3 simple ways organizations can harness the power of content strategy

I was honored to be a guest on Mary Byers’s podcast, Successful Associations Today

Mary focuses on what it takes for associations to succeed today and tomorrow, and I’m thrilled to be part of that discussion. We defined content, reviewed top content challenges, discussed the CEO’s role in making content strategy possible.

Here are a couple of my favorite points we discussed:

Simple ways associations can start to harness the power of a planned content strategy:

1. Create a shared content calendar to record all the content that each department is planning to create
2. Make sure people talk to each other
3. Audit the content you have, to understand and be really honest, what is working and not working

Most important takeaways about content strategy:

1. Make sure every piece of content you publish has a clear, explicit audience and a measurable goal, because if it doesn’t, how will we know if it’s successful, and we want to make sure that we’re understanding the content that works, and making [better decisions about it]
2. Your committees are not your audience, and there are creative ways to take advantage of volunteers’ effort and interest in participating
3. Make sure that if content responsibilities really are baked in people’s jobs,  it has to be official and not something  they’re supposed to do in their spare time.

Listen to the full podcast episode.

If you prefer reading/scanning to listening, you can download a transcript of the episode (PDF, 118k).