Content Strategy, a Crucial Part of User Experience

When it comes to crafting user experience, the job doesn’t end at beautifying interface, content plays a significant role as well. Before you start building screens, you should craft a strategy to make sure your user’s emotions match with the tone and type of message. Content strategists here play an important role, they blend the message smoothly with the designs to create a meaningful user experience.

In the nutshell, the role of content strategist consists of the following four areas –

Defining the tone and voice of the copy, includes creating a message architecture that caters to the relevant audience of the brand.
Determining how to prioritize, organize, and assess content and also selecting the appropriate technology by collaborating with the development teams.
Managing the roles, tasks, processes, and tools needed to create, edit, maintain and achieve content and ensure it appears to the right people at the right time.
Taking decisions on the policies, standards, and guidelines that need to be followed within the team.

Here are the activities around each phase of content cycle -

AUDIT

This step is all about evaluating the existing content on current, partner, sister and parent sites on whether it matches the goal stakeholders are trying to achieve. It includes:

Strategist conduct stakeholder interviews to find out what are they trying to achieve with the content.
Creating a catalog of all the existing content being used in a project.
Competitor audit is done to analyze what content competitors are producing and are they able to achieve the desired results with that.

STRATEGY

Audit helps in unearthing the different issues with the content, which helps in defining a core content strategy.

Strategy consists of recommendations, setting priorities, and creating timelines.
At this stage, the strategist also determines the areas of work, taxonomy, and key vocabulary that need to be followed across the site.
Based on the user research and the goals of the product, the voice and tone that need to be followed are also finalized at this stage.

PLAN

Strategy helps in formulating a marketing plan for the team that needs to be followed.

Content strategist gathers requirements and identifies the types of content and staff responsible for content creation and maintenance.
They also finalize a content management system, designed to house all the content that appears on the site.
The goals the team is trying to achieve are analyzed and it helps in narrowing the definition, structure, and fields in the CMS.

CREATE

This stage is all about creating a governance model and finalizing the policies, standards, and guidelines that need to be followed.

The copy produced also needs to go through the various editing and review process which are finalized at this stage.
Moreover, content has to be compliant with brand guidelines and optimised for search engines.

MAINTAIN

It’s crucial to involve the stakeholders and gain their insights, which is essential for producing the thought leadership content.
The schedule for regular weeding of the content is also finalized at this stage by creating a QC plan.
This is also where analytics data is evaluated to check what’s working and what’s not and how the content is resonated with what we are trying to achieve with the site.

The relationship of UX and Content strategy

If blended well, content and design could turn out to be a lethal combination, crafting a clear vision for the product. Let’s explore their relationship.

– Seamless user flow and delightful user interfaces are the outcomes of user experience. UX brings the same visibility to the content as well, making it readable, understandable, and scannable. The relevant visuals with a clear structure and interesting labels help users in accomplishing the task easily.

– A structure is crucial to make information easily available to the user. This is a major task for content strategists where they team up with UX to plan the type of content that needs to be created and how it will be organized and structured across the site.

– The UX brings user at the center of the design process. The information and clarity about users help in crafting the perfect content for the audience. The user personas are kept in mind for curating content. This helps in optimising the voice, tone and messaging and results in increasing conversions.

Content strategy and UX have similar goals.

The focus on user needs and expectations is crucial for user experience. However, everything goes for a toss if the messaging is not aligned with the experience. Plus, it should deliver seamlessly across multiple channels and devices. While strategists focus on pushing keyword optimised content, the designers struggle to strike a balance between design and messaging.

If you want your design to smoothly navigate users and deliver the message effectively, Inkoniq would love to help you.

This blog was first published on Inkoniq Blog.