Content connects your company to the world. It is how you explain your service, sell your products, and communicate your brand. Doing these things well requires building a smart, agile content architecture that supports an omnichannel user experience.

As B2B customer experiences grow more sophisticated, your users expect to see tailored, interactive content across platforms and devices. And you must not only meet but exceed these expectations to stay relevant.

Architects create designs that fulfil both functional and expressive requirements to create engaging spaces that enrich human life. This principle also applies to content architecture.

A clear understanding of content architecture helps you be more deliberate in designing and implementing your brand's content experience. It provides the unified vision and actionable plans needed to build innovative and effective digital spaces.

If you have never heard of the term 'content architecture', you are not alone. It is a somewhat abstract concept encompassing several components necessary for bringing content strategy to life.

Like good design, content architecture is invisible to most people. When people think about the way they construct their content, they focus on topic pillars and content calendars. These are important, but there's more to it.

A lack of conscious design can be detrimental to the user experience. For these reasons, we think content architecture is worth a deep dive.

The Principles of Content Architecture

To meet the demands of modern B2B buyers, brands must now provide a holistic experience. However, effectively managing a complex content environment requires balancing all the creative forces, technology, processes, and stakeholders involved. That's no mean feat, especially on the enterprise level.

Creating this balance is the purpose of content architecture. It is the scaffolding that facilitates stakeholder communication and brings digital customer experience to life.

Content architecture bridges the gap between content strategy and content management. Whereas strategy determines ‘why’ and management deals with ‘what’, content architecture answers the many, many specifics of ‘how’. It is a shared understanding of how content should be produced, managed, and distributed to support a scalable user experience.

If you are familiar with UX design, you might have heard of information architecture. Information architecture (IA) is the process of structuring and presenting information to users so that it’s easy to understand. It breaks down and organises content in a way that users can find information and complete tasks.

Because of the shared emphasis on structure, many people treat content architecture as a scaled-up version of IA. That’s not quite accurate.

While IA certainly informs content architecture, it goes beyond just structuring content. We think brand architecture is another useful framework to keep in mind. Just as a brand is more than its visual identity, content architecture is more than its individual content assets.

Content architecture is about relationships. The relationship between different pieces of content. The relationship brands have with external audiences. The relationship businesses have with internal stakeholders.

By understanding these relationships, a content architect can design the context for content to spark conversations and drive conversions.

The Questions Your Content Architecture Needs to Answer

As a content strategist, your goal is always to understand the user — their needs, objectives, and how they look for content. The goal is to design content that reflects user behaviours and helps them succeed in their task. Remember, we’re talking about internal and external users alike–not just customers.

Towards this end, examine how you currently plan and manage your content experience.

Good content architecture helps you to answer the following questions:

Scope

Structure allows you to identify and remedy gaps in your content offerings.

Does your content cover everything you need it to? Does the content creation process provide a balance of topics that meet your business priorities and those of your target audiences? Do you adhere to the conventions of your sector, or do you can you create something new?

Viewing content architecture is this way also allows you to be deliberate about what you leave out. You can only make strategic decisions about what to include when you can clearly define the boundaries of your content world.

Organisation and structure

Having a clear hierarchy of information enables the easy creation of relationships between elements. Content architecture documents all the forms of content your brand produces and defines the relationship between content types. It also takes a micro-level view of content assets, providing detailed outlines for organising content and tagging its component elements.

This is key in our content-as-a-service world and will help future-proof your content experience. Architecture makes it easy to reuse and repurpose content elements across media formats and platforms. It ensures that content looks and behaves the way you want it to across different platforms and devices.

Navigation, framing, and sense making

The content you produce helps people to understand your organisation and brand, as well as your products and services. Content architecture creates a clear taxonomy of logical categories and thoughtful navigation that directs users to the content they need. It helps you to make strategic decisions about the what, when, and how you present the information people need.

Structure creates the framing and context for your communications. It enables the creation of a cohesive content system, where the various pieces interact to achieve a greater whole.

Investment

Do you know where you need to invest your time and budget for the greatest impact? Content production requires a significant investment, so you need to make sure you’re optimally using your resources.

Content architecture facilitates the identification of high-impact and high-value content assets and projects. It also highlights gaps and redundant efforts that can hinder your content ROI.

Four Ways of Thinking about Content Architecture

'Content' is a broad discipline that touches every part of the organisation. It is critical to have a framework for prioritising resources and content projects. In addition to the understanding the four questions your content architecture needs to answer, it can help to view it through four lenses: topic, experience, organisation, and ecosystem.

As previously discussed, content architecture is ultimately about understanding how different elements of your content experience interact. And there is no rule stating you can only view these relationships in one way. When you apply architectural thinking from each of these different perspectives, you can arrive at a set of priorities that work.

Topic

This perspective on content architecture helps you to invest your resources in the topics with the greatest value for your business. Examples of topic-based priorities include:

• Establishing taxonomies like content pillars, buckets, and sub-topics to ensure you’re covering all the subject areas you need to.

• Ensuring that you're creating, and categorising, content in a way that is relevant and meaningful for all of your audiences.

• Applying structured data and SEO best practices. This helps search engines understand your website’s structure, creates domain authority, and makes your content more discoverable.

Experience

Content is often the first interaction your audience has with your brand. It is also the foundation of their ongoing experience.

Considering content architecture through this lens ensures you provide the relevant, timely experience you want people to have. From this point of view, the focus is:

• Using content models, templates, and modular content, to ensure quality and consistency across all content assets, touchpoints, and devices.

• Using keyword research and search intent to ensure your content answers your users' needs across the breadth of the customer journey.

• Investing your resources in the parts of the journey that are most valuable to your company.

Organisation

We often think about the content we're creating from a customer's perspective. However, we shouldn't fall into the trap of seeing content solely through the lens of marketing.

Architectural thinking from an organisational perspective ensures your content covers the many and varied needs of your business. For example:

• Making sure your content architecture reflects your organisation. Does it describe your organisational or brand structure? Does it help people understand how to navigate departments, or products and services? 

• Getting buy-in from, and alignment between, all the people involved in creating your content experience.

• Building effective, efficient, and scalable workflows, and allocating resources, to make sure your content meets the business’ strategic objectives.

Ecosystem

This way of viewing content architecture invites you to consider how your content exists in the world. It is all about developing big-picture solutions, such as:

• Designing a system of high-value, interconnected assets that become stronger and more effective as it expands.

• Understanding the broader ecosystem and allocating your resources where you can break through the noise and have maximum impact.

• Creating structured content models or templates to ensure consistency across channels, while also providing the flexibility to optimise content for particular audiences and platforms.

Why Good Content Architecture Matters

Good content architecture improves user experience, driving higher engagement and better search engine rankings. Having a conceptual backbone to your content marketing strategy allows you to think about content more effectively.

It provides your content team with a clear workflow and unified standards. It reduces interdepartmental friction and expedites the process. It enables the efficient creation of effective content that supports both the company’s and the customer’s needs.

Content architecture helps you make sure your overall content offer is comprehensive. Setting out the structure of relationships between content components helps you to identify gaps in your strategy and assets. It ensures you have the types of content needed to build relationships, create conversions, and serve other critical business functions.

Just as important, content architecture helps you understand what you don't need. For example, topics that don’t require significant coverage or social media channels that drive no meaningful engagement.

The consequences of poor content architecture include low engagement rates, reduced conversions, and a negative impact on SEO.

Without a clear and specific plan, content designers can’t produce consistent content experiences that drive brand awareness and satisfy users. It is more difficult for the various teams involved in the content process to work collaboratively. Simple things like managing shared resources can become an utter nightmare.

When there is too much friction in the system, your ability to scale up your content strategy is limited.

Ready to Learn More?

Join us over the next few weeks as we examine each of the four lenses of content architecture in greater detail. You'll gain valuable insight into how to blend these perspectives and design your content experience for maximum effect.

The fundamental point to remember is that architecture is not just about information management. It is about understanding how things work, so you can make strategic decisions and create lasting relationships.

Building relationships through content is exactly what 1827 Marketing is about. Reach out to learn how we help your business design and deliver a content experience that delivers for your company.