In an earlier post, we talked about using focus groups to better understand your web users' needs. But external web users are not the only type of users we need to understand in order to create valuable and purposeful content. To create web content that works, we must also understand our internal web content stakeholders. These are all the people planning for, creating, curating, editing, approving, publishing and maintaining content, among … [Read more...]
Best Practices for Email Newsletter Content Planning
Everyone loves to prognosticate about the future of email, including whether or not anyone still reads it or if we’ll soon be able to check it via our refrigerators. For better or for worse, email remains a ubiquitous form of communication today. According to a July 2012 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, we spend 13 hours per week dealing with email. Thirteen hours! That’s a whole season of “House of Cards,” you know. Not surprisingly, … [Read more...]
How to Activate Faculty to Fuel Your Content
The following guest post was written by Katy Zimmerman, Content Strategist at Colorado Technical University. What if I told you that you have a team of expert writers at your disposal? It’s true. Content professionals in higher education are sitting on a potential gold mine of untapped authors. University faculty are subject-matter experts in their field, and many also have excellent writing chops. But how can you best use these experts and turn … [Read more...]
Eleventh Hour Content Strategy
Any digital initiative — be it a website redesign, a social media campaign, or an enewsletter — should follow a content-first approach. But, as content strategist Corey Vilhauer reminds us, “There is no universal content strategy methodology.” Thanks to the insights shared from our peers across higher education and the broader world of content strategy, we have a lot of models to learn from and adapt for our needs. Yet, as we know, things … [Read more...]