consulting & analysis

Having good texts alone is not enough. Great content requires experience, skill, and creativity.
This is the right place.

Great content is vital for your products to succeed. Thus, content requires the same attention and care. Neglecting your content will backfire in many ways. Suddenly, you waste time and money with little impact. If you want to improve your content, you have to figure out what went wrong first.

Five fundamental challenges

QUALITY

Too many mistakes

more

TIME

Always late

more

COST

Expensive providers

more

IMPACT

Little impact

more

CHAOS

Too many players

more

Quality

Have you ever looked at an article that you have just published and immediately spotted a mistake? The longer you work on a text and the more people review and revise, the more mistakes happen.

High quality requires time, clear responsibilities and simple processes. It sounds counter intuitive, but the simpler a production process is and the fewer reviewers you involve, the fewer errors will be made. Allow for enough time to plan and the individual process steps and follow the plan diligently.

On the other hand, you could just outsource your project and refocus on your business.

"Quality issues" have many roots. Maybe, you lack the time to find relevant topics and present them to your audience in an engaging and interesting way. You know what you want to say but you lack the writing skills. In other words, you have better things to do than to text your next newsletter.

Have professionals support your project.

What makes you unique? What are you passionate about? What do you want to show to your clients and what do they want to hear from you? These questions are much harder to answer than they seem. If you find the right answers, your content will describe the heart and soul of your business. And your clients will love you better for it.

I’ll find the answers for you.

Time

Ideally, your content does not only reflect your communication needs, but also your clients’ interests. Your clients follow trends. Events everybody is talking about get attention and attention is everything. For this reason, you have to keep an eye open for trends in order to benefit from them.

You cannot plan trends, but a robust and simple process ensures that you will be able to react quickly. Since trends are unpredictable, you will also need a robust theme plan in place so that you don’t have to chase ideas every day.

Book a theme creation workshop.

As Winston Churchill once said: “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” The result of your projects may differ from your plans, but planning helps you stay on course. They define milestones along the way so that you know where your project stands. The more time you spend planning and communicating clear goals to everybody involved, the less you will have to use shortcuts on the final stretch that lower overall quality.

You could also make it easier for you and just outsource your project.

Don’t waste your time with article writing, editing or proofreading of your client publication. There are professionals who can do this better and more efficiently. Use your time to develop ideas and explore relevant topics that are important for you and your clients.

Have professionals support your project.

Cost

Creating great content requires skill. This is expensive. The easiest way to save cost would be to lower the rates of your providers or switch to cheaper providers. However, simple cost-cutting measures will lower the overall quality of your content.

Of course, you should compare rates, but there are better methods of cost cutting. Review your content. Do you need all of it? Do your clients appreciate it? Does it contribute to your business objectives?

As a rule of thumb, half of your content is redundant. And I will find out which half.

It is worthwhile to review your processes. I have seen instances where a publication had to be reworked several times. This means more money for all your external resources as they charge by the hour. Thus, a well-planned and executed project would have saved lot of money.

Have your processes analyzed.

Impact

Attracting clients with content is hard work. Their time is precious. The high number of media may have increased the overall time users spend online, but it is fragmented and distributed across channels. Also it seems that user attention spans have become shorter.

There is no general rule as to how you can win your clients’ hearts. You will just have to keep trying. It resembles a love story. There needs to be interest in each other and mutual affection. You have to have similar values. And sometimes, it just isn’t going to happen.

Visualize who your clients are, what they expect from you and what you want to tell them.

There is no way around asking your clients directly. Get to know them, ask questions and listen.

Let me introduce you to your clients.

There are a few basic rules: Whenever you publish something be mindful that hundreds are doing the same at the exact moment. Only approach those people you want to connect with and give them relevant information. Don’t bore your audience and get to the point quickly. Always offer more to those who might be interested.

Remember: "Less is more." If there is only little interest in your content item, shut it down.

Ich weiss, was weg kann

Overview

Usually, the content a company produces has grown organically over time. First, they started a website, added an intranet, diversified the client magazine into an e-paper. Then, they created a newsletter, a facebook page, more social media channels and so on. This all has resulted in a chaotic jungle that hides great treasures and is difficult to manage.

In order to get a grip on things visualize your new content landscape. If you were able to build it from scratch, how would your content look?

I don’t recommend to overhaul the content strategy for your entire company at once. It is better to take one step after the other following a strategic goal. Take quick wins as you go depending on where your biggest pain points are.

Now is the best moment to start.

Challenge every single content project. What is it good for? Why are you doing this? Could it be done faster, better, cheaper, more effective?

Improve the quality of a project that is either a flagship or has come under scrutiny by management. Reduce the overall effort put into projects by improving processes and reducing volume and frequency.

Let me show you how to do it.