In episode 62 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion from episode 61 and talk about best practices for planning.
“You need to be mindful about how what you’re doing is going to impact other groups. You can’t just assume they’re going to play ball when you start rolling out a new strategy. Make sure they’re not only on board in theory, but that they are pretty much committed to the success of the project because they should have a stake in it in some form as well.”
— Bill Swallow
 

Related links:

* Content strategy pitfalls: planning (podcast, part 1)
* 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 62 we continue our discussion from Episode 61 around planning.
GK:     Hello and welcome, I’m Gretyl Kinsey here with Bill Swallow again and we are picking back up where we left off in the previous episode with content strategy planning. So now that we’ve talked about all of the pitfalls that you can encounter when it comes to not planning, how do you do it correctly, what really should go into the planning when it comes to putting together a content strategy and then also figuring out how you’re going to execute that.
Bill Swallow:     I think the first and foremost one is being able to tie everything back to your business goals and that one means that you need to chase down what the goals really are. I know that a lot of companies have charters, mission statements, vision statements and so forth, but you really need to dig into, okay, so given these statements that are out there, what are the goals from the business side as far as how we’re going to make that mission a reality, make that vision come true. Being able to grab those and keep those in sight and make sure that everything that you’re doing ultimately aligns to meeting that business goal that you’re trying to achieve.
GK:     Absolutely. I think everything has to hinge on those business goals or else, like we talked about earlier, things can easily get sidetracked and things can end up not following the strategy that you’ve set forward to achieve. I think it’s really important when you’re coming up with your strategy and planning out the implementation side of it to think about how your strategy is going to get you both short term and longterm wins and address business goals that are more immediate versus ones that are more out there in the future, but something that’s still really important. So an example of that might be maybe you have some really pressing delivery need that’s a short term goal. So that might look like coming up with a certain output transformation scenario or what have you to meet that immediate need.
GK:     But then maybe you’ve got a longterm plan to deliver content into other markets to a larger customer base and so that might involve something like localization. So it’s important to think about what are the short term business goals that we have maybe within the next six months to a year,