The five-pillar-approach in action: My Content Operations master’s thesis (pt. 1)
This is a story about 5 pillars, 4 stages, and 1 project on the way to my master’s degree in Content Strategy.
Read up on how you can use the five pillar approach yourself to guide your next content strategy project!
My master’s thesis in Content Strategy at the FH Joanneum focuses on content creation within an online editorial department. It is essential for them to work as effectively and efficiently as possible in order to save resources.
By creating a content ecosystem map (see my previous blog article), problems in content creation could already be made visible. A gap analysis indicated, that along the content lifecycle, there are many obstacles to overcome.
Main obstacles to overcome
- No clear content goals and briefs
- Lack of style guides for creating content, therefore inconsistencies in voice & tone
- Lack of standards & guidelines for creating content
- No established workflows for content pieces & unclear approval/feedback loops
- Content is not archived and cannot be properly maintained, updated, and re-used
- No clear success metrics and evaluation processes
- Cross-posting content on different channels without considering the needs of the different audiences and channels
Woah, pretty long list of hurdles, right? The good thing is that all these problems can be solved with improvements in Content Operations & Governance.
Ultimately, the resources required for content creation and distribution should be reduced. By improving Content Operations, setting up clear standards for content creation (message architecture, editorial style guides, workflows, voice & tone), and creating a governance model, a more efficient and effective way of creating content will be implemented.
Objectives for the project
- Measuring internal content effort and providing a strategy to reduce costs
- Defining content roles, responsibilities, and ownership
- Defining workflows along the content lifecycle
- Defining clear editorial standards and guidelines
- Optimizing the technological infrastructure of the online editorial department
The five pillar approach
At the beginning, I was completely overwhelmed. I knew which problems I wanted to solve and roughly which methods I wanted to use, but I lacked structure. However, after a feedback session with my supervisor (and content strategy specialist) Rahel Bailie, those worries completely evaporated as she showed me the five pillar approach.
This approach considers five needs in (content strategy)-projects:
- Organizational needs: What are the stakeholders’ goals and strategies? What challenges do they currently face? Are the stakeholders on board with the project? Is content seen as a key factor in business strategy?
- User needs: What does the user want vs. what is offered to the user? Is user research already being conducted?
- Content needs: What kind of content is produced? Are there already defined content types or content models? Is it tailored to the needs of the user?
- Operational needs: Who is responsible for what? What do the workflows and individual work steps look like? Are they efficient? Where can time be saved here? What are the pain points?
- Technology needs: What does the technical infrastructure look like? Are employees given every opportunity to work efficiently? Where are the pain points?
If you take all of these needs into account within a content strategy project, you really can’t fail. All the most important aspects are covered.
The project is then also divided into 4 phases: Discovery, Current state, Future state and Implementation.
In the Discovery, the first phase, you get a picture of the situation, conduct interviews and gather information. It’s important to have a holistic overview, which you, as an expert, can form yourself. Some customers or companies may not even know what they are missing. That is your task to find out.
In the current state analysis, you get down to the nitty-gritty. This phase is, of course, already strongly related to the future state analysis. In this phase, you will define a gap analysis and, moving to the next phase, also a target state, taking into account the previously mentioned five pillars of needs.
All the methods you use culminate in the implementation phase. It is particularly important to summarize the recommendations for action and the gap analysis and to explain exactly why you recommend these steps and what results can be achieved from them.
Finally, a roadmap for the implementation is created as well as a reporting to be able to measure the success.
Following this framework guided me in finding methods and at the same time guaranteed to cover all important aspects in order to develop a coherent project. It was especially important to me that all methods and analyses intertwine and benefit from each other.
My roadmap based on five pillars
This is how my project, based on the five pillars, looks like on the drawboard. I created this graphic firstly to keep track of my project for myself but also to be able to show my teammates and my supervisors of the master thesis my current status. The green check marks mean that I have already completed these items. The wrenches show what is in progress at the moment.
What all this means, you are asking yourself? Well, that’s another story for another blog article. :)
If you are ever in the situation of having to implement a content strategy project and you are wondering how best to set it up, the five-pillar approach or an adapted version of it might be right for you.
In part two of this little article-series, I will summarize the status quo of my thesis and reveal insights about my methods as well as my learnings so far.
Until then, take care and always stay hydrated!
Oh, and if you cannot wait and want to read more fantastic blog articles about content strategy, you should check out the latest articles of my fellow students:
