You're refining your content strategy with data. How can you effectively incorporate user feedback?

To effectively incorporate user feedback in your content strategy: Listen Actively: Personalize by reaching out directly to users for detailed insights. Storytelling: Share real user stories that highlight feedback and its impact. Data-Driven Decisions: Use analytics to identify trends and common themes in feedback. Iterate and Adapt: Continuously refine content based on feedback and performance metrics. Engage Users: Involve your audience in content creation, making them feel valued. Example: After launching a new feature, we noticed user engagement dropped. By analyzing feedback, we learned users found it confusing. We simplified the feature, leading to a 30% increase in satisfaction.

Many Content Strategists will already have a concept in mind for a strategy (based on their years of experience) or strategy(s) that has been suggested by business stakeholders as a starting point. It is valuable to have these documented and added into the mix of insights being gathered from various channels. IMHO this can liberate the person undertaking the strategy refinement process from unconscious biases influencing outcomes during later stages of strategy formation. It also ensures that stakeholders attitudes and expert knowledge are adding to the value of the content strategy from the start.

Gathering a wide variety of insights that are both quantitative and qualitative, but also first hand and third party, is key as part of an effective content strategy. This way you can further refine your strategy based on solid evidence rather than guessing.

If more than one of your viewers/clients/customer is saying something, then you need to adjust your strategy. However, you should know when there’s sentiment in the feedback. A lot of viewers don’t pause to analyze and can give an irrational response. For example, i wrote a relatable blog post about a unique personality type. I also added some of my unique experiences. While my content was genuinely insightful, some people failed to see that it was from my experience and persistently mentioned how “it wasn’t the same for them.” Instead of falling into the temptation of making my content bland by removing my personal touch, I carefully explained how all personalities can’t all be the same, and we have some necessary differences.

It's also possible to discover at this stage that your industry has been "interrupted" by a startup, new technology or global events you weren't aware of and more than refinement is necessary. If this happens it is important to stop your strategy refinement process and go back to research and content strategy ideation, IMHO.

IMHO it is also valuable to have points within a content strategy that leave the prospective client in a state (eg. curious, anticipating, excited) that welcomes additional touch-points (eg. a phone call, webinar invite, survey etc). Doing this helps your content strategy to create openings for a sales call and prevents the strategy from becoming a "broadcast" automation with some personalisation.

Take a leave out of the teacher’s playbook: - deliberately design the desired engagement - engagement should nudge the audience to interact with the content in ways you envision - engagement should result in some form of output produced by the audience that evidences their thoughts and perspectives - examples of such strategies include thinking routines, anticipation/reaction guide, and frayer’s model