Building an Award-Winning Intranet: Content Strategy

Start planning your content strategy

Remember how in the first part of our series for building an award-winning intranet we asked you to choose between the beautifully decorated donut or a plain one. Well, now it’s time to think about flavor!

In this (unexpected) metaphor for the intranet, the donut’s flavor and filling represent the content you publish. The taste can either make you take another bite or put it down. You want your content to incite the first reaction: it must pull employees to come back and stay active within the site.

Who are your content creators?

The types of content that will be flowing in your site should be defined when building your structure. Once this is done, you should identify the contributors and their area of responsibility in terms of content creation and publishing.

How to assign content roles

As the official platform for corporate news, the intranet should be considered a place where information is properly sourced, verified and credible. The right people should be talking about the topics in their field. Furthermore, your topics taxonomy should follow the natural structure of your organization.

Who can create and where?

The following is a non-exhaustive list and depends on your type of organization and the level of maturity of your internal communication. You could give multiple people publishing rights, with a dedicated content manager to represent each team. You can also centralize the workflow in the hands of a few select admins and content managers, such as the Employee Communications team.

• Communications and Marketing managers – corporate news and public updates
• C-levels and executives – information concerning future goals, company mission, and vision
• HR – internal affairs – office life, recruitment, knowledge-based documentation and everything that facilitates daily work for employees
• Engineers, Product and Project managers – product updates, project follow-up
• Everyone – Don’t forget to provide groups and communities in which all employees can be authors in their own way. This is the space for them to share, comment and exchange with their colleagues. Engagement flows from opening up channels for horizontal exchanges and free discussions

How to organize your content

It is best to prepare a structural grid for your content writers in order for them to create easy-to-find and well-organized publications.

Tags

Provide a list with possible tags that people can add to each article or publication. This will help the intranet search engine to bring up the most relevant information according to keywords. Make this list visible both when creating and searching for information.

Separate them by:

• Location
• Topic
• Function
• etc.

Templates

Provide your writers with easy-to-build-on templates to enable fast and effective publishing. This will also create a sense of order and consistency throughout the platform.

Suggested templates:

• General articles
• Knowledge based articles
• News
• Job offers

Frequency

Establishing order for creating content and receiving it will automatically create a better synergy in the work environment. Create a rhythm by posting similar content on given days. For instance:

• New arrivals every first Tuesday
• Monthly prodcut updates
• etc.

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How to retain readers

Surely, you must know that making employees read a long article and scroll through endless paragraphs won’t keep their attention for long. When building your content strategy follow these tips to engage readers better:

What to DO

• Catchy Titles – An interesting, but short title that includes the main keyword
• Summary – Provide a short description or intro near the top, allowing the reader to understand the topic at a glance
• Straightforward – Bring the most important information in the very beginning
• Short Paragraphs – Divide your text into short paragraphs (one per idea) that will create a clear vision of what’s discussed
• Attach files – Name all files correctly, to avoid confusion
• Attractive visuals – Don’t be afraid to add graphs, pictures, slides or even videos that will keep the reader interested until the end. Bonus points if you add alt text on all visuals to help your search engine!

Mistakes to AVOID

• Missing notifications – People should receive notifications inside the intranet when new relevant content is published, for better visibility
• Defining relevance – You don’t want to overwhelm employees with irrelevant articles and create noise. Your intranet should push the most relevant information to employees according to their team, location, etc.
• Straightforward – Bring the most important information in the very beginning
• Duplicating information – If you often need to post certain information in two places, maybe you need to rethink the way you organized your sections or groups.
• Limiting possibilities – Add a section under each publication where people can interact and comment. The possibility to react or even suggest possible corrections will create a sense of belonging and transparency.
• Failing to update – Your intranet search engine can easily locate older information that may mislead readers. That is why you must regularly clean and update irrelevant information.

As a conclusion, we wanted to remind you that internal communication is not just about providing information, it’s about so much more. How do people receive it? Do they remember the information given? Do they want to share in return?

Internal communication is about how you share your thoughts and your corporate culture so that your employees will take initiative and give their best. At its best, your intranet platform is the place where your internal communication strategy will engage your people and make them want to contribute to company success.