Home

I help organizations scale content planning and production to meet the complex demands of multiple marketing channels, lines of business and customer segments.

I have been leveraging the internet in marketing and communications for 20 years in industries including publishing, e-commerce, financial services, technology, nonprofits, and education.

The 5 Challenges Content Strategy Solves

Content is a headache. It’s a pain to make, manage, and measure, and few of us have any kind of strategy to help us deal with it rationally. When I talk to marketing leaders, I listen for what keeps them up at night, and it’s always the same five things:

  1. We have too much content.
  2. No one can find our content.
  3. Our content simply isn’t relevant.
  4. It takes us too long to make great content.
  5. We don’t know which content works or why.

In my view, these challenges are all challenges of scale. We are making and consuming so much more content today than we ever have. As marketers and customers, we are drowning in a mess of content. That sense of overwhelm is the headache.

I can help relieve your content headache. 

When you feel you are facing a big, complicated mess of a situation, making lists, organizing, and setting your priorities helps put your challenge in perspective. It lets you breathe. Then, you can think rationally about what you need to do without that sense of overwhelm bearing down on you. 

Content strategy provides that same breathing space for people faced with big content challenges. As a content strategist, I use the practices of publishing and information science to bring order to the job of planning, making, and distributing content.

To talk to me about your content challenge, Send me a message on LinkedIn or send an e-mail to correspondence at johnmccrory.com

What I do: Content Strategy Skills & Capabilities

The concrete work I do involves four kinds of activities: Editorial, Technical, Design, and Launch:

Editorial

  • Competitive content audits
  • Editorial workflow design
  • Editorial calendars
  • Editorial planning and story blueprinting
  • Editorial and publishing guidelines
  • Writing and editing

Technical

  • Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies
  • Content modelling
  • CMS database design
  • CMS requirements & evaluations

Design

  • Content audits, inventories & matrices
  • Heuristic content and UX evaluations
  • Content design for UX
  • Interface copywriting & editing

Launch

  • Content Migration planning & management
  • Content editing and SEO
  • Dynamic Content Ingestion management
  • Content QA
  • CMS training

About Me

I have been leveraging the power of the internet to transform marketing and communications for more than 20 years.

I possess skills in marketing, writing, design, and technology and have worked in publishing, nonprofits, higher education and design. At digital agency Huge, I built and headed the global content strategy practice.

As a marketer and a content strategist, my approach is to move quickly from insights to ideas to help my clients get things done.  I typically collaborate with partners in brand, UX, tech, and creative, providing vision and guidance on content from discovery to delivery and beyond.

I have worked and played with internet technology since 1987 and started this personal web site in 1996, writing about publishing, literature, urban affairs, and marketing — “blogging for longer than it’s been called that,” as the Brooklyn real estate blog, Brownstoner, put it.  I am interested in just about everything, and I have a few things to say about Content Strategy.

You can connect with me via LinkedIn or @johnmccrory on Twitter.