- Nouha Blagui
- April 13, 2021
Content strategy: how to build, manage, and measure content in your digital workplace
Gone are the days when corporate communications filtered all internal news and intra-company information. Now, with the rapid rise of social software and digital workplaces, content creation and distribution and information management and sharing have changed dramatically.
Content strategy is becoming the main pillar of digital workplace solutions, taking into consideration its capacity to inform, update, and involve workforces and keep them engaged and productive.
Content
In order to take your digital workplace to the next level and keep your workforce ‘onboard’, you have to reconsider your content approach and set up a full strategy, from ideation to execution to analysis.
1. Content strategy: what is it and why is it important?
Content usually includes all the files, text, images and video across your entire digital workplace. It can be formal (top-down documents) and informal (bottom-up conversations and chat).
A well documented content strategy should attract and engage your employees. Focusing on quantity rather than on quality, creating content simply for the sake of publishing something new on your activity stream, and overwhelming your employees with information that is neither helpful nor relevant will drop your engagement rates, harm your employee experience, and hinder the success of your digital workplace solution.
So keep in mind that your employees should consume, interact with, and make use of your content in their daily tasks.
A pro tip would be to make your digital workplace act like a multi-directional communication tool that enables you to collect feedback from your employees and to see what type of content they are interacting with the most.
2. Building your content strategy
It all begins with a strategy that addresses every type of content, engages and enables your employees, and helps your organisation reach its objectives.
When building your content strategy it’s crucial to include the following four elements.
Goal: your content strategy goal should align with your digital workplace strategy as well as your organisation’s overall business objectives. This will help you determine the type of content you should publish, how it should be organised, published, and maintained in your digital workplace, and the frequency of its publication.
Audience: from leaders and frontline employees to new recruits, your content should be tailored to your audience’s needs, specific requirements, and contexts. Identifying your key users will help you set the tone with maximum appeal to each group, while maintaining a voice that aligns with and reflects your brand.
It helps to document your employees’ backgrounds in order to adapt your content to each category. An article about the latest trends in coding and development will appeal more to your IT guys than to your marketing team. So make sure that each space in your digital workplace is tailored to its members’ preferences and interests.
Topics: After outlining all the available resources to support your strategy (for example, documents, videos, texts, articles, tutorials, and whitepapers), you should decide on the topics. Ask yourself if you’ll be publishing company related news in the form of an employer branding video or blog post. Or will it be curated content from your industry? Professional and networking events for small business owners in your area? Educational content? Or a mixture of all of these?
The topics should be selected so as to reach all defined goals: building an employer’s brand, enhancing your employee engagement and experience, strengthening your company culture, increasing your adoption rate, and raising awareness around a forthcoming new feature or product.
Setting the goals is a continuing process, so make sure to adapt your topics to your current goals, and to assess your content frequently as there is no end point.
This of course will determine your publication’s frequency.
Frequency: After covering the topics you want to communicate to your audience, you should determine the frequency with which you will operate. Make sure not to overwhelm your audience with too much information, as this will make the achievement of your goals less likely. Your employees will either be unable to find what they need, or will discover only irrelevant content and will lose trust.
At the other extreme, this does not mean that it’s OK to publish once in a while and then forget about your community for another few weeks.
You can start by testing how your employees respond to and interact with your content. This should get you closer to the optimal frequency of publication within your digital workplace.
3. Managing content in your digital workplace
Now that you know the key elements of your content strategy, it’s time to determine how your content should be managed.
You know your audience, your topics, and your frequency. Now what you need to know is: what exactly will your content include? How should you write it? Will you review and modify outdated content? Will you create content from scratch or curate content?
Start by forming your content team. This team should include content creators, experts in your industry who can go deeply into the details, and content managers who will coordinate your creators and your experts, choose the topics and the publication frequency, and keep track of the whole process. It also helps to have people who will audit and evaluate your content as your strategy evolves, and who will analyse what works best (more on that later).
You should also work on a content calendar so you can concentrate on the operational and tactical details needed to execute your strategy. The calendar will include all the elements mentioned above, such as: who will create and publish the content? How often do you want to publish in those spaces? What content will be published where? Who are your content owners? Does your content need management or approval? What are the deadlines for content completion?
Now you’ve determined your audience, your topics, your knowledge-based wikis, and your spaces, and your documents are full of core business content, you can benefit from ‘curated content’.
Because creating engaging stories and then publishing and managing content is time-consuming, curated content from trusted sources can keep your calendar running smoothly while ensuring that your content is being used for its intended purposes.
Pay attention also to your content policies and procedures. You should ensure that users are applying your organisation’s brand image across your digital workplace, provide your creators with content templates in order for them to produce consistent content, So that readers can easily scan and consume information, publish procedures for adding new pages or spaces in order to avoid unnecessary or duplicated content utilizing content optimization tools where applicable.
4. Measuring the success of your content
Now to the juicy part! It’s time to measure the effects of your content. It starts with evaluating what’s working and what’s not.
You can rely on numbers and data, but not only that. There are other sources of measurement.
Quantitative metrics: you can pay attention to metrics such as the reach, number of likes, comments, shares, views, and ratings.
Qualitative metrics: what are those comments saying? How do your employees find, consume, retain, and use your content? You can conduct employee surveys and polls to see if they can easily find what they’re looking for, if your content is relevant, and if it’s helping them to work better and more efficiently.
Measuring the success of your content will indicate to you the type or types of content that perform the best, and will help you to identify opportunities to fill any gaps.
Your content strategy is a never-ending process. It needs continuing evaluation and analysis if it is to evolve and continue to serve its purpose. You may have to go through the same process again and again in order to engage and delight your audience day in and day out.
FREE WHITE PAPER
Types of Digital workplace solutions
The modern workplace has evolved significantly in recent years, with advancements in technology, the growing number of tools …
FAQs
What is a digital workplace?
A digital workplace is a next generation of intranet solutions or intranet 2.0 that is based on three pillars: communication, collaboration and information. In a way this definition is true but it doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of the term.
Here are some definitions of digital workplace:
- An evolution of the intranet
- A user centric digital experience
How to launch an effective Digital Workplace?
- Understand users’ needs
- Identify your digital workplace ambassadors
- Build the digital workplace brand
- Training and onboarding
- Plan the big day
How do you secure your Digital Workplace?
Here are some best practices to minimise security threats in digital workplaces:
- Develop a cybersecurity policy
- Continuous training
- Control access to information
- Be sure to update regularly
What is a Digital Workplace Content Strategy?
Content usually includes all the files, text, images and video across your entire digital workplace. It can be formal (top-down documents) and informal (bottom-up conversations and chat). A well documented content strategy should attract and engage your employees. Focusing on quantity rather than on quality, creating content simply for the sake of publishing something new on your activity stream, and overwhelming your employees with information that is neither helpful nor relevant will drop your engagement rates, harm your employee experience, and hinder the success of your digital workplace solution. ➝ See the full definition of Content Strategy in a digital workplace
Why Digital Workplace Content is so important?
A pro tip would be to make your digital workplace act like a multi-directional communication tool that enables you to collect feedback from your employees and to see what type of content they are interacting with the most. ➝ Find out Why Digital Workplace Content is so important
How to Build a Content Strategy in your digital workplace?
It all begins with a strategy that addresses every type of content, engages and enables your employees, and helps your organisation reach its objectives. When building your content strategy it’s crucial to include the following four elements.
➝ Find out How to Build a Content Strategy in your digital workplace
How to Manage content in your digital workplace?
Now that you know the key elements of your content strategy, it’s time to determine how your content should be managed. You know your audience, your topics, and your frequency. Now what you need to know is: what exactly will your content include? How should you write it? Will you review and modify outdated content? Will you create content from scratch or curate content?
- Start by forming your content team.
- You should also work on a content calendar
How do you measure the success of content in your digital workplace?
Measuring the success of your content will indicate to you the type or types of content that perform the best, and will help you to identify opportunities to fill any gaps.
➝ Find out How do you measure the success of content in your digital workplace
- Tags: Digital workplace, Tips & Tricks
I am a marketer and social media junkie. I work to optimise eXo’s online brand with content, social media technologies and digital marketing.
I mainly write cartoons but I am also a big fan of topics related to internal communications in the digital workplace.
I would love to connect with you, so get in touch and join our LinkedIn group ‘Intranet & Digital Workplace’.
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