What is content strategy? I can answer (and will answer) it. But what I really love is when others try to.
Want to make your average marketing agency squirm or ramble? Ask them to define what content strategy is. Better yet, ask about their content strategy program.
It’s the question I ask clients and firms to see if they take the practice of content strategy seriously. I’ve personally seen professionals from marketing firms to Fortune 500 companies start creating adorable and elaborate word salads in their attempts to explain it.
Or when I ask, some will pivot the answer to talk about the application of content marketing (which is marketing/education/relationship building+ content strategy).
What content strategy means to most marketing and design organizations.
For most firms, if you really listen to what they tell you when they define content strategy, 8 times out of 10, it becomes clear that what content strategy means to them is writing. This limited definition needs to be expanded, greatly. For many reasons.
When I have looked for content strategists to hire for projects, I’ve been immensely frustrated to find candidates whose work is limited in showing the “strategy” part of content strategy. I recently mentioned in a post that another firm I talked to a few months ago felt the same way.
In other words, the content strategists both of us encountered were really good writers. Props to the writing skills (fist pound on chest goes here ‘cause I got love for you).
When I do find professionals with knowledge and skills about the other parts of content strategy, they almost glow like magic elusive unicorns. Outside hard-core technology or product companies that hire full content strategists due to complex content structuring needs, you don’t see that many running loose in the wild.
Writing is part of content strategy. But…
What gets missed that it is not EVERYTHING about content strategy. Content strategy has a bigger definition.
Writing is to content strategy is what design is to UX. It’s one of the skills you can employ for structuring content but that skill doesn’t encompass the practice.
So what is content strategy?
Full content strategy is…
The analysis, planning, creation, editing, review, governance, structuring, and distribution of content in ways that help to achieve an organization’s or individual’s goals.
Translated to English. It’s the process of optimizing content in terms of style, placement, structure, timeliness, findability, and relevancy to help a user utilize that content to achieve a task better.
Isn’t content strategy about stories?
Yes, but it’s more than that.
But if we use “stories” as an analogy, then a full content strategy program is about the right story, found in the right place for the right person and the right time.
When that happens in a digital product, website, or digital marketing materials, a user is delighted by the experience. Not only did they find the information. The information is also satisfying. Content strategy makes that possible.
Content strategy is a process.
Those components around content strategy are functions and processes. They are not titles.
That means content strategy is not limited to people with the title content strategist. People in other parts of UX (AI, researchers) and even people in marketing can cross over into some or all parts of this role. As they should, in order for a digital experience to feel seamless and aligned in look, flow, content positioning and content relevancy.
Then why have content strategists?
A few things I found to be consistent in why you need a person with well-rounded content strategist skills. I’m betting some of these will hit home with my fellow professionals…
- Designers (and many developers) can’t spell. Or if you are doing it just to keep me on my toes, you can stop now.
- Non-content professionals tend to treat content more like an element of design. Many don’t really look at the meaning, value, and relevancy of content in a digital experience. Only that it is there and the client likes it. Someone has to be around to advocate for the value and potency of the language for the end user.
- A lot of data involved around content or the content itself or a client’s project is unstructured to the point where a human needs to give it meaningful structure.
- In the same way a designer may make colors and brand connect with humans, content strategists design words so they connect to the human experience.
- Who else is going to sit in a room with Google Sheets mapping out content for an entire 1000-page site for two weeks?
Oh, and from search engines, to mobile apps to your website, everything on the web is about the delivery of good content. So it’s a good bet you might want to have someone who knows what good content is.
That’s how I define content strategy. Others define what is content strategy differently. Would love to know what others think.