Creating Content Strategy at Scale for Luxury, Part 1: Applied Content Strategy

In the first of two analytical pieces, FSW explores what it takes to create applied content strategy that delivers enduring solutions and evolves effectively over time.

Selling luxury is about selling a story. Engaging end users is the goal of anyone with something to sell, but luxury is special. Customers must feel it is special. They might want to feel that others believe it is special. Telling this story involves a bunch of different ingredients, including appeals to provenance, craftsmanship, creativity, or a particular way of being or thinking about the world. Drafting such stories is creative and sounds romantic, but is also a discipline. Creating stories that resonate is not a one-and-done product of dreamy imagining, but must involve scaling stories to appeal across a range of different types of people and cultures across various platforms. The most enduring and effective stories are underpinned by strategies to ensure that the stories remain vivid and evolve as times and personnel change. This is the world of applied content strategy.

Content strategy helps luxury brands meet several necessary goals for telling effective stories. It helps them: (1) delineate what types of stories are worth telling and determine what is their objective (decision-making); (2) understand supplier and customer needs (domain expertise); (3) assemble the back- and front-end requirements (content engineering); (4) measure the effectiveness of their stories (statistics); (5) scale stories to reach millions of consumers in the digital and physical spaces they are found (production); and (6) ensure that your stories continue to engage over time (reliability engineering), including taking decisions on when to retire stories that are no long resonating.

A company’s general or storytelling strategy must be grounded in a strong content strategy. Content strategy is an overarching approach for setting out mindful and targeted content that marries your brand’s unique raison d’être with its customers in a dynamic way. A good content strategy not only sets a company apart from its competitors, it allows the North Star of a company’s brand story to shine through across marketing channels in a way that inspires and gives you the right conditions to create brand loyalty.

In this two-part series, FSW will delve into the nuts and bolts of applied content strategy. This first essay will lay out the importance of content strategy to support and scale storytelling. The second will go to the micro level to discuss content operations and why it is essential to storytelling at scale.

What is content strategy?

As a field, content strategy is relatively new since it is a direct by-product of digital technology. However, its foundational concepts are old and overlap with the basic tenets of connecting corporate strategy to good writing, visual design, brand storytelling, and marketing.

Content strategy is about the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. The governance strategy for the creation of current and future content is especially important because while it is, of course, essential to hit your business strategy’s key themes and messages and include clear metadata frameworks and content attributes, it is not a strategy unless the principles governing the use/re-use, production, and cross-channel distribution of content are embodied in a strategic framework. This governance framework ensures that (hopefully) good content creation and delivery processes developed today continue to deliver good outcomes in the future even as corporate strategies and staffing change.

To start at the beginning, a good content strategy starts with a solid understanding of your target audience. This involves researching to identify their needs, interests, and pain points. Once you have this information, you can create content that addresses their concerns and provides solutions to their problems. A well-thought-out content strategy should also take into account the different stages of the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision-making. This allows you to create content that meets the needs of your audience at each stage of the journey.

Finally, a successful content strategy requires ongoing evaluation and adjustment. This involves tracking metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to determine what is working and what needs to be improved. Based on this data, you can make changes to your content strategy to ensure that it is achieving your business objectives. By regularly monitoring and adjusting your content strategy, you can ensure that your content is always relevant, engaging, and effective in achieving the goals of your business strategy.

What does a content strategy do for your brand story?

Yet, for these stories to be effective, you must layer a content strategy on top of them. The content strategy is, at its best, a tissue connecting your corporate strategy
to your story. It should provide a roadmap for your content creation, editorial workflow, and distribution efforts. It involves defining your target audience (internal and external), identifying their needs and interests, and developing content, including stories, that addresses those needs and interests.

A content strategy also helps you ensure that your stories are aligned with your overall business goals. For example, if your business objective is to increase website traffic, your content strategy should focus on creating stories that are optimized for search engines and promote social sharing. After all, what is the utility of great stories if they do not reach your target audience (or your aspiring audiences) in the distribution channels where they are to be found, whether that is in a store, on a particular digital platform, on a corporate intranet site, in the metaverse, or on a video game?

Finally, a content strategy helps you measure the effectiveness of your brand stories and keeps strategies fresh and aligned with evolving corporate needs. By tracking metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can determine what is working and what needs to be improved. This allows you to make data-driven decisions about your content strategy and ensure that it is achieving your business objectives. This results in a feedback loop of learning between your corporate strategy, your company stories, and your content strategy.

Content strategy is not merely a technical detail to be worked out by UX or back-end development teams. Like your corporate stories, it needs the buy-in of strategists and others across an organization. This is important as content strategy can result in path dependency where decisions made on a strategy now can guide behaviors in the future. So decisions on the purpose of a brand story and how well it is or is not achieving its goals require wide buy-in at the start or content auditing stage of the process. Similarly, decisions on who can write stories and how they are updated need to be broadly communicated so that stories are kept fresh and in step with evolutions in the underlying corporate strategy.

How do you create a content strategy?

Like all strategies, creating a content strategy begins with being mindful of the way that you use your internal resources to engage with customers. Content strategy is unique from other forms of strategy in that it must involve integrating high-level strategy with marketing, UX, and CX functions. At least at the start, you need to bring together corporate strategy functions with tactical functions and ensure that the strategy encompasses both front-end areas of client engagement with the back-end technical departments that support the various channels by which your audience is reached. This is especially important if you reach your audience through multiple channels as having separate strategies for IRL engagement, web2 digital engagement (e.g., social media), and even web2.5 to web3 outreach (e.g., immersive digital experiences or various co-creating platforms) will waste resources at best and likely result in the splintering of corporate strategy and brand stories into ways that are diluting.

Content strategies can be as diverse as the organizations using them, but seven steps are essential:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

Before creating a content strategy, it’s essential to determine the goals you want to achieve. The content strategy must be connected to your broader corporate strategy and the brand stories that you want to tell. Your objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Some of the objectives of a content strategy may include increasing website traffic, generating leads, improving brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, or increasing engagement on social media.

Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience

It is crucial to understand their needs, interests, pain points, and the type of content they prefer. You can gather this information through surveys, interviews, or social media listening. Once you have a clear understanding of your audience, you can tailor your content to meet their needs.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

A content audit is an analysis of your existing content. It helps you identify the content that performs well, the gaps, and the opportunities. Also, organizations often do not know where all of their content is located or have a full picture of what the content distributed across various channels communicates. By conducting a content audit, you can determine which content formats, topics, and channels resonate with your audience. You can also identify areas where you need to improve your content, such as search engine optimization (SEO), readability, or visual design.

Step 4: Develop a Content Framework

A content framework is a plan and roadmap that outlines the types of content you will create, when and where you will publish it, and how you will promote it. Your content plan should align with your objectives, target audience, and content audit. It should also take into account the content formats that work best for your audience and the channels they prefer. Your content plan should include a content calendar, which shows the publishing schedule for each piece of content.

Step 5: Create and Publish Your Content

Once you have a content plan, you can start creating your content. Your content should be relevant, valuable, and engaging to your target audience. It should also align with your brand values and tone of voice. When publishing your content, you should optimize it for SEO, use engaging visuals, and add calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage your audience to take action.

Step 6: Measure Your Results

Measuring the results of your content strategy is crucial to understanding its impact and making improvements. You can track metrics such as website traffic, engagement, leads generated, and conversions. By analyzing your results, you can identify what works and what doesn’t and adjust your content plan accordingly.

Step 7. Create a Content Governance Plan

A content governance plan is a framework that provides guidelines and processes for managing content creation, distribution, and governance across an organization. It includes defining roles and responsibilities, creating standards for content quality and consistency, establishing workflows for content creation and review, and ensuring compliance with legal, regulatory, and ethical requirements. The goal of a content governance plan is to ensure that content is created and managed effectively and efficiently to achieve business objectives while mitigating risks associated with content creation and distribution. This step is essential to ensure that good content strategy practices are codified and become part of your company’s rules for creating brand stories for various channels. A content governance plan is what can make good content strategy part of your company’s DNA.