[0510]Content Strategy is MORE Than Copywriting
Highlights from Agency vs. in-house content strategy by The Content Strategy Group TO
What is content strategy? What is a content strategist? For those who clicked into this post, I assume you are as confused as me, wanting to know what all these are about.
Please check the definition of content strategy from Wikipedia first.
Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content — written or in other media.
About the event
I’m really glad to join this event — Agency vs. in-house content strategy hosted by The Content Strategy Group in Toronto.
This event featured two senior content strategists: Nicola Evans from Shopify, and Peter Kelly from Huge. They firstly had a panel discussion talking about their career as well as asking each other some questions, then we had an open discussion with all the audience.
Nicola was at the agency before and now transitioned to a more product-focused role while Peter is still at the agency side, so it is interesting to see them two sharing different insights from a in-house and agency perspective.
Highlights from panel discussion
1/How do you bring impact as a content strategist and how do you like to change the definition of “impact”?
Peter admitted that in an agency, it is hard to bring impact once they have reached the finishing line — hand off to the client.But they tried hard to spend time on analytics and measurement, getting both qualitative and quantitative feedback from users as a measurement of success.
Also, for some large corporations, they may have a chance of continuing the project after they finish the main one.
2/User testing and velocity
Both of them place high importance on user testing, not only doing testing with users, but also within the office for the sake of budget.
Nicola cares about “What to deliver” and “How fast to deliver” as product delivery is extremely important. Nicola mentioned that once they are comfortable and confident with the current model, they will be ready to deliver.
3/Build relationship, trust and education
In both the situation of working in-house collaborating with colleagues and working in the agency with clients, building relationship and trust is always necessary. Nicola started as the only content strategist but she soon managed to get into teamwork by communication — shadowing and observing to see what she could help, offering help and letting other people what she is doing.
It is important to let teammates and clients believe in you, in what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you can do it. In the case of people not fully understand the role, you may need to step up and educate.
Insights from Q&A
1/What is the daily work as a content strategist? How do you collaborate with designers/developers/PMs…?
It is actually a question from me. I used to firmly believe a content person is responsible for providing the content for a website/app/poster…in another word, like a copy writer. However, in tonight’s discussion, I heard a lot of words about user testing, information architecture, user story… and I noticed that a content strategist is more than a copy writer.
Peter replied by stating three points:
1/What a content strategist does is similar to a UX designer, but in the content level. They will provide the content hierarchy in a component level.
2/Provide the talking point instead of placeholder text.
3/Ahead of UX. Bring the scope, the story to the table wit stakeholders before doing any design
They also shared how they collaborate with co-workers. They do a lot of partnership and pairing work to help designers/developers understand the problem, bring research and empathy, and collaborate together in the writing/design/test… process.Also, building a relationship, earn trust and education is again important here.
In a word, content strategist is in fact not a very suitable title based on what they are actually doing. Especially in large corporations, they don’t have a fixed role or a clear border separating their actual responsibility with others. They are jumping in different teams, work on different parts with different people, on clearing out user stories, preparing content structure, sketching out initial ideas to user testing and getting feedback to iterate. They are like a generalist in the UX world(except for visual design and actual implementation)and jump in wherever needed, to balance providing best experiences and capabilities.
2/How do you measure success? What are the metrics?
Focus on user validation. First of course data analytics like traffics and conversion rate, but also focus on qualitative feedback. There is one saying about working in an agency, “making the clients look good”. Not only the clients are satisfied, but also the simplicity and value the product conveys.
3/Without content, I can’t design.
This is the right way of understanding the relationship between content and design. We can’t do design before content and ask the content person to fill in space when we finish the mockup.
The proper way should be, work with the content person to understand the problem space and the goal, based on which then start designing the layout.
Books
Nicola recommended two books to me when we had a discussion about collaboration between content strategists and designers. Check them out if you are interested.
