Develop a Content Strategy: Here’s Why
Content strategies have been around for much longer than most people realize. Dating all the way back to 1945, a pioneer named Don Day named the year 1945 the birth of content strategy after Vannevar Bush published the article: As We May Think. This article introduced the idea of content strategy and planted the seeds for the ideas and concepts that we now know today.
But What is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan, method or design for a piece of content that works to achieve business goals. A Content Strategist is the person behind the process of planning, designing, creating, editing, and publishing content that is based on the user’s goals and needs. (Simplilearn).
Therefore, since 1945 people have been emphasizing the importance of developing a content strategy. In fact, the entire idea behind content strategy is to provide meaningful content interactions, which benefits both the company and the users.
Change over the years
Given that content strategy has been around since 1945, it has definitely changed immensely over the last nearly 75 years. For example, new additions include:
UX Writing
Content Engineering
Product Content Strategy
UX Writing
UX writing, also known as User Experience Writing is the act of writing on behalf of a company to be useful for the user and match the organization’s tone, motto, and goals. (Bjoran). A good example of this is with the application MailChimp. When a user sends a newsletter with MailChimp, the user is likely a little nervous or anxious. Therefore, a UX Writer organized a way to send back a positive message/graphic to lighten the mood of the user. This helps the content become more interactive and serve a greater purpose. Additionally, this didn’t exist in years prior because the idea of user experience, and paying attention to how users utilize and receive apps only developed recently. Plus, the number of content that affects UX has grown dramatically in this digital era we’re currently in.
Courtesy: UXBooth
Content Engineering
Content engineering is the process of fixing the content structure by using content models that meet the user and company’s needs/goals. Plus, content engineering has many primary disciplines including: model, metadata, markup, schema, taxonomy, and graphs. Content engineering can also solve problems such as poor SEO performance, outdated technology, lack of standards for metadata, poorly structured content, and plenty more. This didn’t exist in the past because the technology was not around to even study this, let alone understand it and implement it to fix content strategy issues.
Product Content Strategy
A process of using content as a method to increase product sales and make customers more satisfied. A Product Content Strategist often works alongside a Project Manager and they serve as a user experience expert for each project. This only came about in recent years because the clear understanding that we have now fo user experiences developed after years of studying customers. Now that we have that information, we can implement them into creating such a thing as a product content strategist.
Important Steps in Creating Content Strategy
Budget
Buy-in
Preparation for success
Starting with the first step, the budget will be one of the largest concerns when speaking to a company about content strategy. For this, author Meghan Casey explains that you need to delineate the risks of not doing this type of content strategy work and the negative implications it will have compared with doing the work and the positive results it will have on the company in her book, The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right. To convince a client, Casey recommends being as specific as possible about budget needs from the very beginning and also creating a well-thought out budget proposal. Budget is such an important step in creating content strategy because it’s the first thing that must be addressed when you’re beginning to implement it.
Next, we have buy-in. It’s true; no project is successful without people buying into it, called stakeholders. Therefore, it is imperative to have approval from the managers about this project before moving forward. The reason that buy-in has such as a large impact on the success of content strategy is because if the managers aren’t on board, no one else will be either.
Lastly, there’s preparing for success. This step is imperative because in order for this to come to life, there need to be steps and a plan for implementation ready to go. This includes establishing a timeline, a set of goals, a list of needs, a list of goals, and plenty more. Without steps and goals lined up, the idea for content strategy is substance-less and highly unlikely to be successful.
Achieving Content Strategy
After checking off each of the steps above, then you can successful develop a content strategy. Plus now, our knowledge of content strategy and the relevance of jobs continues to grow. In 2013, a LinkedIn search provided 7,491 results for content strategists, however in 2020, that same search provided 55,406 results. Hence my statement, the industry is growing and so is its value.
Citations:
Bjoran, Kristina. “What is UX Writing?” UX Booth, 24 January 2017, https://uxbooth.com/articles/what-is-ux-writing/. Accessed 3 September 2023.
Casey, Meghan. The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Righ. 2015.
Simplilearn. “Content Strategist Job Description, Role, And Responsibilities in 2023.” Simplilearn.com, 11 August 2023, https://www.simplilearn.com/content-strategist-job-description-article. Accessed 3 September 2023.