Photo: “Best Friends” by eflon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
When it’s time for your company to build or refresh its website, pulling the necessary content together and then properly organizing it can be an incredibly daunting task. Fortunately, you can look to your friendly agency content strategist to help move the process along in an organized manner. They can’t do it alone, though! They need stakeholders like you to help with the heavy lifting. Here are five great tips to becoming the kind of stakeholder a content strategist dreams of:
- Understand your role. According to Webster’s, a stakeholder is a person who is involved in or affected by a course of action. In Content Strategy Land, a stakeholder is a representative of one portion of a company who lends their voice to the project. For example, Bob is Vice President of Community Outreach at The Sunshine Company. When it’s time to build their website, it will be his job to gather all information about community outreach that is relevant to their target audience.
- Speak now or forever hold your peace. Content strategy involves a lot of brainstorming. At some point, your content strategist may bring all of the project’s stakeholders together to discuss goals, milestones and more. During this meeting, remember to follow brainstorming best practices. But above all…contribute! By actively participating in these exercises upfront, you can help set the project on the right course and avoid a derailment down the line.
- Don’t sweat the interview. Many times—especially when a company is building a website from scratch—content strategists will interview stakeholders. This process is solely meant to help the content strategist learn more about you, your company and the department or product you represent. If you think your opinion isn’t important, think again! This is a great opportunity to bring up any goals or concerns you didn’t get a chance to discuss during the group brainstorming session.
- Recruit your own A-Team. You may not personally have the time to gather every file or describe every product, but what about your team? Try enlisting the help of those around you to help fulfill your content requirements while sticking to the timeline. If you’re still having trouble meeting your deadline, reach out to your content strategist for help. He or she may be able to guide you toward a viable solution.
- Look at the big picture. Ultimately, the content you and other stakeholders provide will be organized by the content strategist and whittled down. At first, it may be hard to see your work edited, but remember—the purpose of this process is to create extremely focused content that meets the goals discussed during the brainstorming session(s) and interviews. A few small changes here or there will make a big difference overall!
By keeping these few tips in mind, you can be a huge part of making your company’s project successful.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Tips to Becoming Your Content Strategist’s Best Friend
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