How Content Architecture Supports Effective, Cross-Functional, Content Strategy

This post is the fourth part of our deep dive into B2B content architecture. Throughout this series, we’ve introduced several ways to think about the content your organisation produces.

• In part one, we discussed the basics of content architecture, connecting your content experience to its actual execution.

• In part two, we explored how the way content is organised by topic and shapes effective content pillars and engaging topic selection for businesses.

• In part three, we discussed why great B2B customer experience is rooted in strong content architecture.

In this article, we’re taking an organisational perspective on content architecture and examining the relationship between content and brand architecture.

What Do We Mean by an ‘Organisational’ Perspective of Content Architecture?

As content strategists, much of our work revolves around the content worlds we create for the customer. We spend the day planning digital advertising campaigns, A/B testing different landing page designs, crafting sales enablement content, etc.

However, we must avoid the trap of only seeing content through the lens of ‘marketing’.

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, content strategy touches every aspect of an enterprise. Everyone in the company creates content, and everyone uses it. It influences how internal and external audiences perceive your organisation and how you do business. As such, to maintain a healthy business, you need quality content experiences that function across your entire organisation.

However, building content experiences on an organisational scale is challenging. Each sub-brand and business unit has its own set of target audiences including customers, employees, and other stakeholders. They will all have different things they need to communicate. Yet, there also needs to be an underlying message, a shared element, that links each to the whole.

This is why we believe you need to consider brand architecture, and go-to-market strategy, when developing content architecture.

Brand architecture creates a logical and clear relationship between each brand division and the organisation. Creating content structures based on this framework ensures your content communicates and reinforces your brand experience in your audiences' minds. That you build content structures that help users navigate individual sub-brands/products/services and understand your organisation as a whole.

However, when creating your content structure, keep in mind that brand structure may not match operational structure perfectly. This is usually for a good reason, but it creates three types of issues:

• You will need processes to pull together the necessary people and resources to create content across divisions, and manage conflicting priorities.

• Creating content for your internal teams as well as customers can mean dealing with more than one type of structure. You might need one content architecture for the public-facing offer, and another that matches the organisational structure.

• Addressing internal needs brings individual team requirements into sharp focus. Sales teams need sales-enablement tools. Marketing teams need marketing communications. Finance teams need investor relations. And they all have to be managed in a matrix with your external-facing portfolio.

To manage this complex content environment, you must take these different types of organisational structures and operational processes into account. Otherwise, your content experience will quickly fragment. It will get torn apart by all the different audiences, need states, workflows, technologies, and processes that exist across your organisation. The result will be data silos, content discrepancies, inefficiencies, and an incoherent brand experience.

How Architectural Thinking Improves Your Organisation’s Content Experience

Assessing your company’s content experience using our 'four questions of content architecture' helps to expand your understanding of content strategy.

It forces you to consider how content functions across your entire organisation. It takes into account the specific requirements of your sub-brands, services, and product groups. By understanding these conditions, you can design effective content architectures that satisfy them.

They force you to consider how content functions across your entire organisation. Accounting for the specific requirements of sub-brands, services, and product groups, you can design effective content architectures to satisfy them.

Scope

In a digital-first world, your online content is the first interaction a person will have with your organisation. It is the tool you use to define the space you want your brand to occupy in the user's mind. As such, your content experience must align with your brand positioning.

An organisational view of content architecture ensures your content scope covers all services offered by your brand portfolio. By reviewing every part of your content strategy, you determine what is needed to create a comprehensive experience. For example:

• Do your content pillars align with the core identity of your corporate brand/master brand?

• Does your content calendar account for specific content preferences and behaviours of different sub-brand audiences?

• Do you have the right assets to build ongoing relationships with stakeholders across your organisation?

An organisational perspective also makes sure you are deliberate about what you leave out. Considering the wide range of different audiences involved, you don’t want to replicate identical content experiences across your entire company. It is OK to choose not to do something—but you need to be strategic when making such decisions.

Organisation and Structure

Structuring your content around your brand architecture plays a key role in how users perceive your company. It is how you depict the location of each sub-brand, convey its unique characteristics, and present types of content that will satisfy the user’s needs.

When designing your content structure, it is important to group and link content in ways that make sense. For instance:

• Does your taxonomy categorise content in a logical, easy to understand way that aids content discovery and brand awareness?

• Does your information architecture allow internal and external users to orientate themselves within your content experience?

• Does your sitemap accurately reflect your organisational hierarchy/brand structure/departmental structure to users?

When done correctly, you create an almost intuitive understanding your brand structure. It helps people easily navigate through your content experience and opens up opportunities for cross-promotion between brands.

Without clear content architecture, users won’t be able to relate to your brand at different levels. Users will get the wrong idea of how your corporate brand, subsidiary companies, departments, and services relate to each other. It's a recipe for a frustrating experience. 

Developing content architecture that reflects the nature of your brand architecture also creates more flexible content experiences. Your content structure can adapt to having parts added or removed as your brand portfolio changes over time. Moreover, your organisational schema has important SEO implications. Structured content, site maps, and internal linking structures all influence how search engines understand and contextualise your brand.

Navigation, Framing and Sensemaking:

An important function of content architecture is to frame and present information in a way that creates a cohesive user experience. For example:

• Do the content elements across your entire organisation work together to support the overarching brand identity?

• Do the pieces within each sub-brand/product/service content experience fit together and feel whole at that level?

• Is your content experience meaningful for all stakeholders? For example, are users able to navigate to the service that’s most suitable for them?

Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each sub-brand. There are opportunities for synergies.

In brand architecture, you can have common elements and themes that go across the entire brand portfolio. It’s the same with content. If you’re smart, you can develop reusable content models, types, and templates that make content generation more efficient for you.

To accomplish cross-brand compatibility, you need to establish clear brand guidelines and good governance for your content process.

A set of blueprints to follow creates a shared understanding of how to communicate your products/services, people, and organisation. Every piece of content you produce across all channels must communicate your brand’s visual and verbal language.

Doing so ensures you create a consistent experience that helps people explore your content across multiple touchpoints, devices, and platforms.

Investment

When assessed through an organisational lens, content architecture should ensure efficient allocation of content resources across your enterprise. For instance:

• Does your content architecture align content investment in sub-brands/services/products with a likely commercial return?

• Does it reduce the cost of producing/managing content portfolios across the entire enterprise?

• Does it ensure your content experience stays aligned with the evolving needs of your business?

Matching your content architecture to your brand architecture allows you to quickly determine content priorities.

By comparing different divisions, you can see when content is outperforming or underperforming and adjust your strategies accordingly.

You also gain a broader context for content value. You don’t just consider ROI from the perspective of a single brand or campaign. Instead, you can better determine how investing in an asset could create, capture and realise value for your entire organisation. Doing so helps you invest in content resources that will contribute to your content ecosystem in multiple ways.

Taking an organisational view of content architecture also helps you develop more efficient content operations.

It establishes a chain of command of roles and responsibilities within middle management which speeds up decision-making processes. It creates clear workflows that support greater collaboration. It addresses common challenges such as scaling content production and managing assets across multiple channels/platforms or content in multiple languages. It clarifies all the technical details needed to get everything working smoothly for an effective end-to-end content creation process.

As a result, you produce consistent, high-quality assets at a lower cost.

Build an Effective Content Strategy for Your Entire Organisation

It takes planning and coordination to develop and implement a successful, enterprise-scale, content strategy. However, it can help you to gain a broader understanding of what content can achieve, who is responsible for it, and who needs to be involved in creating it.

Viewing content architecture through the lens of organisation and brand structure is one way to shape a more effective content experience. However, your content strategies must also be informed and influenced by other modes of understanding, such as topic and experience. Doing so will ensure each element of your content experience works together to create a greater whole.

We hope you will join us for the next blog post which will explore content architecture from an ecosystem perspective.

Get in touch if you would like to learn more about planning a holistic content experience for your business.