In episode 61 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow return to our content strategy pitfalls series with a discussion about planning.
“Another thing that is really helpful is doing a pilot project or proof of concept, because that can help you look at a small but essential piece of your strategy and see how that works, and what goes wrong or what goes in an unexpected direction during that pilot.”
— Gretyl Kinsey

Related links:

* ROI for content strategy: getting around roadblocks 
* Planning your content strategy pilot project

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @billswallow

Transcript: 
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 61, we return to our content strategy pitfalls series with a discussion around planning.
GK:     Hello and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Bill Swallow:     And I’m Bill Swallow.
GK:     Today, we’re going to talk about what happens if you don’t plan a content strategy and you don’t plan for implementing new systems. I think both of us have seen this happen quite a bit, so I think let’s just go ahead and start off with the question of what happens when you don’t plan properly?
BS:     All the bad things happen.
GK:     Yes.
BS:     Yeah. One of the things that I’ve seen and I’ve heard pain points for talking to other people is when they look at a content strategy and they plan it without considering all of the pieces that need to come together in order to reach the end goal, so they look at where they are and they look at where they need to be, and they put that end result as the highest priority. But they don’t consider all the little pieces in between.
GK:     Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that happen, as well. I’ve also seen it happen where the end result that they had in mind had nothing to do with their business goals and just had everything to do with, “Oh, we saw this really awesome tool that we think would be a good change.” Or, “We may be have this one goal that we’re focusing on,” but it’s not really taking into account how that is going to help save time and save costs, and it’s not really an overall picture. It’s just sort of something, one little piece that they’re focusing on, and that affects the entire planning process or lack thereof.
BS:     Right. Because it then shuts out a lot of other opportunities and it shuts out a lot of other places that need to be addressed.
GK:     Yes. I think one really common case I’ve seen of this is where content strategy kind of just encompasses one department or one type of content and doesn’t really look at the organization’s content as a whole, and doesn’t kind of look at the future end goal of getting all of that content aligned and making sure that the company’s branding is a major part of that and that everyone is kind of consistent across their messaging. I think that that’s one big planning gap that I’ve seen happen a lot of times. A lot of it boils down to just different groups kind of working in silos and not collaborating with each other. And so when that happens, then of course they don’t plan together and make sure that they’re coming up with one kind of overarching strategy.
BS:     Right.