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It’s difficult to properly visualise this navigation in a hierarchy, largely because it includes three different levels of navigation at the same level, and mixes topics with page types.

Hierarchical Categorisation Diagram

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An easier way to present this to the user would be in simple tiered navigation. Page types would not be needed on the navigation, because they would be easier to find through a broader range of possible topics.

You could categorise by article types, but it’s important to be consistent and specific within your navigation. Always think of your categorisation as a hierarchy of how users can find content.

Broad categories throw up a range of possibilities, and often lead to content creators digressing from brand essence or defined strategy. Be specific, and try to focus on the things you’re best at, and you’ll more likely find an audience. Lots of other companies, particularly publishers, are more likely going to fulfil broad spectrum content well, so it pays to be defined.

Tagging

Website tagging normally interacts with categories, but tags should be different types of classification. They are often defined by proper nouns, such as place or people names, but they can be a range of entities. If they aren’t defined, what often occurs is that content is tagged with similar subjects to categories, thus creating duplication and not a lot of value.

Nouns are often a good way to go with tags, since they can describe particular entities mentioned within the content. So, if you have a post that could be categorised as ‘Dresses’ you could tag it as whoever is wearing the dress, such as ‘Carey Mulligan’. You could also use your tags to define page types, such as ‘Video’ or ‘Infographic’. Again, it is important to be specific.

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Categories and Tags Working in Harmony

What a defined category and tag plan will create is a system that is easy for users to navigate to other relevant content, and easy for your developers to customise when necessary. Vogue. co.uk uses this system well.

User enter the website and clicks News, then sees a story she wants to read: Rihanna Unveils River Island Campaign

Case Study: Net-a-Porter

Few, if any, e-commerce websites have perfected the integration between main website and content feeds. Perhaps luxury fashion website Net-a-Porter is the closest to doing so.

If you visit the homepage of Net-a-Porter, you are greeted with an article collection called ‘The Edit’ rather than any product feed. This is effectively a 30 page weekly e-zine.

The e-zine functions much as a printed magazine, with pages that you can click through, although most often you can ‘Shop the Look’ or click through to buy the products mentioned in the content.

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The scrollable collection is a popular content type in the fashion world, as many e-commerce providers aim to group products together to help inform users of their selections. However, few do it to the same level of detail as Net-a-Porter.

Product listings are regularly grouped into ‘editor’s picks’. For instance, with white being a seasonal colour, the homepage has a call to action to ‘INVEST NOW’ and then lists the editor’s favourite thirty white products behind the link.

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Further content feeds are available – on the top navigation there is a video section with exclusive access and interviews from the fashion industry, while a quick firing news section is available called Fashion Fix is available in footer navigation, and provides more daily updates on the world of fashion and particular looks.

The site also includes options to navigate to its presence on six major social networks and sign up to its newsletter on every page.

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 Execute Schedule

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Net-a-Porter clearly has a multi-faceted approach to content marketing. In a vertical where editorial mixes firmly with product selections and informs consumers on their next buy, it’s a winning formula.

Mapping Content into a New Structure for a Relaunch

As mentioned earlier, embarking on a content marketing strategy often runs in tandem with relaunching a website, or making changes to the Information Architecture and User Experience design. When this occurs, you’re likely to have content that you’ll need to reformat, recategorise or repurpose for use elsewhere.

Redirection

Redirection is simply moving one URL to another, and telling users and bots (like search engines) that it has moved.

The technical method of doing this is through either .htaccess (Apache Web Servers) or Internet Services Manager (Windows Server). Exactly how is best left to web developers, but for redirection, you should provide a spreadsheet that has two columns:

þþ Old URL: The URL where the content sat.

þþ New URL: The URL where you want to move the content too.

This should be straightforward for a web developer. The HTTP status code for permanent redirection should always be 301 (moved permanently). By default, Windows Server uses 302 (move temporarily) and some developers simply implement it as so. Ensure that all redirects of this nature are 301. You can test this using HTTP Fox or Firebug to test server response to a URL.

If you are moving domain, then URL redirection will be necessary, but it is not recommended that you redirect all URLs just for consistency with categories. Users rarely care about URLs, so long as they can find the right content. Thus, if you need to recategorise content, you may simply want to say to a developer:

“Move all of the content in Category X into Category Y. All content in Category X should appear under the Category Y landing page and archive, but there is no need to change the

URLs.”

For the most part, old categories can simply be absorbed into new ones or renamed. This will suffice and discounts a couple of risks:

þþ Doing more work than is necessary enhances risk and leads to more things to check

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over.

þþ URL changes reset counters such as social share buttons, which are difficult to get set correctly for moved URLs.

It is possible that some content is very similar, and could be consolidated into a new URL. In this case, you combine (or more) URL’s content, edit it and then publish at a new URL. All of the old URLs where this content was sourced from should be redirected to the new one.

Re-Editing Plans

From the content audit process, you would have spotted content that you can re-use for your new content strategy and marked it as ‘Keep’ or ‘Reformat’.

Even keeping content will mean revisiting it to ensure the new brand essence, message architecture and editorial styles are applied. This can be a substantial job, so if you are planning a relaunch, it’s worth thinking about how you can merge re-edits into the editorial plan, which is the subject of the next section.

Defining an Information Architecture Recap

A content marketing hub is the core of your content strategy – the place where all of your other platforms are promoted and work together.

þþ Creating a Content Marketing Hub – A website or blog is normally the linchpin of your content marketing strategy, integrating other platforms and syndicating content onto them.

þþ Blog Launches that Fail – Ask yourself whether or not you need a blog, think why users would visit it and think of an appropriate name.

þþ Integrating Subscription Features – If you’re on other social networks and have email sign up, make sure they are visible on your site so people can subscribe on different platforms.

þþ Navigation and Categorisation – Create content and categories that promote your product categories and vice versa.

þþ Categorisation – Use categories in the same classification scheme and at the same level.

þþ Tagging – Use tags in conjunction with your categories to enable writers and editors to sign post users to other relevant content.

þþ Redirecting Content for a Relaunch – If you are changing content categories in a relaunch, ensure that redirects are properly mapped out and will be using a 301 (moved permanently) status code.

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Technique 5

Defining an Editorial Plan

Through following the steps of the last section, you should have a marketing hub with a strong technical setup for SEO and usability – now you just have to fill it with content. But before you do that, it’s necessary to create a solid plan.

Attempting to publish content with little structure or schedule is one of the main reasons so many blogs and content feeds run out of steam and grind to a halt; a lack of a solid plan means when things aren’t working as expected, they can just be stopped. Thus defining an editorial plan is perhaps the crucial phase in a strategy – not having one can lead to confusion, or simply quitting. This chapter outlines a number of methods to ensure your editorial plan has the authority to sustain your content marketing.

Telling your Story

rr Q. Approach to storytelling around audience interests and business needs defined?

Regardless of your sector your product or services will need solve a problem for your customers, or fulfil particular needs and wants. No matter how boring you view this product, it sits within a ‘story arch’ that can always be made interesting to consumers facing the challenges that it solves.

In Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a basic pattern of storytelling is defined as a ‘monomyth’ or ‘hero’s journey’. This is a pattern that can be seen in a wide range of storytelling from around the world. Essentially, protagonists within a story go through a number of common stages, often encountering obstacles and villains as shown below11:

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information 4 Architecture

From Homer’s The Odyssey, to Medieval Romances and modern sci-fi adventures such as

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and Avatar, this story arc persists:

1.The protagonist is inspired to go on an adventure.

2.This adventure will present various challenges which will take the protagonist out of his known environment.

3.The protagonist will meet a mentor or go through some specific training in order to fulfil his quest.

4.There are a series of challenges of challenges and temptations for the protagonist to overcome.

5.The protagonist overcomes these challenges, culminating in a critical final showdown.

6.The protagonist completes the quest, and is subsequently rewarded for their efforts

(in many stories, this is normally through the fulfilment of love, such as Odysseus returning home to win back his wife Penelope).

Using Star Wars as an example, the story arc is easily recognisable:

1.Luke Skywalker is a young and romantic individual, living on a desolate planet with bigger dreams.

2.He encounters two robot droids, who inform him that Princess Leia is in need of help escaping from the evil Empire.

3.The message leads him to Obi Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Knight who begins to show Luke the ways of the force.

4.Obi Wan takes Luke away from his home planet in order to save the Princess.

5.With assistance from new characters, Luke rescues the Princess, but now faces the greater challenge of defeating the Empire through destroying the Death Star.

6.After the fleet of rebel fighters suffer heavy losses, Luke manages to destroy the

Deathstar with the assistance of one his new companions and his former mentor.

7.Luke is rewarded at a medal ceremony.

We can use this kind of story arch in a content marketing strategy through switching the protagonist with the customer, and then offer mentorship through the content, and the promise of reward (or quest completion) from the product. For instance:

1.Joe is a 28 year old marketing manager seemingly unaware of the potential of his company’s data.

2.He reads a blog which tells him about the potential of having strong data management and reporting.

3.He discovers that his company has little internal understanding of the potential value.

4.He continues to read content from the blog, soon discovering that this company also offers a product that can solve his company’s data management issues.

5.While the product might solve the issues, he encounters internal politics and IT issues that can prevent its deployment.

6.Eventually Joe manages to get round the internal politics via a meeting with the IT Director. The product solution is deployed.

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7.The new data management leads to an increase in company revenue, and Joe is promoted.

While the second story is hardly going to make audiences as excited as one of the most successful films of all time, it can help you shape a relevant structure for you content marketing plan. For instance, from Joe’s potential ‘quest’, you could shape it as follows:

rr Month One – Identify potential customer problems and create content to help them meet challenges.

rr Month Two – Create content about the product, and the benefits it presents in meeting potential challenges.

rr Month Three – Create content about meeting internal company conflict, and inform potential customers how to meet these specific challenges.

rr Once these challenges are met (through purchase of the product) offer something as a reward to the customer. This could be exclusive content, lower rates on further purchases or non-financial rewards.

This story arch has a good understanding of the protagonist (who could be defined by your personas), their challenges and how you could solve these. Now you need to decide on the ‘types of content’ that you will use to create this story.

Defining the Content Mix

rr Q. Are our content themes and topics defined?

Good content strategy thrives on variety, and defining how and when to deploy different content types is vital. One of the reasons that so many content ‘strategies’ slowly unravel is because there is little definition of variation; often they are approached with in one dimension

– simply a blog or newsfeed.

Subject Matter

With a story arc in place, you need to go deeper into the particular topics that your content creators will write about or produce to meet the challenges of the audience. You also need to things they definitely shouldn’t focus on – this should also be guided by the Message

Architecture.

For instance, if you have a fairly broad category such as ‘Fashion’, what kind of fashion are you going to focus on?

þþ Is it men’s or women’s fashion? þþ Low end or luxury?

þþ Which influential people will you mention?

Asking questions like will ultimately define what and who for the content you create. The how is defined through the next steps.

Stock, Flow and Curation

rr Q. Content workflow defined?

Content can be clearly defined three ways: stock, flow and curation. These can be explained

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as follows:

þþ Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Twitter and newspaper sites are the best examples of timely flow content.

þþ Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what

spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time. Advisory content on pregnancy is a good example of stock, since as long as people live, this could be useful12.

þþ Curation has since grown in prominence since these definitions. It is simply the gathering of a variety of good content sources into a document. Thus the document becomes a useful source in its own right. Pinterest is a good example of this, since all of its content is curated by its users. Dan Bosomworth has a great post suggesting 23 methods of content curation.

Primary Fuel vs. Nuclear Fuel

Another way of looking at how you prioritise on flow and stock content is Primary Fuel vs Nuclear fuel. We picked up on this idea from Michael Stelzner who runs Social Media Examiner.

What is it? Primary fuel

Primary fuel is regularly published, free content that meets the needs of your reader base. The goal of your primary fuel is to help your readers solve their problems so they will become raving fans.

Stelzner advises that the lifespan of primary fuel is just three days although it may generate additional visits through time via SEO which can lead to conversion. The types of primary fuel include:

þþ How-to articles þþ Expert interviews þþ Reviews

þþ News stories þþ Case studies

þþ Contrarian stories

What is it? Nuclear fuel

Nuclear fuel is carefully designed content that has a lasting impact on significant numbers of your ideal reader base and possibly experts. It will cost more to produce, but the returns will be greater.

This type of content has a lifespan easily exceeding that of primary fuel. It can sometimes be relevant for years. Nuclear fuel is usually free or requires opt-in and includes:

þþ Reports based on surveys þþ White papers

þþ Top 10 contests

12  Robin Sloan, ‘Stock and Flow’, Snarkmarket: http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890.

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þþ Micro events (webinars, videos, podcasts)

Here’s an example for a B2B infographic created on Smart Insights: compare this sustained traffic and page value showing it does influence sales to some degree, to the example earlier in the book.

A blog, of course, can be used to create all of the mentioned content types – but why should you choose one type of content over another?

That really depends on what sort of industry you’re in, your audience requirements, and how you want to portray your business. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. A Newspaper Website

A newspaper website would almost certainly have the vast majority of its content plan as news – thus flow. It may also add some stock content, such as lifestyle advice. Some of its content could also be defined as curating other sources.

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