Irrespective of the industry, content strategy for learning has become a part of mainstream businesses. From education to health, every industry is derived from content creation, and this necessitates the creation of excellent content strategies.
With this article, we will be talking about how we can curate the best content creation strategy that will benefit your organization to scale and achieve goals.
1. Stick with the why for your content strategy!
Many times, you would feel like experimenting with the tools, language, template, and whatnot! But whatever you want to do, don’t leave the question of “why.” Why you are curating the content, why your audience requires the content strategy, and why they are your audience. Most of your content strategy depends upon answering the question “why.”
The first step is to understand what value your resources are adding to the users and how they can benefit from your courses, eBooks, or whatever else you are offering.
You must look at the benefits in the longer term and realize the end-term goal will be combined with many factors, such as market trends, new products, new markets, compliance, etc. Your end-term goals must adjust to the evolving requirements.
2. Who are you?
Well, we are not telling you to go and ask each of your prospects—who are you or what you do! There are much simpler ways to solve that issue.
You must understand who you are serving before you can provide any kind of learning resource. This includes seeing the attitude, behavior, and learning pattern of your targeted audience. You can ask questions like:
- Where do they work?
- What their work environment looks like?
- What must be the risk factors in their jobs?
- What must be the skills they want to excel in?
- What are their basic qualities and abilities professionally?
Questions like these will help you determine what you should provide to your audience. You should not just aim the arrows without any target and think one will hit the target! Learning resources are not only a learning path but also determine the proficiency and added skills in one’s job. They are more than just some reading resources that can help people achieve their determined goals.
Every industry has a different set hence you must therefore understand them and shape your learning resources accordingly.
3. What should be the medium for content distribution?
When you have your audience and your purpose figured out, the next step will be determining your medium. Do you want to do it online, offline, hybrid, interpersonal, and the list goes on?
It is important to determine, as per your audience’s interest and benefit, what will be the most suitable methods. You can also determine how you will be creating content; it can be answered with the following:
- Do you want to create all the resources?
- Do you want a third party to create content for you?
- Do you want user-generated content?
- Do you want collaborative content?
Based on your audience’s interest and your company’s benefits (non-financial and monetary) you must decide how you want to build your content.
Determine if your content strategy is aligning with the learning pattern of the work environment or the learning methodology organizations follow.
Your resources must compile with the already followed work culture and learning patterns of the target audience.
To support the formal training, you must determine the tools you would be using. You must see how you can provide content management tools as well like LMS, that will help in curating the best content strategy for you.
4. See who can energize your content strategy!
Your content doesn’t have to come from a single place; it can come from multiple places and be combined to give the best learning experience.
Seek out members of your internal team who can contribute to the creation of content, and look for in-house experts who will give valuable market information.
A mix of an excellent content strategy lies in:
- L&D team
- Experts
- Personal knowledge
- Team
- Workplace
This mix helps you make a content development strategy that works for your target audience. If you are choosing members from your internal team to create content or they are energized to contribute, you must see if they have the right tools.
You must provide them with the appropriate tools that will help them curate that brilliant content strategy. Another benefit of the internal contribution to the learning resource is that they know what the core pain points are and what solutions should be provided in the training program.
5. It’s in the details!
Next up is polishing your content and giving it the best form. Focus on the details: what do you want to include in the training program, what are the topics, what should be the duration, and how do you want to distribute the courses? Do you want live classes or cohort courses?
One of the ways to curate the best strategy is to directly ask the audience! Again, we are not telling you to go and ask everyone; rather, you can make it easy by doing the surveys!
You can distribute surveys or questionnaires to see your audience preferences and create content accordingly.
6. Analyze, analyze and analyze!
Once you are done with your content creation, the job is not over yet! If you really want to add value to your audience’s life, you must determine how your content resources are doing.
For that, you must select tools that can give you a proper analysis of your content strategy. For instance, any learning management system will help you curate the required metrics to determine how well your content resources are working.
With the metrics, you can determine how much time they are spending on the particular course, how much they are interacting with the course, and what the bounce rate is. What are your best-performing courses and the least-performing ones?
You can derive all the required metrics with the help of an LMS.
Additional tips for content strategy
- Use interactive methods like live chats or live courses.
- Include anonymous feedback forms for honest reviews.
- Add a community factor to improve social learning.
- Create short courses for better employee learning retention.
- Provide certifications for better learning motivation.
Hope you will now create the best learning strategy for your audience!
