Sometimes I lay in bed at night thinking content strategy is the greatest trick us content folks ever pulled. One day we’re writing web copy, the next we’re pushing for company blogs, the next we’re pushing for social media, and now we’re all asking for raises because we’re not writers anymore… we’re strategists!

It all just seems so simple. Of course everything you write needs to be agile enough to fit every screen size. Of course you can’t expect your content to live on fixed layouts with perfect line breaks. Of course you can’t expect your content to only live in just one place, or even on just one website. Of course you don’t want to be maintaining various forks of the same copy on multiple pages — write once, publish everywhere. It’s not Newton’s Law of Physics, it’s your mom telling you to not build your wardrobe exclusively out of Halloween costumes. The tops and bottoms rarely work togeher, and they certainly don’t belong in the classroom.

But when it comes to thinking about words, you, as the brave content strategist, might be the only one in your company who truly cares. Your designer will want everything to look great, and your front-end dev will probably say, “uh, pretty sure Bootstrap or something is designed to do that,” but it’s only you who cares if the old “knowledge base” content should be migrated to a universal site CMS from the painful Desk WYSIWYG, with content that can pop-up on both support pages and blog pages without a hitch. And you might be the only one who cares if your new CMS supports both long and short summaries to stream content effortlessly into various social media platforms, update feeds, and all the content destinations the future could hold. And dear god, a content audit? You’re definitely the only one who thinks that’s a good idea.

As all the books are saying, the future is content. Brands are living and dying based on how easily their customers can find what they’re looking for (pro tip: they’re coming for a million different reasons, on a million different devices, so don’t you dare limit your mobile experience to just showing where the nearest ATM is). Sure, you might not know the difference between Perl and Python, but dammit, you’re the one with the content-strategy toolkit that can make your next site redesign as future-proof as possible.

So if you’re going to bed thinking what you do is ridiculous, just think about how bad you’d feel if you let your kid walk to school with Jack Sparrow pants, a Spider-Man shirt, and a Buzz Lightyear helmet.

On second thought, that sounds kind of awesome.