Recently I’d been talking with an awesome content strategist who goes by the name of Gigi Griffis. In aid of us getting a project going Gigi invited this guy *points at self* along to a content strategy meetup and get together type thing in London.
The long story short… it was pretty awesome. I won’t go into detail about what everyone had to say but I will say that each speaker had a very unique perspective and actually gave valuable takeaways – and let’s be fair, that’s very rarely the case as conferences. It’s usually very dry and vague, talking top level tactics which leaves people in the same position they were before!
Anyway, the notes, in order of when they were jotted down and unedited; enjoy…
- Who are our users? If we don’t know everything about our users, we can’t do the necessary research into what’s needed.
- What do users need? Following from above, if we don’t know exactly what they need, we can’t provide the best service/content.
- Start listing all needs, in a spread sheet, mind map. This will get the content juices flowing.
- Use and draw up wireframes, do lots of testing and take in everyone’s opinion. More brain power the better!
- Launch, then test. Don’t dilly-dally and waste time.
- Make sure your company has a content style guide, words to avoid, what to say, everything!
- Team all sitting together allows for all content wording, design and development work to seamlessly flow together. Better end product!
- Create an ‘easy to understand how everything works’ page… a simple explanation page for your site/product/anything to make users experiences easier.
- Validation, spot checks, formalities, training. Not everything can work first time, needs human elements.
- Think about how everyone can collaborate together at work – what does everyone have in common? What can everyone bring to the table?
- Incorporate content strategy into even the smallest of projects/work! Maybe I could use this idea to formalise a better way of getting even small updates out there.
- Better content creates a better life for everyone involved.
- Consider the ethical nature of everything, find the balance between users and business goals. Lol especially with us, gambling isn’t the most ethical of niches to work in.
- Content can make all the difference even in the smallest way. A/B test different titles, descriptions and look at performance metrics, click throughs, sign ups, page views etc.
- Teach my team how to think, manage content, organise, marketing, about the user being #1.
- Only document what needs to be. Everything else is a waste of time.
- Visualise, test, try everything. This brings ideas forward and gets shit done, rather than procrastinating about what might not work.
- Make and build, not document. If you have an idea, do it, now. Rather than wasting time being useless talking.
- Get prototypes live and in testing. You can’t test great content if you haven’t started yet… prototype change, make new things less scary.
- The speakers we’re awesome.
For £9, it was a decent event. Nice work guys, I’m just disappointed I can’t attend the 3 day conference next week in London. No problem – I’ll be making my way to Minneapolis for that one instead!
I hope this was as useful to you as it was for me. If you took down any valuable notes I missed, please, please get in touch or leave a comment.
Peace out ya’ll!
