Category: Writing

https://econsultancy.com/the-six-fundamental-elements-of-an-effective-content-strategy/

A strategy is an overarching diagnosis, guiding policy and direction, while a plan is the steps in the process that allow a business to progress with confidence. At its heart, every strategic process answers the same four questions:

• Where am I now?
• Where do I want to get to?
• How do I get there?
• How do I know when I’ve got there?

A good content strategy therefore needs to begin with a good understanding of context drawn from the competitive and brand situation as well as customer insight, which can then inform an objective, strategic direction and plan that can be executed through a coherent but responsive set of plans, actions and measures.

This enables businesses to set out a comprehensive strategic process for content that ensures the maximum opportunity for success.

The fundamental elements that may form a part of content strategy can be summarised in the following taxonomy:

1. Research/insight

This includes understanding user need, customer segmentation, the development of personas, review and understanding of existing assets and position via content inventory and audit, competitor and gap analysis and formulation of measurement frameworks.

2. Content management/resourcing

Incorporating content management structures necessary to establishing and maintaining appropriate structures, organisation and resourcing – information architecture (site structures, taxonomies, metadata frameworks); content management tools and practices; backup, versioning, archiving practices; analytics configuration; governance and standards; budgeting; resource requirements.

3. Content planning and objective setting

Including guidelines, plans, objectives and KPIs – brand positioning, purpose, point of view, guidelines, tone of voice; aligning content objectives with marketing/organisational objectives; targets, KPIs, success metrics, mapping outcomes to business value; concept development; themes, messages, topics; content calendars, channels, content type, format, integration; workflow (e.g. RACI); role of third-party/user-generated content.

4. Content production

The creation and production of content, including authoring, editing, asset production; content optimisation, accessibility, SEO; tagging and classifying; insourcing/outsourcing in production; the role of third-party tools and technology; content reuse.

5. Delivery/distribution

The execution and delivery of content incorporating the role of agencies and third parties such as syndication and aggregation, content distribution and channels.

6. Content review/optimisation

The evaluation of content, adaptation and optimisation – analytics evaluation, optimisation, revisioning, test-and-learn, user experience.

The PROSPER framework

These fundamental elements combined with a good strategic process support the definition of a good campaign process for content strategy, built around the acronym PROSPER:

Figure 1: The PROSPER framework

Source: Econsultancy

This model follows the outline for effective strategy and planning:

• Prepare and Research stages: Where are we now?
• Objective: Where do we want to get to?
• Strategy, Plan, Execute: How do get there?
• Review: How do we know when we’ve got there?

Taking each key stage of this seven-step model in turn, more detail around this process can be defined as follows:

Prepare

This initial stage is concerned with establishing and understanding the available resources, assets and capability, as well as appreciating positioning, context and environment. It is essential when setting out a strategy to develop an appreciation of the resources and capabilities that may be at the disposal of the team, so that the full range of possibilities are understood. This way, the team can avoid duplication of effort and maximise resources, also understanding what needs to be outsourced or supported by partnership.

The key question the team need to answer at this stage is: Where are they now, and what do they need in order to succeed?

Key activities include:

• Content audits to establish an understanding of available assets that might be used or repurposed, or areas of opportunity/gaps that need to be filled.
• Capability audit to establish what competencies, tools and technologies are available and what might need to be outsourced or supported through external partnership.
• Competitive analysis to understand competitive positioning and context and help define and map territory and opportunity.
• Situational analysis to develop understanding about the current environment and situation that might inform a strategic response. This might include the key stakeholders in the business (stakeholder mapping).
• Development of brand positioning/personality/tone to establish a voice. Good content strategy is rooted in a clearly defined brand positioning that brings clarity to tone of voice, territory, point of view, content themes.

Research

This second part in the “where are we now?” stage is focused on defining and developing understanding of customer needs, wants, fears in order to define the opportunity for strategic response.

The key question that needs to be answered at this stage is: What are the key insights providing the foundation for the campaign?

Key activities include:

• Research commissioning, aggregation and analysis: pulling together the relevant research material and outputs (quantitative and qualitative) for analysis to draw out key insights that can inform strategy.
• Talking to customers/users: there is no substitute for getting in front of real users or customers whenever possible in order to inform activity and response. The earlier in the process this is done the better.
• Audience segmentation: this covers the process of dividing people into subgroups based upon defined criteria such as demographics, psychographics, customer lifecycle, product usage and behaviour, media use. Econsultancy’s Segmentations and Personas Best Practice Guide contains useful frameworks and practices in this area.
• Persona generation: the development of user or customer personas as a representation of key customer segments, and the use and application of customer journey mapping. Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide contains practical and useful guidance in this area.

Objective

Next the business needs to set a clear objective and goal in order to define what success looks like and set a target that can inform direction.

The question that needs to be answered is: Where do we want to get to?

Key activities include:

• SMART objective setting: this involves establishing objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time bound.
• Aligning goals and objectives: the brand’s over-arching goal should set a target that defines what success looks like. This should be measurable and time bound. The team may then set a number of objectives that ladder up to the over-arching goal.
• Identifying measure of success: what are the KPIs that will show when the campaign or activity has achieved its objective/s?

Strategy

This stage is concerned with identifying the key ways in which the team will achieve the objective that they have set. A good strategy should detail high-level actions, considerations and preferences.

The question that should be answered at this stage is: How do we get there?

Key activities include:

• Strategy definition: this includes identifying how the start point relates to the end point, how activity can be integrated right from the very beginning, identification of the key channels to deliver the objective, the balance between consistency and channel specialisation, principles for governance of activity and opportunities for test and learn.
• Strategy communication: give clear, concise expression and communication of the objective and strategy in order to ensure alignment from the start.
• Strategy development: taking account of changing contexts, circumstances and environment, strategy needs to be consistent enough to define a clear direction but fluid and responsive enough to reflect shifts over time.

Plan

The plan sets out the specific actions, activities and steps that the team are going to take in more detail, and defines how they are going to utilise specific channels.

The question that needs to be answered here is: What are the specific steps that we will take?

Key activities include:

• Plan definition: laying out the order of activities and key actions to be taken, including detail of how the team are to use individual channels (e.g. keyword strategy for search, content deployment, targeting methodology, media schedules), identification of tests that they are going to conduct, tracking and testing methodologies.
• Plan communication: give clear, concise expression and communication of plan and activities and how this relates to the objective and strategy.
• Plan development: plans change faster than strategies, so plans need to be responsive to changing contexts, circumstances and environments.

Execute

When executing, the team need to ensure good governance so that the plan and strategy are executed well, but they also need to have a clear understanding of the opportunity for in-campaign optimisation.

The question it is important to answer at this stage is: What are the key actions and who will take them?

Key activities include:

• Assigning responsibilities: this involves identifying in advance who is responsible and accountable, and who needs to be consulted and informed (using a simple framework like RACI^[7]). It includes identifying key responsibilities across agency partners and internal team members for channel and activity management and execution.
• Tracking, testing and optimisation: the team should not wait until the end of the campaign to capitalise on the opportunity to optimise against their key objectives and goals. Tracking, testing and optimisation should be built into execution as a continuous process.

Review

At the end of campaigns, or at regular intervals, the team need to take a step back and identify what learnings they can take from the activity and how that can contribute towards continuous improvement.

The question that needs to be answered at this stage is: How did we perform, and how can we improve?

Key activities include:

• Measurement: identifying performance against the set goal and objective/s.
• Learning and optimisation: deriving insight and learning from the measures of performance, including identifying opportunities for improvement, efficiency, future testing hypotheses.

The post The six fundamental elements of an effective content strategy appeared first on Econsultancy.

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In life, it can feel like things happen randomly, without causation, and with little or no meaning. The human brain, though, needs meaning. We need to understand why things are going badly for us so we can avoid it or why things are so well so we can do more of whatever’s working.

This is why humans love story.

In stories, we get to see the cause-and-effect connections between otherwise random events. We get to experience the deeper meaning in life. We get to see through the chaos of real life and see the underlying pattern.

The literary term for this pattern is story arc, and humans love story arcs.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the definition of story arcs, look at the six most commonly found story arcs in literature, talk about how to use them in your writing, and, finally, study which story arcs are the most successful.

Definition of Story Arc or Narrative Arc

That’s the definition, but what does it actually mean? Let’s break it down.

Story Arcs Rise and Fall

Stories change. If there is no rise or fall in a narrative, it isn’t a story. It’s a list of events.

The rise and fall of characters’ fortunes interest us more than anything else.

This change, the rise and fall in a story, can be plotted on a graph to form a curve shape line.

And when you graph them, you begin to see patterns across all forms of story.

Here is a simple graph of a story arc that Kurt Vonnnegut describes as “Man in a Hole”:

The x-axis of the graph describes the chronology of the narrative and the y-axis describes the positive or negative value the main character experiences.

The 6 Primary Story Arcs

Story arcs of course do not always follow such simple graphs. In fact, story arcs can often look more like this than a smooth curve:

Yes, stories must change, but that doesn’t mean they all change in the same ways.

But when you compare the story arcs of the best stories throughout history, patterns begin to emerge, and you find that these arcs are much more uniform than you might think.

That’s what Andrew Reagan and his team of researchers from the University of Vermont found after analyzing over 4,000 of the best novels from the Project Gutenberg library.

In fact they found that stories fall into six primary arcs, which I’ll list below. You can find the full study, Toward a Science of Human Stories, here (the part we’re talking about begins on page 73).

1. Rags to Riches (rise)

All stories move, but some stories only have one movement.

In the “Rags to Riches” story arc, that movement is a continuous upward climb toward a happily ever after.

Examples of Rags to Riches story arcs:

• Disney’s Tangled
• A Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Matilda by Roald Dahl
• Holes by Louis Sachar
• The BFG by Roald Dahl
• My Fair Lady (film) / Pygmalion (novel) by George Bernard Shaw
• The Great American Dream / Progress

The Rags to Riches story arc is one of the most common story types, but these stories lag in popularity, according Reagan, the researcher from the University of Vermont, who found that other story arcs were more widely read.

2. Riches to Rags (fall)

As with Rags to Riches, in a Riches to Rags story, there is just one movement. However, this movement is in the opposite direction, a fall rather than a rise.

Examples of Riches to Rags story arcs:

• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
• Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

In a Riches to Rags story, the protagonist begins the plot in a fairly high place, but slowly their life devolves until by the end, their life is a ruin of its former self.

Often addiction stories or stories about mental health fit into this structure.

3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

This is one of the most common and highly rated arcs, and is even an arc I used in my book Crowdsourcing Paris.

Examples of Man in a Hole story arcs:

• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Disney’s Monsters, Inc.
• Finding Nemo
• “Make America Great Again,” Donald Trump’s Campaign Slogan

Many stories actually include two sequential Man in a Hole story arcs, as illustrated by this curve:

According to Reagan and the researchers at the University of Vermont, this is one of the most popular structures. He says in his paper:

We find “Icarus” (-SV 2), “Oedipus” (-SV 3), and two sequential “Man in a hole” arcs (SV 4), are the three most successful emotional arcs.

Examples of the Double Man in a Hole arc include:

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
• Disney’s The Lion King
• And more

Some stories even contain many Man in a Hole arcs—becoming Man in a Hole, Man in a Hole, Man in a Hole ad infinitum. Lord of the Rings and the 6,700-page online serialized novel Worm are examples of this.

4. Icarus / Freytag’s Pyramid (rise then fall)

This is the plot structure Gustav Freytag was interested in when he coined the plot structure now known as Freytag’s Pyramid (contrary to popular belief, Freytag’s Pyramid is not a universal structure for plot, but a description of a single arc). For more on this literary concept (and how it’s since been misunderstood), see our full Freytag’s Pyramid guide here.

The Icarus arc, named after the Greek story about a boy who escapes imprisonment on an island by constructing wings made of wax but who ultimately falls into the sea after flying too close to the sun, is one of the most popular story arcs.

Examples of the Icarus story arc includes:

• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• The upcoming novel Pluck by J.H. Bunting (me!)
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Disney’s Peter Pan
• The Old Man and the Sea / A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
• Titanic (film)
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Great Santini by Pat Conroy
• If the word “great” is in the title, you know you’re in for a sad ending! This a popular story structure with literary writers, and tends to be a staple structure for many classics.

5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

The Cinderella arc, like Rags to Riches, is one of the most common arcs, often found in love stories, sports stories, and Disney movies.

Examples of Cinderella story arcs:

• Disney’s Frozen
• Disney’s Up
• How to Train Your Dragon (film/novel)
• Jane Eyre by Emily Bronte
• Disney’s Pinochio
• Disney’s Aladdin 

If you’re writing a Disney movie, there’s a good chance it’s going to be Cinderella.

 6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

The Oedipus arc is of the most difficult structures to pull off, but it’s also one of the most highly read structures.

Examples of the Oedipus story arc include:

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• The Godfather by Mario Puzo
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare

How Story Arcs Fit Dramatic Structure

Dramatic structure describes the elements of a story’s movement, and each of the above story arcs incorporates the dramatic structure. At The Write Practice, we use a six-part dramatic structure:

1. Exposition
2. Inciting Incident
3. Rising Action/Progressive Complications
4. Crisis
5. Climax
6. Denouement

Note that many people include the falling action in their dramatic structure. I don’t include it because I believe the term “falling action” to be misleading and really only appropriate for Freytag’s narrow definition of the tragic, Icarus structure, not a modern three-act story structure. You can read more about this in my falling action article.

Here’s how these elements of dramatic structure fit into the Rags to Riches Story Arc:

In this arc, the exposition has little to no movement and is primarily to acclimate the reader to the world of the story and its characters.

The inciting incident begins the upward movement.

The rising action describes the upward motion of the movement.

The combination of the crisis and climax is the point of the peak, the make-or-break moment when things could either continue to improve or reverse.

Last, the resolution wraps up the story at the end with one or two scenes of relative stability.

These components of dramatic structure can be found in every arc, and are part of what gives each arc their structure.

Story Arcs Measure Values

A story’s rise and fall in value can be expressed generally in terms of “fortune,” but you can also get more specific by measuring a story’s movement based on six different story values.

You’ve heard that your story needs conflict, but what does that actually mean? Because the kind of conflict stories need is (probably) not more fistfights and loud arguments (although, depending on the story, that might not hurt!).

No, the kind of conflict your story needs is between one value and its opposite.

Which values?

A good story rises and falls on the spectrum of one of six different values, according to Shawn Coyne the author of Story Grid. The six values, which follow Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Human Need, are as follows:

1. Physiological. The value of food, water, air, warmth, and rest. Life vs. death.
2. Safety. The value of personal and group security. In story terms, life vs. a fate worse than death.
3. Love/Belonging. The value of intimate relationships and friendships. Love vs. hate.
4. Esteem. The value of personal prestige and accomplishment. Accomplishment vs. failure.
5. Self-Actualization. The value of reaching your potential. Maturity vs. naiveté.
6. Transcendence. The value of becoming more than yourself. Good vs. evil.

The rise and fall of these values dictate the rise and fall of the arc.

For example, in an adventure story set in space like the film Gravity, where the core value is physiological survival, you would measure the arc based on this life vs. death metric.

Let’s break this arc down, analyzing the rise and fall of the life vs. death value throughout the key moments in the story:

***Spoiler Alert***

Exposition: Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and astronaut Matt Kowalksi (George Clooney) are on a space walk on the Hubble Space Telescope. Life vs. Death value measure: stable.

Inciting Incident: A missile strike causes a chain reaction of space debris that threatens to destroy much of the spacecraft around the planet. Life vs. Death value measure: A threat of death appears.

Rising action: The space debris field begins to destroy spacecraft, including Stone and Kowalski’s ship, and they have to escape to the International Space Station. But the spacecraft ISS has been damaged, and they have to travel to the Chinese space station. While en route, Kowalski sacrifices his life to save Stone. Other space shenanigans happen until Stone is out of options for survival. Life vs. Death value measure: inching closer and closer toward likely death.

Crisis: The sole survivor of the debris field and trapped in a Soyuz capsule without fuel, Stone has to choose whether to end her life or keep working to survive. Initially, she decides to turn off life support, but as she is losing consciousness, a vision of Kowalski gives her a final solution to reach the working Chinese re-entry capsule. Life vs. Death value measure: near death.

Climax: Stone reaches the Chinese re-entry capsule just as the space station is about to crash into the atmosphere. She unlocks from the station and is descending to Earth when a fire starts. After she lands safely in a lake, she has to evacuate the capsule immediately because of the smoke and nearly drowns before finally swimming to shore. Life vs. Death value measure: near death but survival becoming a slim possibility.

Resolution: Stone takes her first steps on Earth, thanking Kowalski, and as she watches the debris burn in Earth’s atmosphere, a helicopter flies overhead signaling her rescue. Life vs. Death value measure: survival by a small margin!

***End Spoiler Alert***

Notice how the story moves from virtually no chance of death to death almost a certainty to the resolution, where survival seems even more precious because of how close the protagonist came to death.

The story moves the value from the positive form to the negative, and, depending on the value, back again. The story’s arc is created through this rise and fall movement.

This same arc can be used to tell a love story, a performance story, or even a coming of age story. The arc stays the same, but the value being represented by the arc changes.

How to Use Story Arcs in Your Writing

Now that you understand the six main arcs and how the shapes of stories interact with a story’s core value, how do you actually use this information to write great stories?

Here are five tips for using story arcs in your writing:

1. Above all, make sure your story moves.

It can move up, it can move down, it can move up and then down. But it must move, and that movement must begin early.

A narrative that stays the same is not a story but an account of events.

2. In the first draft, don’t worry about matching your story to a particular arc.

You may know what your arc is when you start writing, and you may not.

Don’t worry too much about it. Just tell your story (and make sure that story moves).

3. In the first draft, do worry about finding your core value.

While you don’t need to worry about finding the right shape of your story when you start writing, you should try to discover the core value, the y-axis that your story will move on.

If you can discover your core value (see the list of six values above for the options), you will be much more equipped to making sure it moves the way it needs to.

And while you may choose more than one value—perhaps a value for a subplot or the internal genre—if you try to move your story on too many values it will become muddied and will be very hard to work with in your second draft.

Above all, keep it simple. You can always write another book, but a book that’s trying to do too much can easily become unworkable.

4. Write to the crisis.

When you’re writing a first draft, you don’t need to know everything that’s going to happen.

If you’re a pantser rather than a planner, you might not know anything that happens.

But the best thing you can do is to write toward the crisis.

The crisis is the primary turning point in a story. It is the moment when a character is presented with a difficult choice that will determine his or her fate.

This moment is usually found at the very bottom of a dip in a story arc or the very top of a peak. It will be followed almost immediately by the climax.

If you can find that crisis, you will have found your story.

Everything in a story builds to the crisis.

For more on how to discover the crisis in your story, read my full guide to a literary crisis here.

5. In your second draft, find the arc and enhance it.

While you don’t need to know the shape of your story arc in your first draft, after you finish your first draft and before you start your second draft, find your arc.

What is its shape? How does it rise and fall? Does it fall enough? Does it rise enough? Is there enough movement?

The purpose of the second draft is to enhance your arc, to make it more pronounced, smoother and more effective.

All Good Stories Have an Arc

Good stories are about change, and thus all good stories have an arc.

By finding the arc in your story, and making that arc better, you can give your readers what they want: meaning.

All humans need meaning. While the world often can feel confusing, chaotic, and meaningless, the role of the storyteller is to help people find meaning in their lives.

This is why humans love story.

And soon, it’s why readers will love your story.

Which of the six story arcs is your favorite? Which story arc do you want to use for your next book? Let me know in the comments section.

The post Story Arcs: Definitions and Examples of the 6 Shapes of Stories appeared first on The Write Practice.