Fabulous product content strategy and where to find one
If I had a dollar for every time I Googled “content strategy for a product,” I would be retired on a beach somewhere, no longer caring about content strategy OR products. But I don’t, and I’ve had at least one person ask me how I built a content strategy for an app last year, so I’m here writing this article instead.
The dearth of information I unearthed during that process makes me hopeful that I can provide you, the product content strategist, with a lot more detail than you’ll get anywhere else, as well as a blueprint for getting started on crafting your own.
Why me?
I’ve spent most of my career in the type of thankless, practical, nitty-gritty roles that are well-defined and not well-paid: editorial assistant, website editor, content writer, and so forth. That didn’t change immediately when I started at Intuit.
At first, I dived straight into the world of microcopy in the user experience. Choosing text for a button or a zero state was a problem I could easily and quickly wrap my brain around, adjusting as needed to fit into larger strategies and practices that somebody else, thank heaven, had to worry about.
But something I did somewhere led someone to believe that I’d also have a knack for molding those larger strategic projects, so I was selected to be on the committee that would shape the first QuickBooks voice and tone strategy.
I didn’t find it difficult to understand what I needed to do on this project and how I could contribute. Everybody knows what voice and tone is, right? Writers have been thinking about this since the invention of the written word itself. Plus I had talented teammates and a super-smart guy organizing and driving the whole thing, and part of the work was producing voice and tone examples (i.e., what I’m actually kinda good at: writing). How could I go wrong?
But success there led me to another strategic project. QuickBooks wanted to do something special with its mobile apps. And they needed a content strategy, not just a bunch of words in a prototype.
The Appening
The initiative required a small core team to define users, parameters, success metrics, design principles, a design system, and so on. We had to start with mobile users and work backwards to ensure everything we came up with could work on the other surfaces, too. We had to come up with recommendations, guidelines, and implementations from scratch.
I was totally freaking out, man, out of my league and unsure how to keep swimming.
It took some time and a lot of churn before the team was clear on the problems we were solving, who we were solving them for, and what was out of scope. Once we were beyond pure idea mode, I asked around. I Slacked around. I read a bunch. I Googled fruitlessly.
I knew what content strategy was, basically. I knew the building blocks of a few different types of content strategy, most notably marketing content strategy (the Internet’s got loads of resources on this, go figure). But how do you make it all work for a product?
And what does it look like? Is it a slide deck, a PDF, a word processing document?
Where I got gummed up
I was viewing “product content strategy” as this Holy Grail, this one singular object that I could covet, discover, and eventually adapt for my own (nefarious?) purposes. I really thought the best approach would be copying someone else’s product content strategy for the structure and editing the pieces therein to apply to the app. I was convinced it was supposed to look a certain way, sound a certain way, and be a certain way, and because the organization was placing a shit-ton of eggs in this app basket, the stakes were high, and the pressure was astronomical. I was obsessed with finding someone else who had done the work already to shine that guiding light. But I didn’t have any success. You know why?
Content strategy is a flexible framework for a reason.
There wasn’t a right or wrong answer. I’ve gotten much more comfortable with gray area and blank slates since embarking on this project, but it seemed insurmountable at first. I had to make the hard and sometimes arbitrary choices myself, since I didn’t have a content team to back me up or provide additional ideas. So I made a list of what I thought I needed, took a deep breath, and opened Google Slides.
How to make content strategy work for a product
I went back to the basics. I listed the pieces I’d need if I were designing any old content strategy and started brainstorming how they’d manifest in the product.
1. Core strategy: sets the long-term direction for your content. It’s flexible, aspirational, memorable, motivational, and inclusive. That might sound high-minded for something you’re selling for free-99 in the App Store, but it’s not.
- Value proposition. Keep this top-of-mind because every piece of content you write is in service of your product’s value prop. What problem is your product solving? Who’s it solving for?
- Mission statement. Why does your team exist? You might need to interview your team members separately to get a handle on this, but banging out a mission statement is a quick way to get your team aligned and prove early on that content deserves a seat at the table.
- Content’s role. When launching a product, you might already have a design strategy. Include it in your core content strategy, but specify how content takes it one step further. What can content do that nothing else can? What’s content strategy’s value prop for your product?
- High-level frameworks (optional). There may be some content-adjacent product issues or features that affect what content you’ll surface. At least mention them, or better yet, toss in a few examples of content that will be affected. Give them a little taste.
2. Substance: the content you actually need and what you need it to do. A good way to show this part is just to make a few lists and compile some examples of other products that are doin’ it right.
- Audience. Obviously, this is your customers, but it’s also your total addressable market. It’s your investors and Google Play and your CEO.
- Messaging. This ties in closely with branding. What do you always want to be communicating to your customers, regardless of what you’re actually saying? A messaging hierarchy is useful and straightforward.
- Topics and purpose. A product’s content needs to communicate 3 things: 1) what the product is and does, 2) how a customer can get the product to do that, and 3) what to do when the customer needs help. This keeps UX content focused and instructive but still leaves room for some personality.
- Voice and tone. Speaking of personality, by now you should have a good handle on who you are, as a product. How does this come across in the way you talk to customers? As I mentioned above, this can be a massive, cross-team initiative, or it can just be a checklist you arbitrarily make up yourself. Since QuickBooks already had a well-defined voice and tone strategy, all I had to do was lay out how it applied to this app.
3. Structure: usually related to information architecture. If you have a complicated product, you’ll probably need input from your entire team on this one. But QuickBooks had its IA already set, so I focused instead on the types of content we needed, what they should do, how they should sound, and what they should look like. Some best practices already exist (Material Design FTW!), but in other cases, I had to refer to mobile heuristics, synthesize information about mobile users and designs, and make an arbitrary call based on that. But that’s totally OK. Your content strategy will be a living, breathing document!
- Nomenclature. Be bold! Give each piece of your product a name if it doesn’t already have one! Don’t be too clever, though; your product is designed to be used, so you want to make sure it’s, you know, usable.
- Type of content. Describe what it is supposed to do and where it lives on a screen. You might go deep into how voice and tone should manifest in each type, but that’s not necessary for simpler products.
- Length. How long should each type of content be? If your product is, say, a mobile app, you might check with your developers to find out where something wraps or truncates.
- Construction. Do you want this content to be a phrase? A complete sentence? Punctuated?
- A handy checklist. If people other than yourself will be writing any content, you need to scale your work. A checklist that they can use to decide if content is ready to ship will be a boon.
4. Workflow: the processes, tools, and people you need to make sure your content strategy is actually put into practice in the product. Because QuickBooks had a separate team dedicated to rebuilding the content workflow at the time of this project, I’ll just point you in the direction of Content Strategy for the Web and Content Strategy for Mobile.
5. Governance: how you’ll create, maintain, and update content, including your content strategy. This can be tricky in a product with lots of moving pieces and players, but you can come up with a decent proposal. I believe in you.
- A place for final content to live. I’m a fan of wikis and copy docs, but if you’ve got the money, invest in a CMS. Other people are experts on this.
- Socialization. How will you beat the drum of your strategy? You need buy-in. I hijacked operational mechanics meetings (standups, weekly design crits, etc.) to make sure everyone saw my lil deck. Depending on how complex your product is, you might want to develop training in your content strategy, but I found a resource deck usually does the trick.
- Change management. Come up with a process that you can stick to when something changes. Make a weekly calendar reminder to update your copy docs, for example, or put one person in charge of seeking out changes and updating the appropriate documents.
- Style. Set up some quick and dirty content standards. It’s pretty easy to crib from AP or Chicago style and point out anywhere you need to deviate.
- Oversight. Maybe you have office hours, or maybe you have weekly reviews of new content. Maybe you have a Slack channel dedicated to on-the-spot questions. Make it easy for people to contact you, show you their content, and get feedback on how they’re using your strategy.
- Resources. What additional information can you provide for anyone viewing your strategy document? Just make a list of links.
Phew! Got it? Now you’re done! Just kidding, you’ll be updating, modifying, and totally upending this strategy for the rest of your natural life, probably.
But you say you don’t have time
Does your product team have a JFDI mentality? If you’re on a really tight timeline, here’s where to concentrate your efforts.
Top tasks for a product content strategist
1. Research! Or barring that, make friends with your researcher, if you have one. Understand the user, problem, all the same stuff your designers need to know, which will inform everything else
2. A mission statement will help keep the team on track and prove your value right away, even if you’re not putting words in the product yet.
3. Voice. You can start simple, but you must decide how you want to sound. Choose maybe 3 voice attributes (“Human, rational, reductive,” for example) that speak to your particular customer. A user journey map or cognitive product walkthrough can help you crystallize this (if you have a researcher, here’s where your friendship can pay huge dividends).
4. Style seems minor, but it will be very annoying to fix later.
5. Don’t forget to interface with marketing. It’s important to make sure they’re not promising something your product isn’t delivering.
6. Writing product copy — that’s what you’re there for, right? — will help you pressure-test some of the other stuff you’re doing. It can also inform other pieces of your strategy. For example, perhaps in your strategy, you’ve recommended one type of CTA across the board, and now you can see if it really works for your product in practice.
All right, Internet, I *do* read comments and feed trolls. Tell me what I got wrong! Did I totally miss some glaring product content strategy resource? If you’ve created a content strategy for a product, I’d love to hear about your experiences.
