Content Strategy Needs Content Strategists

“An effective content strategist has to know enough about everything from editorial tone to HTML to analytics. A content strategist is the one who can go up the ranks and become the head of a digital team because they are the ones who work the most often across all aspects of digital production and management.” —Anonymous survey respondent

For over eight years, Jeffrey Zeldman and other thought leaders in the design community have been telling us how important content is to design thinking, marketing, and communications.

Yet too often, having someone in charge of content is seen as a luxury that few can afford. I recently conducted a survey of UX professionals, in which 88% said that “content strategy is essential to success” of their projects. Yet 23% do not have content strategists on their team. (Respondents skewed toward content strategists themselves given the networks it was shared with, so that number may even be a bit inflated.)

During a recent design conference, I spent an evening listening to designers defensively tell me why they don’t have content strategists on their team. The rationale ranged from “my boss doesn’t get it” (“boss” being a design director or higher) to “what is content strategy?” (from a lead recruiter for an established app company) to “we’re hiring a UX Designer with strong writing skills” (real job title). To be sure, I also had conversations with people who were excited by their newly beefed up content strategy practices too. But to say that content strategists are being taken seriously by the entire design community is overreaching at this point.

Even when content strategy is given priority, hiring content strategists is not. (See job description for “UX Designer with strong writing skills.”) Just as a project with a designer is going to be more effective than when a designer isn’t involved, a project with a content strategist is going to have more consistent messaging and structure than those without one. Someone needs to be responsible for determining not only what content needs to be created, but also how it is created and produced and published.

Content strategists are needed so that the content gets created, and all the “content thinking” gets done, as Colleen Jones recently termed it.

Design thinking will never be enough in our content-driven digital world. We need content thinking. #contentstrategy #contentmarketing

— Colleen Jones (@leenjones) January 25, 2017

Sure, content strategy tasks might be getting done. But are they done as welland as fully as they could be? Often doing things like content audits and SEO research take away from someone’s main job instead of it being their job. It’s hard to know the cost of not having a content strategist on the team. But I have not met anyone who worked with a content strategist and felt poorer for it.

Here are four ways having a content strategist helps teams and produces better results.

Lorem Ispum doesn’t mean anything

Stakeholder 1: “What language is that? Is it Greek?”
Stakeholder 2: “No, I think it’s Latin.”
Designer: “It’s not any language. It’s just placeholder text.”

Does that conversation sound familiar? The point is, lorem ipsum is not a language and has no meaning whatsoever. At best it’s a distraction. At worst it leads to a system that does not accept the content that was created and a design that has a lot of egregiously unnecessary components.

The problem is that content is often the last thing added to a project. Designs and systems are created and then wait for content to fill them. This outside-in way of designing needs to stop. Starting from the core – content – and working out from there is a smarter way to approach design. Not least because that means the content is developed first. When content is developed first, there is no need for placeholder text. With real content in wireframes and prototype, real discussions can be had about whether the design will meet the goals. Feedback and critique are meaningful and push the project to a better outcome by dealing with reality.

Not only do content strategists guide the content through the design, they can enhance creativity by providing proper constraints for the system. While the designer and developer are doing their work, the content strategist can make sure the content creation is being iterated along with the design and content system. Having a content strategist worry about the content means others don’t have to.

Content strategists are editors

At its heart, content strategy is a means of getting the right information to the right people at the right time. It takes a lot more than writing copy to achieve that outcome. While content strategists often do some copywriting as part of their work, copywriting is not the focus of content strategy. Therefore, they are not necessarily writers. They are more often editors, responsible for determining the priorities, flow, and structure of content.

Based on my survey, top content strategy tasks are:

• Content audits
• UX writing
• Site maps
• Content models
• Content production

Notice copywriting is not on the list. There is plenty of discussion to be had about different types of writing and how those fit into an overall organizational structure, but when it comes to digital, there are a lot of words on the screen. The words are essential to the success of a website’s or product’s users, and thus the organization itself. Why are decisions about the words left to just anyone who happens to come in contact with them? Get the right content strategist into the mix and watch improvement in conversions and user satisfaction go up.

Digital content is also a conversation. Sometimes that conversation is between humans and computers. Connecting people with bots is now a mainstream task and needs to build even more trust than with screens. Those conversations need to be designed as well. Conversation design is a relatively new idea, but conversations happen whether they are designed or not. Don’t leave that connection to chance.

And remember, content includes more than just the words. Content includes the images, documents, videos, audio files, infographics that exist in the system. What type of content will serve a need best? A content strategist will look at the user need, the design and development resources, the author’s skills, and business priorities to determine what type of content will deliver the best outcome. It is not as simple as the word that goes on a button. Maybe a button isn’t the right element in the first place, and a well-designed call out or link would be better. A content strategist should be the one to decide the best words to get the user from point A to point B – or whether an image would be better. That should be determined before anything is designed.

In other words, a content strategist acts as a translator between users and the system – sometimes literally guiding language translation strategy – as well as between the various team members and the product. Designers, developers, salespeople, database administrators, CEOs, marketers, and subject matter experts all speak slightly different languages too. Have a content strategist lead the effort to translate user needs and business needs into the right content for the system.

Content strategists are organizers

A good content strategy starts with figuring out what to create. But it goes beyond having a list of pages to write. Content needs to be produced and designed and implemented. What happens to sheep that are not watched over? They either run away or get eaten by the wolf. If there isn’t a content strategist to guide the content through the design iterations and the content management or product information management system, it could be lost.

Once the content is created, it needs to be maintained. A good governance plan will help the site last longer and keep it organized. This is also part of a content strategist’s job. Besides the editorial style guide, there need to be guidelines for tagging, metadata, structure, workflow, how to determine how content is evaluated, and who is responsible for what. In other words, a manual for keeping the website working.

Content modeling is a core activity for content strategists. No matter what form it takes, a content model is a representation of the types of content and their relationships with each other. Based on my survey, this is not work that is being done if there is no content strategist on a team.

Somehow systems are built with content types and connections. Content strategists contribute to the creation of the most efficient and effective system. They make sure authors can use them and not work around them.

There are other activities and tasks during content production that need a guide. While this process of creating and managing content will vary, generally it includes:

• Research
• Writing
• Editorial review & revision
• Approval
• Enter into CMS
• Web page review and sign off
• Publish and maintain

Don’t leave project success to chance. Have a content strategist establish a content production process and act as the content shepherd, making sure content is given the care and respect it deserves.

Hire a content strategist now

As the field of content strategy grows, it attracts people from all sorts of backgrounds. Specialties are cropping up, including UX content strategy, product content strategy, back-end content strategy, marketing content strategy, and more. All are valuable. All are grounded in the same principle: content is what users want, content is what allows users to do something, and content needs attention.

Each organization is unique, and so are content strategy needs. Just as web content isn’t copied from one site to another, neither should job descriptions be the same from company to company. Figure out what your team needs most and use that as a basis for a job description. Use this article as a guide to finding a content strategist that will move your organization forward and help it be as successful as possible. It will pay dividends for years to come.