Meghan Casey, the author of the Content Strategy Toolkit, put it best, “If you can’t articulate measurable business goals as reasons for producing or sharing content, you’re probably wasting your business’ money.” As an academic exercise, I thought it would be fun to put on my content analysis hat and test this.

Enter Bernard Marr, a contributing author for Forbes,  who has case studies on his website. The case studies are useful because his firm produces a ‘strategic plan-on-a-page’ for its clients. These one-page plans make isolating an organization’s goals easy. I grabbed the one for Northumbria Healthcare and found three goals I could use to gauge the organization’s digital content.

Background on the Organization

Northumbria Healthcare NHS is a National Health Service Foundation Trust that provides care for over half a million people across Northumberland and North Tyneside in its hospital, community venues, and in people’s homes.

I analyzed Northumbria’s website content for the following three organizational (or business) goals:

  1. Teach and train people in the competencies we need
  2. Recruit, develop, motivate and communicate with our people
  3. Provide excellent patient-centric customer services

A business goal is an observable and measurable end result achieving one or more objectives within a fixed timeframe.

The report I compiled also contains recommended Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each goal because—like Casey says—the goals need to be measurable. “KPIs are how a company determines, through measurement, whether it’s meeting its business goals” (Casey, 2015).

If you’d like to see how well Northumbria Healthcare’s content measures up to its goals, check out my content analysis report.

 

References

Casey, M. (2015). The content strategy toolkit: Methods, guidlines, and templates for getting content right New Riders.

Casey, M. (2017, MARCH 30). Why you need content strategy before editorial planning. Retrieved from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/03/content-strategy-editorial-planning/

Goal. Retrieved from http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/goal.html

Marr, B. Measuring and managing NHS performance: Northumbria healthcare foundation trust. Retrieved from https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1061

Media enquiries. Retrieved from https://www.northumbria.nhs.uk/about-us/corporate-information/media/media-enquiries/