Taking a look back at my first year as a Master Student in Content Strategy
While I’m sitting home in Albania in the middle of the summer, I was thinking and reflecting on the past year as a student again after 4 years of break.
I have to admit that this was one the best decisions I’ve ever made till now, leaving Albania, my family, friends, my work and everything and coming to a new country, starting a new life from the start. It was challenging, still is, but now maybe I’m used to it and I’m starting to like it, feeling under pressure all the time.
Master in Content Strategy
Always thought that I know a lot, and I was very confident about my skills, but this master course learned me a lot of new things…
Highlights from first-year classes
A content audit involves looking at every piece of information on your website and assessing the relative merits and weaknesses of every piece so you can prioritize your marketing efforts moving forward. It’s a qualitative assessment and evaluation based on KPIs you select in advance.
An audit of content consists of
1. Thinking of your goals.
2. Gather your content.
3. Categorize your content.
4. Analyze your data.
5. Create action items.
The tool that helped us perform our first content audit was Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is a web crawler. This tool utilizes your sitemap to gather URLs and create an SEO audit. Screaming Frog can audit up to 500 links for free if you have a smaller site.
There are also tools such as Google Analytics and SEMrush.
Brand Values and Message Architecture
A message architecture is a hierarchy of goals for communication that reflects the values the company encourages. The definition includes a series of attributes that represent your company values and can be implemented across your entire team. As an output, you typically get a list of attributes (adjectives & phrases) listed in order of their appearance communication priorities. A message architecture drives content design and serves as a strategic yardstick that can be used to measure existing content, determine quality, prioritize content types, budget, and new content investments.
Creating your message architecture can help you to define your communication goals clearly. The result will be consistent content and messages aligned with your brand values and business priorities. (https://thecontentwrangler.com/glossary/message-architecture/)
The Information Architecture (IA) focuses on the organization, structuring, and labeling of content in an efficient and sustainable manner. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks. In order to do this, you need to understand how items relate to each other within the system, how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture.
Main components of IA:
- Organization Schemes and Structures: How you categorize and structure information
- Labeling Systems: How you represent information
- Navigation Systems: How users browse or move through information
- Search Systems: How users look for information
(https://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/3-information-architecture/index.html)
Tools used: Pen and paper, Mindomo, Figma, etc.
Qualitative research — includes the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting non-numerical data, like language. A qualitative approach can be used to gain insights into how a person subjectively perceives and interprets their social environment.
The three most commonly used qualitative research methods are in-depth interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), and observation.
Tool MAXQDA
https://www.questionpro.com/blog/qualitative-research-methods/
Conclusion
Other subjects included User Experience & Interaction Design, Quantitative Research, and Cross-platform storytelling.
So far, I’ve learned a lot, and luckily, I’m also putting them to practice while working as an SM Strategist.
The discipline of content strategy is a multidisciplinary one, and it is required in almost every field or practice in order to achieve the right business results.
