A key part of a content strategy is your content vision and principles. Setting up a content vision and principles early in your project can provide a benchmark to check and align content to make sure you are achieving your goals.
Your content vision and principles will be your touchpoints throughout content planning and development, and inform your decisions along the way. It is important to develop them with key stakeholders to ensure that your content meets both business needs and user needs, and so stakeholders can understand the content decisions you will make throughout production.
A shared vision and guiding principles mean that all content will be created with a consistent approach.
Content vision
The content vision is what you want the content to achieve. It is important to include not just what you want the content to do, but the outcome or impact you want. For example:
Our content will help patients to understand their options in cancer treatment so that they can make informed choices.
Our content will provide information about government programs so businesses can find appropriate support.
You can create a content vision for any size of project, from complete overhauls of an organisation’s website to content for a report.
Content goals
You can expand on your vision to call out specific content goals. This is useful for content strategies for larger projects such as websites, and organisation-level content strategies. These goals will directly support your business needs and user needs. See Aims and messaging.
Tip for complex information. Involve subject matter experts in setting your content vision and goals to help connect the topic and data with how users will experience it.
Content principles
Content principles are the core things that content must address or achieve before it can be considered suitable for publication. They are based on the identified user and business needs. For example:
Content must be:
- user focused – it uses clear language and terminology that users recognise
- findable – it uses a simple structure based on user understanding to make content navigable and searchable
- clear, consistent and concise – it is easy to read and understand, and presents similar information the same way every time
- authoritative and trustworthy – it is scientifically rigorous, underpinned by data and references
- in line with required standards – it complies with accessibility requirements and departmental reporting requirements.
Everyone who plans and creates content for the same organisation, business, program, service or product should follow the content principles. This supports a consistent approach so that all content has a clear purpose and complements related content.
Content principles are helpful for content leaders to manage new content requests from colleagues. For example, if someone suggests some new content, you can cross-check the request against the content principles (and vision and goals) to ensure it is something your organisation needs to publish.
Some principles may relate to mandated requirements, such as accessibility. Others may relate to the specific needs of the subject matter, such as accuracy, precision or clarity. Some may relate to planning content and some to creating and refining content.
It may be helpful to expand on the principles, to ensure they are clear and can be understood by content developers and content managers.
Tip for complex information. Make sure your principles consider the need for accuracy and clarity. They should be set up to support decision making throughout the content process to appropriately balance user needs with the requirements of your organisation’s science, data or policy.