What Content Strategy Has Taught Me About My Job — And Vice Versa
Juggling a full-time job with a degree isn’t always fun. But it’s an experience worth putting in the effort for.
In September 2016, I started in the Master’s Degree Program for Content Strategy while still working as an intern. Now I am two months away from graduating and my internship turned into a permanent job.
My degree taught me a lot of things that I somehow knew made sense, but did not know how to properly base on sound arguments. On the other hand, my job gave me the real-world experience necessary to put theoretical knowledge into practice. Here’s five things I learned from both worlds.
Learning #1 — Content Is More Than Just Copy
This is probably not going to come as a surprise. Of course content is not just copy. It’s video, pictures, audio. But even more so: It is data. No matter how great of a prose writer or genius video editor you are, no matter how much journalistic acumen you are going to put into your work — that alone is just not going got cut it when you’re creating or managing content for a living (and for money).
If you’re spending your time on understanding Content Strategy, you’ll quickly learn that all we consume via digital channels sooner or later comes down to numbers (namely 0 and 1). No matter the platform, algorithms are going to rank your stuff, making it visible or invisible to the people you want to reach. So you better get your head into the tricks that make your content click with a)the audience and b)the machines processing it. Don’t just create, think about:
- Tagging. The metadata you assign to your web content — if you want a search engine to work for you, you better start by tagging your content right
- Quality. Don’t just create your content and leave it there to die on the web. Evaluate it, optimize, critically evaluate if a piece you worked on still serves the purpose right or needs to be changed — or taken offline
- Effort. Make your content work harder for you, without you yourself having to work harder. There’s tons of ways content can be repurposed, chunked into smaller pieces to work on multiple channels or templated. You do not have to reinvent the wheel every time when you’re struggling to find or create content that fits the occasion. It’s called content modeling. I’ve written another article about this. Check it out, if you want.
Learning #2 — Everybody Needs Something
Your users want this. Your business unit wants that. And do make sure your content is on brand. Sometimes it’s just mind-boggling, isn’t it? Who do you listen to when developing a marketing or communications tactic? The answer: All of them. Sounds hard? Well, that’s because it is.
Luckily enough, my program gave me an entire toolbox to fix this. First off, understand: Content is not a black box that just makes magic appear. You need to be clear on what you want to achieve with your specific piece of content. You can’t always make everyone happy. But you can focus on the most important goals you want to achieve and align your content to them.
In her book, Content Strategy At Work, Margot Bloomstein writes about how brand values and audience needs inform any project’s communication goals. As a third pillar, I would also like to add business goals. When I think about the customer journey on the web and the content that visitors get to see, I always ask myself three questions:
- What task does this tactic/content/channel, help the audience do?
- What brand message should be conveyed? How do I want the customer to feel after engaging with the brand?
- What business goal does this tactic/content/channel support? How?
Ideally these questions will help you find the sweet spot between helping your business and helping your community.
But the point is: You’re probably not always going to get the unicorn you’re chasing after. Sometimes, a tactic might just be meant to generate leads, create reach or simply sell stuff. And in a third instance, a customer contacting your support team is first and foremost looking for help or a place to vent, not for buying more of your stuff. Every channel, every piece of content should have its purpose. The experience people have when interacting with it determines the impression the brand makes on them. So try going for the rainbow at least.
Learning #3 — Know Your Stuff
This relates directly to the previous section. How are you going to answer these questions and improve if you don’t know what you currently have? Content Strategy has taught me to effectively evaluate before I start working on any project. Meghan Casey’s book has even given me an entire toolbox to set a Content Strategy up for success. Here’s four of them that I would argue are essential to getting started:
- A content audit is probably one of the most powerful tools a Content Strategist can come up with. It gives you an overview on what content your business currently has, how it is performing, what shape and quality it is in — and it quickly shows you potential areas of improvement. The content marketing institute has written a guide on how to run one. Before you do anything, start with this.
- On to the Brand Messaging. How are you going to align your content to your brand if you don’t even know what you are meant to say? An easy and straightforward process of defining what your messaging should look like is to run a message architecture workshop with your team. Margot Bloomstein has released a deck of 90 cards with brand attributes, out of which you can distill the ones that fit your brand. That way, you’ll reach consensus on what your team should focus on. But I’ll leave the explanation to Margot herself.
- With a Business Requirements Matrix, you’ll be able to summarize all inputs you get from your team, your managers and any other stakeholders within your business and assign a priority level to it. As such, a Business Requirements Matrix will help you define the core of your project, the necessary steps to take and clearly outline how content can contribute to achieving business goals. Here’s another article on this (this time in German).
- Get your User Research right. After all, you’re not shooting your content into a void — you want it to reach people, make them think, excite them, maybe even educate. How are you going to do this if you’re not asking what your audience wants? Get out there, interview them, ask them where your products help them or what even frustrates them about it, look at how they interact with your content, be curious and run usability tests with them on your website. Or go big scale and run surveys (Sonja has written about this here) or A/B tests (again on your website). You won’t regret it.
Learning #4 — It Doesn’t Always Have To Be Perfect
“Don’t over-engineer it” is one of the things my manager sometimes tells me when assigning tasks to me. And he’s right. With all the inputs I got from my program, I was and still am pumped to bring in all the fresh ideas I got into my every day job and do everything I worked on perfectly. And that’s a good thing. But as we all know, projects sometimes do run on a tight timeline, ad hoc requests come in, and sometimes you need to cut a presentation you’ve been working on for the past two weeks in half because the agenda changes pretty last minute. That stuff happens. Just don’t be disappointed when it does.
So what my job taught me to do is to work on a good-better-best model. Be it a web page analysis, a strategy proposal or an outline for a testing pilot you want to run — manage your time carefully. Think about the core of a challenge you get on the job and address it first. And then build from there iteratively. You may not always get to present your entire skill set or shine in front of the team and get the big WOW-moment. Sometimes it is about providing only a small piece of the puzzle to make a project succeed. And that is just as well if it helps your team move forward.
Learning #5 — Be Patient
When I got the confirmation that I scored an internship with Intel, I could not wait to get started. Sure, I did have some professional experience, but not in such a big corporation, not with an industry leader. And I do have that now.
Two and half years after I started at Intel, two years after I started my Master’s Degree, one of the most important lessons I have learned is that great things take time. I went from an intern with a progressing Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and PR to a full-time employee with an almost finished Master’s Degree in Content Strategy, discussing web experiences for an entire region. That’s quite a journey I would say. But that did not happen in a bat of an eye.
It is nothing new that in a big, global company, you cannot just kick off a project on the fly. You have to build a case to get the green light for a project, outline the issues, provide ideas on how you want to address them, secure budget, analyze the situation before your project, execute, analyze the situation after your project, summarize learnings and do even better next time. Hardly anyone doubts you want to do well in your job, that you mean well for the company. And that is exactly why you will always be challenged (and are expected to challenge others) on your job. Because you have to learn to refine your ideas, rethink your strategy or even change course to improve. And that is best done within a team that supports such discussions. I learned that at Intel.
It is also nothing new that going through a Master’s Degree isn’t always fun. Sometimes it is outrageously frustrating and annoying to go through all the assignments. But after all my Master’s Degree did teach me things that I can put into practice every single day on the job (and of course stuff that I probably won’t be thinking about ever again). It taught me to think strategically about content and give sound arguments on web content thanks to the expertise I built.
The past two and a half years have been some of the most challenging, instructive and rewarding experiences of my career. It was stressful, it annoyed me at times to juggle a full-time job with lectures in the evening, but I know that without it, I probably wouldn’t even be writing this article, let alone going to do my job which I really like. After all, it was the mixture of two good things that made great stuff happen.
