What Does it Take?

In a way, Erickson Barnett's content strategy appears to be pretty simple: Feature some videos, write a more developed article every few months, keep a blog- piece of cake, right? Wrong. Even a content strategy as apparently simple as this takes a lot of hard work and comes at a cost. I recently spent some time speaking with Lee Erickson (pictured at right), co-founder and President of the firm, about what kind of effort is needed to achieve a worthwhile content strategy.

As I mentioned before, Erickson Barnett started by taking a close look a their positioning. "We started by narrowing our positioning to B2B only and becoming experts in B2B marketing," Erickson told me. In taking this step, they were able to clearly outline what decisions needed to be made internally to support the content strategy that best fit their positioning. As a result, Erickson moved out of account management and dedicated herself full time to content creation, which is divided among doing research, blogging, and working on the Orange Thoughts articles.

"Content is the hardest thing to do. It has to come from the top down. If management doesn't believe in it, then client work will always come first," she said. Erickson knew that the success of their content strategy would depend upon the level of importance it had internally, so she redefined her role around their content strategy rather than "moonlighting" as company blogger and strategist. By delegating some research and writing, she is also able to us the creation of the Orange Thoughts as an opportunity to mentor junior staff members and identify those more inclined toward strategic thinking.

Erickson Barnett also took a slower approach to blogging. In fact, they spent an entire year developing their blog internally before they made any of it public. Erickson advises agencies to "blog internally as a closed blog first. You need to practice, and you need to know who's in and who's not." By spending this kind of time developing their approach to blogging, they were able to find a unified voice and identify and commit to a particular goal for the blog, rather than let it turn in to an ineffective free-for-all. In fact, she pointed out that they had initially allowed for more fun "check out this cool thing" posts, but eventually removed them after deciding that the blog's primary purpose was to "let visitors know how we thought." They now guard this position with a conservative and measured approach to their writing, and a committed schedule that requires at least 1 post every 2-3 days, a weekly post from their analytics team, and a poll every Friday.

Out of their 14 employees, their goal is to have 3-4 bloggers actively participating. Keeping the number of bloggers low ensures that the responsibility is taken seriously. As Erickson points out, blogging needs to be done by a dedicated resource and needs to be part of their actual job description. With planned time and dedicated resources, she concluded that the blog both "keeps the company aware of it's main goal and maintains an overall discipline for the staff."

Lee also emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining a good content strategy. It obviously takes dedication and diligence to get it started, but it requires accountability to keep it going. While this can come from allocating full-time resources to the effort, she also noted that committing to things like speaking engagements motivated her entire team to get their household in order. "It's just like having company over," she remarked, "then the house get's cleaned." Knowing that, after an event, their website's visibility would increase provided strong motivation to make sure that the content was saying what they wanted it to say. These types of accountability measures will vary from firm to firm, but make sure you find yours as a means of maintaining your strategy.

Your content strategy is not something to be taken lightly. One thing that became clear after spending some time with Lee Erickson is that the content visible on the Erickson Barnett website is just the tip of a much larger content strategy iceberg. Building a strong foundation for your strategy will require a serious commitment to refining your positioning, planning an approach, dedicating resources and persevering long enough to see results.