A 'Content Strategist' is a fancy job description for someone who plans, curates and publishes content for a business or organization, and most likely does a little writing themselves.

The discipline has recently taken off as a necessary reaction to the explosion of devices and channels that our audiences are accessing our content on. It seems like every month there's a new smart device and another social platform to publish to. Chances are, if you're a teacher, administrator or marketer you're already familiar with the main components of content strategy—structure, workflow and governance. What you need are smarter tools to bring them all together seamlessly. That’s exactly what we've built Hail for.

Structure

It's our belief, the more structure that is added at the content creation stage the more future-proofed and freer it will be. By breaking up the content into meaningful chunks; such as 'headline', 'lead' or introductory paragraph, and the article 'body' with separate hero and gallery imagery, we are able to perfectly adapt what is presented to the viewer at every touch point. Hail also employs tags, which have an important dual purpose; they organise your content in the system and categorise it in published formats.

Well-structured, semantic content with key metadata will live on and adapt to the web as it continues to grow and mature, extending out past mobile to the next wave of content-capable devices like wearables, tv and car dashes.

Workflow

Currently, the average content creator writes within a word processor on a desktop, sends it by email for approval/feedback, copies it in to their CMS/Web publishing tool, social media channels, email campaigns, and eventually collates and reformats it for printing in offline newsletters and magazines/reports. They have to deal with a huge number of different interfaces and platform capabilities and when needing to augment the content with photography and video the job is even more daunting. Even more problematic is that the content now exists in many separate silos, all with their own formatting requirements and no central storage or updating pathways.

Obviously, there is serious scope to make the lives of content creators and strategists better and we believe the ideal is the maxim promoted by NPRs API: COPE – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. That’s exactly what Hail provides, a cloud-based software package that empowers your organisation to collaborate on great, well structured content that's formatted and optimised for the adaptive web. Hail takes it one step further by providing customers with beautiful adaptive and responsive templates for online publications, such as newsletters, magazines and yearbooks. Outside of the provided layouts, an API is available so that customers can integrate Hail into their existing websites, social channels and blogging platforms.

We believe strongly that your content is yours to keep, so although we will keep it hosted and backed up in the cloud, it will always be accessible and branded with your own identity in all published formats.

Governance

Finally, governance is addressed by empowering organisations to invite collaborators with varying permission levels. Content writers and photographers can work independently before submitting articles for approval by editors. Once ready, content can be pushed out to the social channels and curated into publications by those with publishing rights. This workflow ensures the consistency and quality of the content that reaches your audience.

Content strategy isn't only for large institutions with dozens of collaborators, Hail’s workflow, structure and adaptive publishing benefits small groups and individuals also.

The content of the future is future-proofed and able to outlive the original platforms it was written for, greatly extending it’s shelf life, so it can continue to perform and provide a return on investment. By revolutionizing your content creation with Hail you'll be best placed to take on the adaptive web, ensuring you continue to provide your audience with well branded, beautiful and engaging content.