your content. However, you'll need a few more things to build out a plan:

  * Understand user intent
  * Find out how your users learn
  * Find out where/how users look for learning content

When your Marketing Plan is complete, you'll be able to define the content distribution for every piece of content in your Learn Journey so that it provides the greatest value to your customers.

## Case study: The evolution of the CC Learn Content Marketing Plan

I wish I could say that creating our content marketing strategy was a long story with a happy ending, but the truth is we scrapped the plans we created when we first started out, and, like our content strategy, we're evolving and molding our new strategy to address our users' needs better.

How you address your customers should continuously change as your market changes. You should try to avoid using the same approach twice because customer needs evolve and change just as your product does.

Step 1: What's the mission?

Awesome. So, everything changes, nothing is ever done, and it's always evolving, yadda, yadda. It sounds overwhelming, complicated, and hopeless, right? Not quite. While all of that is true, our current marketing strategy for our existing content is reaching millions of customers each month. We're doing something right, right? But how did we even get there? Well, we started by defining a mission statement (yes, I, too, would roll my eyes at this point so feel free. Go ahead have a good eye roll, we'll wait...). A clear mission statement let us define what we do and what our goals were. From there we were able to start figuring out what strategies we should focus on getting us closer to our goals. Take a look at the mission we developed to get us there:

  * We provide the right content at the right time: We create content people need and present it when they need it most. To accomplish this goal, we had to understand customer needs and learning styles to make sure we had tutorials about the right topics and that these tutorials were presented in the right style (i.e. short-form, long-form) to encourage learning.
  * We meet customers where they are: Our content needs to be everywhere that our customers are looking for learning. That meant we had to understand how people were looking for learning. We had to understand what were they searching for, both from us and from our competitors.

What we did: Research baby! Tons of it. Lots of smart people across the company had already done amazing studies, so we begged, borrowed, and stole data from everywhere to build a picture of our customers' needs and then drove content development to meet them.

What we learned: One size does not fit all. There are different types of learners, and we need to create different types of content for them. Our users don't think like us. Or, better said, we don't think like our users. They didn't look for learning content in the places we thought they would. The landing pages and websites weren't the main place they looked for help. They use what works best for them and what's the fastest. And we're not there.

Step 2: Marketing starts at home

One of our biggest issues was that nobody at the company really knew what we did and why we do it. But wait! There was hope. It turns out that if you can tie learning to customer engagement, and then tie that to loyal customers, which results in "cha-ching!", proving your value. By backing up every decision we made with verified data, we started to show everyone that investing in our team was investing in the continued success of our customers (and company). Then another amazing thing happened: other groups started to trust us to do our jobs. Go figure!

We based our content marketing on data. We dug into the numbers to show that what we did impacted the bottom line. Everyone already knew that learning was a key component in customer satisfaction, but they didn't understand that it could actually move the needle on customer loyalty. Better content delivered in the right places translated into higher usage and engagement: the holy grail of customer success.

The other part of our marketing plan was to prove that we had the required expertise to control our own destiny. We marketed the crap out of the SMEs we hired so that everyone understood that we had qualified learning professionals on our team that could crank out impactful content.

The end result is that our team now drives all of our content: the strategy, creation, calendars, and marketing efforts. Our content strategies drive what learning content appears across a wide range of surfaces and ensures it reaches the right people. Learn content is now a fundamental part of every product.

What we learned: Every hour and effort spent marketing ourselves within the company paid off. Once people understood our value, other teams devoted efforts to finding out learning needs, and learning became an integral part of product strategies.

Step 3: With a little help from your friends

We found that there are a ton of resources within our own company that can help us define and develop a marketing strategy. Heck, there are a ton of strategies that are already in place. We chose to create our own, but many parts were "borrowed" from research and plans developed elsewhere. Like, who knew we had a huge SEO Team that could give us search data, a Research Team that could connect us with customers, and a Product Org that had already done a ton of competitive analysis. By partnering with other teams internally and using their data and resources, putting together our plans was so muuuuuch more manageable, and, in the end, was very much in line with the primary goals of the company.

By executing our marketing strategies as a team effort, we're able to maximize our resources and increase our reach on our company's website as well as in the digital atmosphere. Working with our research teams on an ongoing basis has allowed us to validate assumptions with real customer data and create the type of content for which people are asking. Learn content is now a prominent feature and asset in the company, growing with our social marketing teams to our company's highly visible social channels, including Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, all valuable surfaces, where users are looking for learn content.

What we learned: We had to remember that we are part of a larger organization and share the same goal: customer success. Even though we may not have the same approach, we were able to get a real head start by using their research and resources. Learn from our experience: you can save yourself quite a bit of time and pain by partnering with other teams and utilizing existing efforts.

The (almost) happy ending

The story is getting better, but it's nowhere near done. Our current marketing plan is working. Our content is reaching more people, and we're getting positive feedback on the content that is out there. All of our efforts are coming together and it's cool to watch. With a clear strategy and the tools laid out below, we're starting to meet our customers where they are.

Clear mission: We continuously check our plans with our mission to make sure we are focused on the tactics that help us deliver the right content at the right time and meet customers where they are.

Internal partnerships: We continue to develop marketing plans that include customer intent data from our research teams, competitive data from product teams, and search optimizations from our SEO team.

### Define customer intent

Your core customers came to your content for a reason, right? Your job is to figure out why. That reason "why" is the intent. Your audience's intent can be really vague or very specific, and if you miss the mark, your content won't be beneficial to them or you.

Let's say, your boss at the International House of Prunes told you to find out how to use this new prune-drying machine. Your first step might be to look up the user manual for the machine with the intention of learning how to operate the device. In this case, when you use the manual, you intend to learn the basics. That's a very different intention than if you just had a lifelong obsession with prunes and picked up the manual as a bit of light reading. For that manual to be a fruitful resource for you, it has to present the basics quickly. If the manual gave you a ton of info on the history of prunes, it would fail as a resource.

Defining the various intents of your users will provide you with the information to decide what gets presented when

Intent is how you target content. Defining the various reasons of your users' intent will allow you to decide what gets displayed and when. For instance, if your research is telling you that most of your customers are coming to your content to understand "basic concepts," you'll want to make sure that your overview-type information is displayed prominently on your website. Of course, it can get much more sophisticated than that, but the general principle holds.

#### How do you define customer intent?

Go back to the common themes you've identified from your customer research. There will be some themes that, when grouped together, will indicate some general intents. Look at your themes and ask these questions:

  * What kind of content would help to meet the intent of that customer in an easy and satisfactory way?
  * If the intent is vague (example: "prunes"), what are the various types of intents that they may have? Example: prune-making how-to videos, prune recipes, prune recipes for summer, winter, autumn, specific prune types like black, golden, etc.
  * What would they consider useful?
  * What would they consider interesting or engaging?
  * What would they consider sharable?

Intent is very specific to the type of product or service you're supporting, but there are some general aims you can draw out:

I want to create something

Users want to accomplish a specific goal, to create something that they need or complete a task. These users have an interest in learning the fundamentals as long as it aligns with their goals. These users may not be willing to explore workflows or features that do not get them to their goal quickly.

I want to learn something

Some users have dedicated a certain amount of their time to learn something. They are prioritizing learning over accomplishing a goal and are willing to devote time to learning fundamental techniques and workflows.

Once you have a good understanding of customer's primary intent, you can start building out general categories for your content. These categories will be used to determine what content you display to a user with a set intent:

Create | Learn

---|---

How to make a prune | Famous prunes in history

How to dry prunes | What's a prune?

### Define how users' want to learn

Not everyone approaches learning in the same way. You need to understand how users want to learn or you may end up with great content that no one uses. Much like intent, you have to understand the preferred method of learning to make sure your content is presented in such a way that support their needs.

In our research, we have found that there are generally two types of learners: lean-back and lean-forward. If that sounds like recliners positions, you're getting the analogy.

Lean-back learning is a more passive approach. These types of learners generally have more time to devote to learning and are able to process conceptual information as well as skills. They tend to consume long-form content and are happy to watch others do tasks.

Lean-forward learning is an active approach. These types of learners are the "do-ers." They are sometimes called "hunt and peck" users as they tend to start playing with controls and trying things out. They favor content that has a very clear outcome, i.e., short content that will immediately teach them "how to do X."

A lot of how users want to learn depends on how much time they have to invest, so you need to make sure you display the different types of content you create to the right type of learner. Again, from our research we've had success with presenting content in two ways:

  * Lean-back learning = sequential content
  * Learn-forward learning = snackable content

#### Sequential learning

Content is introduced sequentially as one piece of knowledge or skill is built upon the previously learned skill. This content is linked together in a particular order, for example by implementing navigation buttons at the end of the content that takes users to the next piece of content.

Users who with more time to engage with your content will be drawn to sequential learning with the idea that you're offering full courses of content. You can market the idea that you are providing comprehensive training programs.

#### Snackable learning

This type of content allows users to learn something quickly and then return to their project. Keep in mind that users who seek out this type of content do not want to sift through a long document or multiple videos to find the nugget of information they need at that moment; it's important to keep an eye on the length of this type of content.

These are the "Quick Tips, Top Tasks, Helpful Hints" in your content library. The marketing strategy here should focus on the following goals: "Need to find that tool?", "Here it is," or "Need to select that area?" "Follow these three steps."

So, now (drum-roll please) you can add more categories to your plan: | Create | Learn

---|---|---

Sequential

|  |

Famous prunes in history

Snackable | How to make a prune | What's a prune?

|

How to dry prunes

|

### Where are customers looking for learning?

Now that you have all this insight into how people learn and how your content can help them, you need them to find it. The best content strategy will fail if no one uses it. Once you understand how people learn, you need to figure where they're looking for that learning. If your entire marketing plan is "just Google it," I hope your content is all cat videos, because that's probably all your users are going to find.

The best content strategy will fail if no one uses it.

Search engines, like Google, are more than likely the first place users are going to look. Everyone everywhere uses Search to find everything, so yes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any marketing plan. But if you stop there, your users will get lost really fast.

There are a whole lot of social-media platforms out there for getting the right eyeballs on your content. Your strategy is to define what are the best platforms or surfaces are for your product. See, not every social media surface is right for every type of learner. People looking for sequential learning are probably not going to Pinterest, and people looking for a quick tip aren't going to download your 400-page PDF.

Unfortunately, there's not an easy button or prepackaged platform for your product out there. Determining where your content should live is very specific, so what works for our product probably won't work for yours. We can't say "everything must be on Twitter," because depending on what you're marketing, that might be the worst place for your product to be. However, there are some techniques you can try that will help you to make an informed decision:

  * Learning through social media: Before you decide which social media platforms are right for you, do some research to figure out which platforms are popular for your industry, what platforms are your competitors using, and how are people using each one.
  * Check out your competition: This is a great opportunity to see what the competition is up to. How are they connecting with their users and where? How often do they engage with their users? And, what type of content are they posting on their various platforms? What's the saying? Keep your friends close and your competition closer? In order to outperform the competition, you need to be visible in all the same places. We'll dive into more about competitive analysis later.
  * Review your SEO: Look at how you're using keyword tagging on your content. There's a whole science on how to do tagging. OMG is there a lot to learn in this area, but you don't need to know it all. Just do some basic research and be consistent in your keywords.

### Are customers looking for learning on social media?

To improve your customer engagement strategy "Ask not how you can sell, but how you can help"

  * Based on Insights of Professor Mohanbir S. Sawhney, Kellogg School

Customers these days want to connect with brands beyond the shops and the websites. They want a genuine relationship with their brands. That relationship translates into trust, and when it comes to learning, trust is everything. On social media you want people to look to your brand to be the main source of truth when it comes to learning materials. To do that, you first need to figure out which social media platform is best for your content and then figure out how to engage with people to build continued loyalty.

#### Social media and learning

There are three main social media platforms for learning content: YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

YouTube \- Gone are the days when YouTube was famous for watching cat videos. It's now a "go to" place for everyone who wants to learn and explore. In fact, it's now "the" destination for learning. Also, YouTube content isn't just on the YouTube website; you can share your YouTube content via other social networks, websites, and virtual learning environments. The key to success here is that you need to know as much as possible about your audience. You need to understand their interests and how they perceive your channel. You can go to the Community section of your channel and see what your subscribers are saying through comments. You'll be surprised at all the treasures you'll discover there.

LinkedIn is another place where professional trust is established through connections. It's a social platform that is built for business communities to connect. People are constantly following their favorite brands, focusing on enhancing their skill set, and looking for inspirational content from the industry experts. So this is another excellent place for learning, not only for industry professionals but also for students and aspiring professionals.

Facebook \- Facebook is a network of billions of users! Currently, there are thousands of groups and online communities where users from all over the world collaborate on a common interest or theme. Using Facebook, you can build a community where the participants are interested in learning, creating inspiring content, and help out other members. Your brand page is another sweet spot where your fans will come looking to find out what's new with your products and learn how to use them. Putting learning content on your brand page will get you a ton of engagement.

#### Build trust

Trust in your brand is essential to marketing your content. If no one believes you are a good source of learning material, no one will use it. Social media is a great way to build trust (or lose it if you're not careful).

Some things to remember when you're developing a social media strategy: first, social channels are accessible to everyone; and second, they are a unique ecosystem in which people believe in the magic of conversations and the power of sharing. Make sure you're using social media effectively to connect with your customers, understand their needs, and discover new trends.

Here are some tips to provide your users with a sense of community:

  * Inspire them
  * Entertain them
  * Engage with them through meaningful conversations 
  * Ask for their pain points and be their pain reliever

Find out which channels are bringing in the most value, how your customers are using it and how you can leverage those social channels to build that real connection.

### What's up with the competition?

Imitation is the highest form of flattery. In other words, feel free to "imitate" everything you see others doing in your industry. It's not like there's anything original out there anymore anyway. Everyone is just improving on someone else's ideas. Oops, was that cynical? My bad.

First, figure out who your competitors are. This means companies that offer the same services and companies who are actively creating content for your customers and engaging with them. Then you'll need to do a deep-dive into their content to orient yourself and to determine what opportunities you have so that you can outperform them, and where you need to put in more effort and resources. We're not going to lie; this is going to take a hella big chunk of time and effort on your part, but it doesn't have to be daunting. Figure out what you like about how they display their content, what you don't like, what you can take and make better, and so on.

Here are some things to look at when scoping out the competition:

First impression

Check out where your competition puts its content—home page, product pages, etc. —and see what stands out.

Target audience

Who do your competitors seem to be targeting with their content? Are they targeting average users, professional users, or developers?

Topic

What do your competitors talk about? Think high-level, rather than specific topics.

Content type

What types of content do your competitors use? Do they use video vs. articles, interactive web pages vs. PDF white papers, long-form vs. short-form, snackable content?

Distinguisher

What would you say makes each competitor stand out from the other? What sets them apart? Is it the format they use, the way they speak to their users, the graphics they have, the layout or color?

Industry-specific ingredients

How do your competitors address common issues in your industry? If your business is raising swallows, how do they prominently answer the question: "What is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?

Search results: Do some searches and see how they are using keywords in their content (titles, meta descriptions, etc.) and for tagging their content. Try some common terms used to find your content and see what comes up in your competitor's results. For instance, if you're in the doorknob business, search for "bag of doorknobs" and see what kind of content comes up.

#### How are your competitors doing?

Now comes the subjective part of your competitive content analysis. First, select a sample of each type of content your competitor uses. Say, a sample tutorial, whitepaper, datasheet, or self-aware data assistant answer (that last one was a joke—or was it?). Now, evaluate the content and decide how good it is. When you're evaluating your competitions content quality, ask yourself:

  * How accurate is their content?
  * How in-depth does the content go, i.e., does it just scratch the surface, or does it go into advanced concepts?
  * Is their content long or short?
  * What type of content do they use: video, written, images, gifs, etc.?
  * Who is writing their content? Do they have multiple contributors? Are they all employees or do they also use guest contributors? What are their areas of expertise (do some social media sleuthing)?

#### Apply your competitive analysis

Now that you're conversant with what your competitors are doing, you can start seeing what you can "imitate" or, you know, copy, rip-off, whatever. Here are some actions you can take to get you started:

Target the same audience

What audiences are they appealing to or trying to appeal to? Visibility is key. You can better appeal to these audiences by displaying your content where your competitors are to help improve your results. Or, if there is an audience your competitors aren't reaching, you could capitalize on that as well.

Make sure you have the same types of content

Take a look at what type of content is performing well for your competitors. If short content is outperforming longer content, you can assume your audience prefers shorter content. If video has better engagement than, say, written and graphics content, you may want to consider incorporating more video into your strategy.

Make sure you're using the same industry-standard terms

What keywords are driving traffic to your competitors? Identifying successful keywords can help your SEO. It can also help identify missed opportunities, allowing you to capitalize in areas your competitors aren't taking advantage of.

#### Example Competitive Analysis Report

The best way to illustrate how you might apply your research is to show you how to create a reeeeeeally basic report. Let's say your business is "Flying Files Inc." Here's what your analysis might look like: | Competitors

---|---  
|

Flying Files Inc. | Piles of Files Co. | Just Files LLC

Audience | End users | End users | End users

|

Pro file makers | Pro file makers | X

|

X | File making enthusiasts | X

Content type | Articles | Articles | Articles

|

Videos | Videos | Videos

|

PDF | X | PDF

|

X | Chat bot | X

Top terms | Files | Files | Files

|

Records | Records | X

|

X | Dossier | X

From this analysis you might want to focus on:

  * Addressing "File making enthusiasts"
  * Adding Chatbots to your offering
  * Making sure your content is tagged with "dossier" as a content type

Okay, right about now you're saying, "Like duh, this is sooo simplistic." Yup, that's the point. This is a super basic analysis to give you a sense of how to perform this task and how you might apply it. Trust me, these competitive analyses can get very complicated and involved very quickly. It all depends on how much data you can gather. For example, if you have access to sales reports, you can compare what type of content moves what kind of product.

Even in this basic example, you can see how you can benefit from your competitors' successes, and see some things they are missing. You may also find you outperform in some areas; these are key opportunities to establish yourself as a content leader.

### How are people searching for your content?

In its simplest terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making sure your content gets the greatest visibility when a user searches for your product or something related to your product. In SEO terms, this is called rank value. The better your content and contents performance is, the better rank you will have in search. If your company makes prunes and prune-related products, you want your content to appear as the top-ranking result whenever someone searches "really old plums."

There's a lot more involved in SEO, but when you're trying to see where your customers are looking for your product—in our case, learning—you'll want to focus on search term and query analysis. Search-term analysis will help you find keywords to use in your content and what words to use to tag your content. Search-query analysis will help you figure out what type of content people are looking for when they look for your content.

#### Why do search-term analysis?

Understand what your customers are looking for

Search-term analysis helps you understand your users' needs and desires: what problems they want to solve, what they expect to find, and so on. This is why it's so important to understand what search terms your users are using to find your product or services. When your content is designed to match user intent, you'll grab and keep their attention for as long as you meet their unspoken needs.

Communicate with your customers more effectively

Another benefit of search-term analysis is well-crafted content that is much more effective, targeted, and specific in communicating with your users. Your users should feel like you are "speaking their language." The way you connect, engage, teach, and guide your users will become more meaningful if you provide the right content at the right time. You meet them where they are. Sound familiar?

Make better content plans

Proper keyword research allows you to prioritize your content. Having a better idea of what content your users want the most will help guide your content plan. Let keywords help drive your content and plan accordingly and voilà! Watch as your content finds the right customer at the right. Magic.

Create amazing content

Your content should go above and beyond your competitors. Use your keyword knowledge to anticipate any questions a visitor might have.

Use data to get creative

People think that using keyword data to create content cramps creativity. That's a myth. You can be creative while using search data effectively. And, truthfully, you should be. It really shouldn't be an either/or choice. Without data, you run the risk of creating content that doesn't benefit you or your user. It's a waste of time and money.

When you know your readers' innermost thoughts and intent, it's easy to communicate more effectively with them. With the right keyword and content strategy, you'll be able to mirror your users' wants and needs, and create content that people want to share and also ensures that they will return.

#### How to do search term analysis

There is a whole industry built around finding the best keywords for your content. There are services that let you upload your content, do an analysis, and pull out the best keywords. Google AdWords is a great (and free) resource that lets you see how many people use a particular keyword. It will even provide you with keyword recommendations and alternatives. You can find keyword analysis tools by searching for "keyword analysis tool." Ironic, isn't it? However, you don't need to use this service to get started. The first thing we did was review the substance of our content and look for commonalities. For instance, you're a prune manufacturer, so you're definitely going to have "prune" as a keyword. As you review your content, you're going to start seeing groups of keywords emerge. Here are some examples:

  * Brand Terms: People who are familiar with your brand are going to be searching for you using your brand's keywords, so make sure you have one to identify yourself, and then make sure you use this keyword in your content and tagging. Seems obvious, right? You'd be surprised.
  * Product Terms: This is what your product is or does, and what problems it solves.
  * Related Product Terms: This is something someone might associate with your product and use instead of your product. For example, if you're selling prunes, you might consider optimizing for "plums."
  * Similar Product Terms: These are items that complement your product. If you sell prunes, you could optimize for "prune juice."
  * User Terms: Put yourself in your user's shoes: what types of topics would they search for that you'd want your product to get found for? Let's say your product is photography software; you would want to create a general topic bucket for "photo editor." Then you'll want to think about what keywords your users would search for that fall into this bucket. These are keyword phrases related to your product that your users are probably using in their search. This might include: "photo editing tools" or "photo editing software."

Once you have a list of tags going, do a search and see what comes up. If there are lots of relevant hits, then you've got a good keyword. If not, you'll have to find alternatives that work better. A service like Google AdWords can help you see if the terms you chose are the ones your customers are using.

A word about keyword governance

Okay, so the first step is figuring out what are the best keywords to use, and then you need to develop a process for actually applying and maintaining a keyword library. Keyword governance is almost as important as deciding which keywords are useful. See, you want all your content tagged consistently so that all of your relevant content shows up when your customers do a search.

Governance is a fancy word for the process that makes sure everyone understands and follows your specific tagging guidelines and controls which keywords get created, and how and when they're used.

We can't stress enough of the important of maintaining a keyword library when you're creating and marketing content. In our case, we had industry experts creating content for every phase of their product's Learn Journey. This meant considering the whole enchilada in terms of users—beginners to professionals—and has proven to be a continued benefit to our products and users. Unfortunately, it also means that they don't always think in the same terms as a user just getting started. Be aware that industry-specific jargon that the industry may think is common knowledge or standard vernacular may elude or confuse a new user and turn them off from your content and product.

There is nothing worse than having a system where authors make up keywords as they go or get caught up and forget who they're creating the content for. For example, how confused would a user be if they looked up "prunes" and found hits for everything from "dried plums" to "paint colors"? A governing body controlling keywords will ensure that your authors only tag things related to "dried plums" are "prunes".

#### How to do search query analysis

Search query analysis will help you identify gaps in your content library. For instance, if you find that a hundred thousand people are looking for "how to make prune sandwiches," it's a good indicator that there should be some content in your library tagged with "prune-sandwich." Or, if you don't have content about "prune-sandwiches," then maybe you should go create some (just stop and imagine for a moment who would be looking for "prune sandwiches"—hmm).

This is a numbers game: the higher the number of queries, the higher the need. But you need a way to see what's getting the most hits. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can do this for you. The tool you use depends on how deep you want to dive into the numbers and, of course, cost. Google Trends is one of the easiest tools out there in terms of accessibility and use. Oh, my gosh, is it easy, just type in "prunes" and look at the ton of great information you'll get:

See the numbers? The higher percentages indicate topics you probably want to have in your content library. In this case, you should go out and create a lengthy article in French on how to make natural prune preserves. Okay, so that's probably not what you should do, but the trends will tell you what people are looking for. It's up to you to decide if that term or phrase is relevant to your business. If so, fill-in the content gap.

Of course, Google Trends isn't the only tool out there. Almost any analytics tool will have a way to track keywords. Products like Adobe Marketing Cloud (shameless plug) let you create reports that show which keywords were popular for a given time period—say, a month—based on what users are searching for on your site. It's important to pull these reports often (we'd recommend at least once a quarter) as users and search queries change over time.

Part 4:

Improve Your Strategy

## Putting it all together

Wait, how does all the Learn Journey stuff relate to the all this Content Marketing plan stuff? Well, one informs the other. The Learn Journey planning process makes sure that the content you develop is delivering the right content at the right time. The Content Marketing plan is all about taking that content and making sure it's available wherever your customers are looking for it.

The data you gather about customer needs and learning approaches for the Learning Journey plan can be used to define customer intent and search terms for your Content Marketing plan.

The data you gather about customer needs and learning approaches for the Learning Journey plan can be used to define customer intent, and search terms that go into your Content Marketing plan.

See! It all fits together like a beautiful tapestry. Ok, maybe it's more like an unfinished puzzle seen through the bottom of a dirty water glass, in a seedy bar on a dark Tuesday afternoon, in a town with no name, but you get the idea.

Ok, so that's how your planning docs fit together. But how do you make sure your overall strategy continues to meet changing customer needs? For that, you'll need a way to review, analyze, and improve your plans continuously. That's where the Content Strategy Planning Cycle comes in (patent pending). The cycle will let you plan in phases, with each phase informing the next. When you get to the end of one cycle, the next one begins. It's a never-ending task and super fun. Trust me on this one.

Using a content strategy planning cycle, you can break down your process into phases that will let you define a few things:

  * What content you need to develop
  * How you're going to develop content
  * Where your content will be seen
  * Who is using your content and whether it's effective

## Case Study: The evolution of the CC Learn content strategy planning cycle

Right, so this is the last case study, we promise (although it's sad because this is like therapy for us). Before we had a Content Strategy team, we were basically a service organization. Every product team would come and ask us to build content that would fit into their overall product strategies. While this helped users understand features, it didn't do much to teach our customers anything meaningful, and thus people were failing at basic tasks and then not using the products because they were so frustrated (which is a bad thing, by the way).

Once upon a time, a lowly editor was given the title "Content Strategist" and asked to come up with some kind of strategy fast. That was the birth of playlists and the Learning Journey. Although those strategies were successful, they needed to be maintained. Oh, and the whole thing had to be sold to every other team, over and over and over and over again.

#### Step 1: Make Content strategy everyone's goal

When we first started out, we didn't have our own experts so we relied heavily on input from the product team and their expertise.

What we did: To keep everyone included in the planning content, we created a Steering Committee for learning content. Every month, we'd gather all the stakeholders and they would prioritize what learning content our team would create. We secretly called it the "battle royale with cheese," because we had limited resources so product teams would have to decide amongst themselves who would get attention from our team.

We learned: Committees don't work. Yeah, big surprise, I know. Everyone had great intentions, but we could never answer the basic question: "Why are you creating this content?" The answer was always: "Because you told us to." That's not strategy, it's tactics. We ended up creating a lot of stuff that was quickly obsolete.

#### Step 2: Build a Learn Journey powered by everyone

Next, we took control of our direction by hiring our own experts and having them help us generate a comprehensive Learn Journey that would teach user basic skills and keep them learning, thus adding to their knowledge base.

What we did: We transitioned away from the Steering Committees to Learning Journey Planning meetings. In these new meetings, we didn't ask for input on what to create. Instead, we asked them assign priorities to the content our team was planning on creating.

What we learned: By keeping things at the priority level, we could quickly get everyone's input and then go off and develop content that fit into both the overall product strategies and our content strategy. A win/win!

#### Step 3: If you just build it no one comes; you need to market it

We built a ton of great content, but our customers didn't know it was there. Even worse, our internal partners were looking for content and didn't know we'd made a ton of it.

What we did: We added a marketing phase to our planning. During the Learn Journey planning phase, we built out the marketing plan so that we could assign keywords, hashtags, and publishing destinations to each piece of content we were thinking of creating.

After each Learn Journey Planning meeting, we generated quarterly content plans that listed out every piece of content that was coming out of our team and distributed it to every team we worked with. Finally, we published a weekly report and created an online master calendar so everyone knew when content was going live.

What we learned: Change is hard. Even with all this effort, teams still don't know about everything we're creating, and customers still complain that we don't have content that we've actually already created. However, it's getting better! We're now being more proactive about pointing internal teams to our resources. And creating a full marketing plan has allowed us to stay on track with our external efforts, and our search ranking is improving. We're a hit on YouTube (that's what my mom tells me anyway).

#### Step 4: You gotta stop and listen before you leap

Believe it or not, it's a good idea to figure out if anyone likes what you're creating before you create even more of it. After we had created Learn Journeys and marketing plans, we had really strong reasons for creating new content, but thankfully we stopped the mule train at that point to review our data and verify our assumptions.

What we did: Search-term analysis has always been part of our development phase, but now we started looking at customer research, traffic, and usage data to determine our own internal content priorities.

What we learned: Our assumptions were off. We thought the best thing to do was to fill out our Learn Journeys so that we'd have a good breath of content. Turns out people couldn't use the basic features, so no one gave a crap about new features or cool tools when they couldn't figure out how to save a file. Armed with solid data, we successfully made the case for refocusing our content planning around beginners.

And they lived happily ever after.

Nope. Things are not all gumdrops and lollipops in content land. We continue to run the cycle, improving it each time we do, but it's been a struggle.

Keep selling your plans: Our biggest hurdle has been adoption. At first, the teams we partnered with didn't get what we were trying to do, but after a few months of improving data and customer successes, we're gaining credibility. We've created roadshows to inform new teams and created an internal website to publish our plans and goals.

Keep running the process: Each time we run the cycle, we are finding areas that need improvement. We're figuring out the best cadence for planning meetings. People have short attention spans, so we keep them frequent and short.

### What's a Content Strategy Planning Cycle?

Here's where "planning" becomes "doing." You can sit and plan all day, but until you turn those plans into tangible content, you're not moving forward. Fish gotta swim, people! Content strategists need to deliver content! Not the best rallying call, but you work with what you got right?

Ok, so everyone has their own way of running their content processes, this is just one idea that's working for us. This cycle makes us stop at each stage to make sure we're including everyone and informing everyone of where we are and what we're doing. It also makes sure we're verifying our assumptions before moving on to the next stage. We've found that this process saves on tons of wasted effort.

Here's what our content strategy planning cycle looks like:

### Plan

This is the phase where we fill out the Learning Journey planning document. All our findings from customer interviews, content audits, and traffic analysis along with customer intent and content type research get put together into one planning doc. At the end of this phase, we present the planning document to all stakeholder to verify priorities. The meeting has a pretty simple script:

CONTENT STRATEGY:

Hello everyone, here are our strategy goals for this quarter

MEETING ATTENDEES

(Silence)

CONTENT STRATEGY:

Hey everyone, here's the content we plan to create this quarter.

Isn't it awesome?

MEETING ATTENDEES

(Silence)

CONTENT STRATEGY:

Ok, can we get your help prioritizing?

MEETING ATTENDEES

(Much discussion)

CONTENT STRATEGY:

Great. Thanks. We'll take your priorities and generate a content plan.

Peace out!

Once you have set the priorities, you can start creating content plans. The goal here is make sure you deliver enough content each quarter to keep users engaged with your Learn Journey.

Content plans list out the playlists topics and tutorials organized by Learn Journey stage and target release date. We then pass this plan along to our content development team (if you're a one-person shop, email it to yourself to make it more official-like).

### Develop

Here's where our content development team take over. They have their development milestones and processes, but they create content in the order of priority set out by the content plan. This phase is also where we provide guidance on customer intent, keywords, hashtags, and other search engine optimizations that need to be baked into new content.

### Market

This is where the bulk of our Content Marketing plan gets executed. After content development does their thing, we have tutorials that are properly tagged and optimized. Now we can publish to all our various surfaces like our website and YouTube. This is also where we start working with our partner teams in email and social media to make sure we're putting content where users are looking for it.

### Analyze

Data analysis is done constantly. We don't stop looking at data when we're developing or marketing content, but we do gather a lot of data into several reports before we start planning new content. First, we look at how the content we've just released is performing. Then, we look at trends in search terms. Do we have content for the top terms? Next, we consult our customer research team to figure out where people are struggling. We put ratings badges on our content and then look at that data to get us general satisfaction rating. Depending on the ratings, we may target a topic for additional investigation or new content.

Phases don't have a set amount of time to complete. Duration depends on content delivery goals and commitments.

Although we have phases, we don't really have a set amount of time set aside for each one. Most of the time, the planning stage doesn't take as long to complete as the development stage. We try to keep our planning meetings on a set cadence as we're asking lots of people to participate.

Content planning and development are driven by release dates. Sometimes we have commitments to campaigns or other marketing efforts, which will definitely inform how long we take to run the whole cycle. In general, we try to run the cycle each quarter just to keep everything fresh. Also, we tend to do marketing and data analysis all the time, so those phases can overlap quite a bit.

### Putting the tools together

Now that you know all our dirty planning secrets, there are some tools that you can use to help you keep you on track throughout the cycle. The two main tools we use to track our strategy are the Learn Journey planning doc and the Content Marketing plan. You can put these together to help you track both the content development and marketing info all in one place (we store ours in a database cause we're all fancy-like).
Here's a simplified version of the Learn Journey planning doc we used for Photoshop:

Learning Journey Stage | Playlist Topic | Content Type | Customer Intent

---|---|---|---

Begin | Photoshop fundamentals | Sequential | Learn

|

Photoshop Editing basics | Sequential | Learn

Practice | Beginner projects | Snackable | Create

|

Retouching projects | Snackable | Create

Master | Work with Camera Raw | Sequential | Learn

|

Fix perspective | Sequential | Learn

|

Create 3D | Sequential | Learn

Evolve | PS with other apps | Snackable | Learn

|

Be a better photographer | Sequential | Learn

This planning doc is used to define each of the playlists in the Learn Journey and how they appear at each stage. It also lists out the types of learner each playlist is targeting; for example, the Sequential learner who leans back or the Snackable learner who leans forward. Finally, it tracks the customer intent for each playlist. Are we targeting a user who is looking for long-form learning or short quick-win content?

A Learning Journey planning doc can get as complicated as you need it. In our final version, we list out every tutorial within every playlist and organize them by the major tags we use to filter content: Learn Journey Stage, Playlist type, Topic name, Content Type, and Customer Intent. This allowed us to see how we're addressing different audiences and see at a glance how we're covering certain topics. It looks something like this:

Don't look too closely or it will melt your brains. Sadly, we can't show you the actual tool, not because it's confidential, but because it's terribly boring (and confidential).

You don't need a database to store this kind of information. You can use something like Excel or Google sheets. The advantage of using one of those apps is that you can create a single place for all your content information that will let you do content planning, strategy, and marketing all from the same data. Whatever tool you choose, make sure you can produce reports or charts from the data. For instance, we report on things like:

  * Tutorials by Product: This lets you see where you're spending your effort. You can use this report to ensure that you're investing in the right products.
  * Tutorials by Stage: The lets you see what stage of learning contains the most content. Does this match your marketing goals? If you're trying to market to new users, you should have more tutorials in the Begin stage.
  * Tutorials by Customer Intent: This will tell you how well you're supporting customers coming to you with different learning goals. If your customer data is telling you that people are looking for quick tasks, you should have lots of snackable content.
  * Tutorials by Content Type: This makes sure you have a good balance of content for different types of users.

We use these reports to quickly figure out how much content we're providing to support our products, and also to see monitor how we're achieving the milestones we set for content development. They can be a real-time saver during the Plan and Develop phases.

### Putting the strategies together

Beyond compiling the tools you'll need, you also want to make sure you're integrating in the best way possible all the research you did to build your Learn Journey and Content Marketing plans. The findings from one type research should inform the other:

  * Customer Interviews + Customer Intent: While you're talking to people about what they need to learn, you should find out "why" they are looking for learning and how they want to consume it. This insight will help your team gauge your customers' future needs and expectations.
  * Search Analysis + Content Audit: Looking for the right keywords will also tell you what topics your customers are looking for and what they're not. Use this data to define what content you should keep and what you should archive. Search terms will also tell you where content is missing.
  * Competitive Analysis + Content Audit: Your goal should always be to have just as much coverage of topics as your competitors. That data will set criteria for your audit as well. Archive anything that no one in your industry cares about.

## Content Development Strategies

It's hard to plan or market content if you don't have any. If you've read this far, it's a good bet that you already have content to begin with, so why does this section exist? To make this book bigger of course! No, while you may have plenty of content to organize, you may have discovered after doing an analysis that you need new content or different types of content. So, we thought we'd share a few techniques we use to create or source content (see, it's not just padding).

If you have a big content development team with a big production process, then this section is not for you. Go grab another latte. Still here? Ok, here are some content development strategies:

  * Make it yourself using Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
  * Hire outside learning professionals to make it for you
  * Let other teams make their own content

### Make your own content

Depending on the size of your team, you may be the strategist and the content developer all in one, so this is basically talking to yourself. If you're making the content, then you need resources to do it and a budget. No one will give you money unless you can prove that you're spending it wisely. That where you can use the Learning Journey plan to prove that every piece of content you're proposing will contribute to the overall learning goals of your customers. Some things to consider:

#### Invest in a Learning Journey plan

The plan is your shield and sword (for the power of Grayskull!!--look it up, it's a hilarious reference). All the time you spend researching and planning out the content will make it clear to everyone "why" you're making that content.

#### Stick to the plan

Don't create content that is not in the plan and don't let anyone else pressure you into creating content that is out of plan. The whole reason you're on solid ground with a content plan generated from a learning journey is that you have the numbers to back up your decisions. Content that comes out of nowhere starts to erode that argument.

Off-plan content may not be what users are looking for, or it may confuse the customer with too many choices on the same topic. For instance, if you're making a learning journey that is all about teaching people how to use vegan building materials, you don't want others in your org creating content about how to build gazebos out of bacon. That content doesn't work for the customer you're trying to reach.

#### Market your plan to your SMEs

If you want content that's going to fit into your Learn Journey, everyone needs to know what journey looks like and what you're trying to accomplish. If the internal subject matter experts understand that there is a larger strategy at play, you're much more likely get content that contributes to your goals without having to do a ton of editing.

### Hire experts to make content

This may sound like the easy way out, but it often makes more sense to take yourself out of the equation. You can't create content strategy for learning content without some knowledge of how people learn your products, but you may not be an instructor. If teaching isn't your thing, then hiring instructors who do teach your products out there in the world is great way to make sure you're building content that people need. Some things to consider:

#### Hire instructors that listen to customers

It's an instructor's job to pass along the same information to every user so that everyone in the classroom learns the same material. However, you want to make sure that the instructors you hire modify their courses in response to constant student feedback. Most instructors will change up a course based on new features, but they also need to respond to any issues that customers may encounter. Review their course materials to make sure it's been updated every year.

#### Hire instructors that are recognized by the industry

The whole point of hiring instructors from the industry to create your content is to lend credibility to your learning journey efforts. It's not enough to just hire good writers. You want to bring in influencers and known personalities. The more recognizable your instructors, the more leeway you'll have from your internal stakeholders. It boosts your cred a lot if you can say, "We're creating this piece on "vegan flooring" because this instructor, who's taught 50 courses for over 20 years, is the brains behind "SuperVegan1000," and he/she says customers need this kind of information."

#### Keep testing the content

Just because an industry-leading instructor is creating your content doesn't mean they're infallible. User testing is essential to making good learning content. Every new piece of content should be put in front of actual users before you publish it. That way you have more than just one voice saying that this content is solid and meets our needs.

### Let others make their own content

We all have limited resources, but you still need fresh content, right? Feed the learning machine! This is where you let everyone help themselves. Learning should be everyone's goal, so it's in everyone's best interest to make sure there is enough content to support your customers well. By setting up a process that allows anyone in your organization to "self-serve," you open up a whole new avenue for new content. Before you tackle the world of self-serve content, here are some things to consider:

#### Provide all the tools and let them do the work

No matter where the content comes from, it all needs to meet the same standards of quality. You'll need clear editorial standards and guidelines in place where everyone can find them. In addition, leverage your SMEs to review all the content for instructional standards.

If you're not going to create the content, everyone needs to understand what makes good content. Once the content is created, there needs to be a production process in place to actually publish to content to your website or other surfaces and/or platforms.

#### Supervision required

It sounds scary to open the flood gates to content, letting it flow from everywhere, but keep in mind that your customers don't know how you're organized internally. They don't know what team does what. They only experience your company through your content. So, if other teams are going to generate content, you better have some way of making sure it sounds the same and don't lose sight of the primary goal: teaching your customers how to use the product using the resources you're providing.

This is where we leverage our instructors and content strategy team. We use our instructors to ensure that everything published on our site has some instructional value and meets writing standards. We use our content strategist to go out into the wild to let every team know that we're a resource to help them plan and market the content they create on their own.

#### Resources don't grow on trees

Just because someone else is creating the content doesn't mean that it doesn't take any time away from your content development team. Someone has to review all the materials. Someone has to review all the assets and pretty pictures, and, finally, someone has to publish the content. Keep in mind that self-serve content will impact your processes and resources. You don't get this content for free, it's just a little cheaper.

## That's all folks!

CONGRATS! You made it to the very end. Ok, everyone, so what did we learn today? Well, content strategy is super-fun and strategists are just the best! Pat yourself on the back and grab yet another latte and splurge; this time with a whole biscotti! Yum (Cookie Monster sounds)

Hopefully you picked up a few tips you can use in your own world. At the very least, maybe you learned what not to do. A wise motivational poster once said, "It may be that your purpose in life is to be a warning to others." Words to live by, no?

Here are a few parting thoughts:

Why content strategy?

Because if you don't have it you don't know where you're going and know else will either. Not all the marketing in the world will sell a product that people don't know about, and even worse, don't know how to use. A good strategy will get you more resources and more credibility. Without it, you won't be in control of your destiny.

Build your strategy

Learning is a journey. People need different kinds of content as they learn to use your product. Don't leave them stuck in one phase. Make sure that the content you're creating supports them at every phase of their journey; that was you'll end up with satisfied and loyal users.

Market your strategy

You need to understand how people want to learn so that you can make sure your content is available at those locations where customers are looking for learning materials. The best content is useless unless someone sees it.

Improve your strategy

Never stop questioning your assumptions, and stop now and then to make sure you're giving yourself time to plan thoughtfully, develop effectively, market loudly, and analyze profoundly.

We don't have all the answers. In fact, we're not even sure that everything we're doing is right, but for now, it's working and we're seeing success. It's amazing to see our customers reacting to our efforts. Let's hope it all works out. If it does, you'll read about it in the sequel: Content Strategy for Learning Content: The Voyage Home (look it up; it's a hilarious geek reference).

FIN

# Resources

Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, so please check out these resources if you want to learn more about content strategy. We gratefully acknowledge the lessons these other authors taught us.

Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition

Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach

Foreword by Sarah Cancilla, Facebook

New Rights, 2012

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Hubspot

Rachel Leist

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht

How to Adopt a Learning Content Strategy

Xyleme

https://www.xyleme.com/how-to-adopt-a-learning-content-strategy/

Demystifying Content Strategy: Key Takeaways from Intelligent Content Conference 2016

Content Marketing Institute

Joe Pulizzi, March 17, 2016

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/03/takeaways-intelligent-content-conference/

Using Your Niche's Demand Distribution Curve to Improve Your SEO, Social, and Content Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

MOZ

Rand Fishkin, January 8, 2016

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-model-the-demand-distribution-curve-of-your-niche-whiteboard-friday

Multi-Device Content - How People Read on the Web

Google Developers - Web Fundamentals

Sam Dutton

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/responsive/content

Emotion Analytics: A Powerful Tool to Augment Gut Instinct

think with Google

Tom Kelshaw, August 2017

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/consumer-insights/emotion-analytics-powerful-tool-augment-gut-instinct/

Value of Digital Learning

MIT - Opening Learning

https://openlearning.mit.edu/value-digital-learning

Chapter 2, Content Strategy

MOZ

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-strategy

Go Beyond Analytics to Give Customers the Content They Crave

Content Marketing Institute

Melissa Eggleston, April 14, 2016

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/04/customers-content-crave/

How to Use Community Forums to Fuel Your Audience Engagement Strategy

Marketo

Liz (Courter) Oseguera

https://blog.marketo.com/2016/03/how-to-use-community-forums-to-fuel-your-audience-engagement-strategy.html

Content Strategy: What Your Target Audience Really Wants

American Express

Jayson DeMers, Founder & CEO, AudienceBloom

July 24, 2013

https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/content-strategy-what-your-target-audience-really-wants/

How to Do Keyword Research the Smart Way: Targeting Interest and Intent

Kissmetricks

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/keyword-research-smart-way/

Keyword Research: a Key Element of SEO & Content Marketing

Search Engine Land

Trond Lyngbø

April 7, 2016

https://searchengineland.com/keyword-research-key-element-seo-content-marketing-246418

Contents

Content Strategy for Learning Content

Why we wrote this book

Part 1: Why content strategy?

What is content strategy?

Case Study: The evolution of the CC Learn content strategy

Part 2: Build your strategy?

What's a Learn Journey?

Understand your content

Sort your content

Make a Learn Journey plan

Part 3: Market your strategy?

What's a Content Marketing Plan?

Case study: The evolution of the CC Learn Content Marketing Plan

Part 3: Improve your strategy?

Putting it all together

Case Study: The evolution of the CC Learn content strategy planning cycle

Content Development Strategies

That's all folks!

Resources
