Working smarter not harder

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

Working in content design is hard

It doesn’t matter whether your job title is content designer or copywriter, the truth is that working with content is often difficult. There are some common misconceptions that we often have to contend with:

1. Content designers are ‘writers’ or ‘wordsmiths’
2. A content designer’s job is just to ‘write the words’
3. Content designers are proofreaders.
4. Content design is just about digital content.
5. Anyone can write.

This can lead to a lot of content existing within an organisation (or even floating across the internet) that is difficult to find and doesn’t add value for the people who need it.

There’s a lot of content in the internet

What do we do when we’re faced with a sea of content? It feels overwhelming and every time we add to it, it feels a little like we’re adding to the problem.

As a person who works with content, I’m a big fan of the delete button. It’s my favourite button on the keyboard and I use it with gleeful abandon.

But that doesn’t mean that we should never create content. Thee world moves fast, and content is how we communicate what we think and what we do in the face of these changes. What it means to me is thinking about how we can do more with less. In content terms, this means I’m constantly considering how to add more value for the people who use our services with less content. We want to be smart, user-centred and contextually sensitive when we create content so that what we create and share makes a difference for the people we’re trying to help.

To do this, we have to shift our focus away from the volume to focus on the value we’re delivering. We’ve already started this thinking during the pandemic when organisations focused more on deliverables than bums on seats and saw employees rise to unimaginable challenges. In the context of content creation, we need to do the same thing. The content we create is not a 100 page piece of proof that we’ve done the work or done the thinking.

Shifting the content paradigm

The content should be the way we prove our value to the people who need our services. It should help them understand:

• who we are and what we do
• how we can help them
• what they can do to help themselves and what they’ll get in return

One of the ways we can start to get our content working hard is to think about how we can reuse it. We don’t want to duplicate effort every time we create a new piece of content, but if we could repurpose something we write in a blog to also work for social media, then our content creation and social messaging becomes more streamlined, efficient and consistent.

There are conversations in my future — streamlined, efficient and consistent ones I hope.