Nowadays everyone is a content creator. Whether your profession requires it, or you are a casual user of social media, there is no doubt that we are all moving gears in the content machine. Being able to separate the good content from the bad doesn’t only come down to what each creator is sharing, but how they are sharing it.
Since I am a graphic and user experience (UX) designer, it’s my job to create content for a living. However, once I leave the office, I don’t remove my hat as a creator just yet. Rather, I shift what and how I am creating.
How often do you think about the strategy behind your content sharing? It’s probably more than you realize. In today’s age of technology, it has become second nature for us to think in terms of content strategy. This blog will provide a glimpse of my personal content strategies. Whether these approaches are the best is still up for debate, but let’s dive in!
Professional Content
As I mentioned previously, I am a graphic and UX designer, so content creation goes hand-in-hand with my profession. For some quick background, I am an in-house designer for a niche insurance company based in Connecticut. Having to design for an array of internal clients means my work is delivered to audiences through various sorts of media. Examples of the content I produce at my nine-to-five job are flyers, brochures, e-newsletters, webpages, infographics, digital and print reports, etcetera. The possibilities are truly all-encompassing.
So how do I go about producing these pieces of content? Well, this is a big question with many answers, but I will keep it as to-the-point as possible. Being a part of my company’s marketing team means having long discussions on who our audiences are and what they need/want from us. Good content always begins with research. Ideally, each project begins with personas and journey maps. Is this always accomplished? No, it isn’t. Projects get requested last minute, time gets cut short, and so do our creative processes. However, even when these steps don’t get completed it is important that I keep the market knowledge that I do have at the forefront. Having this knowledge in my back pocket can help me with tasks as simple as choosing the right image for our marketing collateral. It can also be as important as deciding what main message we want to drive home on the homepage of our company website.
I am the sole designer at my current job so properly managing simultaneous projects is a must. My team has five internal business units to serve, which requires some balance. For me, content management comes down to prioritizing projects that align with overall company goals, while still making sure all business units are being satisfied. This can mean creating marketing pieces that overlap multiple business units’ needs. Efficiency is key.
Managing content also goes past the stage of its’ creation. It goes into its’ organization as well. Especially in a business setting, archiving your content is a must. I keep both final PDF and art files for all projects dating back seven years (this happens to be my company’s policy). We have folders for each year and within each year is all of the associated work separated into appropriate folders for easy access. I would be lying if I said each of my InDesign projects was packaged and none of my files had broken image links, but I am getting better as I get older!
Personal Content
When I first graduated college and started my job as a professional graphic designer, I pretty much wanted to skip all of the processes I mentioned above in order to get to the ‘fun stuff.’ I can see now, after time has passed, how I have begun to mimic some of these practices with my personal content. What do I consider my personal content? Some examples are, all of the files on my home computer (specifically any from my master’s program), the thousands of pictures I have taken over the past decade, any social media posts I have ever made, and so on. Let’s talk about my after-hours content creation and how it compares to the practices used at my day-job.
At the start of my graduate program in 2018 I bought a new iMac to do all of my upcoming work on. The goal was to start fresh and organized; something that my existing 2010 MacBook (yes, a decade old and still going strong) from college was not. As work started to pile on, I was able to get a hold on my content organization by using some of the same methods that I had utilized at my job. Each class had its own folder and each of those folders held folders for each finished project. Something so simple, but still lends such peace of mind when everything else in life seems hectic!
I followed a similar method for all of my photos. I personally am not a fan of Apple’s Photos app, so instead I have all of my images saved as JPEGs, in folders, according to year. However, I cannot lie and say my content strategy for photos is the best. Honestly, I don’t think anyone’s is or can be since it is so easy to take thousands of photos a year. Most of us have an overload of images and a lot of them are redundant, unnecessary, and taking up a lot of memory on our devices. Undoubtedly a fault in my content management. On the upside, I have started selectively printing out photos for albums. The strategy behind this is that they will:
- be seen more. I feel once a photo is off my phone, I never go back to look at it on my computer and it is basically lost in a sea of other pictures.
and
- having a hardcopy makes me feel better about an image’s longevity. I have no worry that it will be lost if something happens to my computer and I also feel it could be more easily passed down through generations.
Now, let’s move on to one last topic; social media. Where do I begin? I will admit that probably too much strategy goes into my social media posts. Especially considering all of my social pages are strictly for pleasure and not business. I do think about things like, “What is the most optimal time to post this picture to Instagram?” or, “What filter gives the best effect?” As a millennial, these kinds of thoughts are almost second nature. We are all content strategists to a certain extent.
I am also a Twitter user, which is another social platform that can require a decent amount of strategy per tweet. How do I best utilize my character count? What is worth tweeting? I am guilty of spending way too much time putting a measly sentence together for the sake of my small Twitter following.
The topic of content strategy and social media is really one for its own blog, but I will leave you on that thought. After reading this post, I wonder if it made any of you realize you are more of a content strategist than you realized, in your professional and personal lives. I’d love to hear!
Samantha Mantiglia 