Audits and data and planning: oh my! On May 21 and 22, my compatriot Katie Pennell and I attended Confab Central, a national content strategy conference that takes place every year here in Minneapolis. We had the exciting job of presenting a session about what we do here at NHI. The slides from our presentation on human-driven SEO and data-driven content — and how to DIY your content data if you have never spent more than 10 minutes in Google Analytics — are embedded below.
We’d like to say Thank You! to everyone who attended. It was fantastic to see all your faces taking in information about analytics on the last breakout session of the conference. In addition to our presentation, Katie and I also took in as many sessions as we could. Here are four quick takeaways:
1. Audit every experience that your customers may have. This means testing out error messages, customer emails, 404s, incomplete fields, and any other mistakes they may encounter along the way. (From Michael J. Metts’ presentation: Take my money: Building trust during transactions)
OUR TAKE: Yes! Also, do not forget to audit the experience on every device.
2. When tackling a huge content strategy project, try producing incremental readouts (a.k.a., one-page summaries about what you are focusing on right now). For internal teams to understand what is happening and why, break it down into smaller pieces. Massive website overhauls and quarterly campaigns are more easily communicated through a one-page summary. (From Jeff Greer’s presentation: Making Sense of Health Insurance: A Case for Content Strategy)
OUR TAKE: We agree. Even when strategies are complicated, a one-page actionable worksheet can help focus and build strategically.
3. The more you can plan ahead, the better the end result. This is especially true for producing complicated content like video. Producing good video generally takes time and planning, even if the video is short. There was also a lot about agile production at this conference; there is still a lot of planning involved in the agile process! (From Ravi Jain’s presentation: Mining the Power of Immersive Short Form Video)
OUR TAKE: Pre-production for a video shoot is a little bit like setting up your goals and content groups up in Google Analytics ahead of time, right?
4. If you write a presentation about a Google product or feature, Google will change the name of that product or feature right around the time of your presentation. Yes, we talked about Google Webmaster Tools in our deck the day after Google renamed Webmaster Tools to Search Console. Sigh. It will always be Webmaster Tools in our hearts.
Confab Central 2015 was a great time; thanks again to all the cool content strategists who could share the cake with us!
