Content Strategist User Guide
Part One: A High-Level Introduction to the Content Strategist
Who’s this for?
This guide is for any project team (UX, design, brand, marketing, etc.) that’s unfamiliar with Content Strategy as a discipline. For a little more background, you can read an overview to the whole guide here.
This is Part One of an ongoing series. It’s an introduction to Content Strategists as team members and how they’re foundational to any project.
Who is the Content Strategist?
- They’re usually writers so they think and work like artists.
Many Content Strategists start out as copywriters, and copywriters are often screenwriters, essayists or novelists on the weekends. Writers love telling a good story and evoking specific emotions in their reader. They’re also avid readers and obsessed with the range of human emotion, motives, and actions.
How does this help your project?
A good storyteller is someone who understands the power of word choice and how an economy of language will help define your user experience. They become obsessed with your user’s goals and motives and consider every possible action and behavior. They’ll leverage everything they learned about the user during research to deliver the most important info at the right time, and craft language and sequencing for maximum impact.
2. They are information addicts and know-it-alls (in a good way.)
The avid reader mentioned above will also dedicate research and discovery time to becoming an expert on the subject they’re working on. We devour a new topic like an order of fries. Two years ago, my consultancy, Rhetorica knew nothing about AI, Machine Learning, or 3D Printing. We delved into white papers, read super-niche trade magazines, and interviewed every expert to whom we had access.
With that subject mastery were we were able to architect Content Strategy at the brand, editorial, and product level for pioneering platforms in those industries.
How does this help your project?
Because the Content Strategist gets neck-deep in subject matter, they know how to dig their way out and surface only the most important info. They know where in the sales funnel or onboarding flow a specific user needs to hear about your 20-point geometric analysis of CAD files—if at all—and how to illustrate it for them.
Literally, the Content Strategist will make a recommendation as to whether that info should be an illustration, infographic, or line of copy.
3. They’re often People-People.
There’s a reason your Content Strategist works on a team rather than hole-up writing the next Infinite Jest, and it’s not just money. They probably have an extroverted side that enjoys a collaborative creative process. Sure, they need undisturbed focus time like any other individual contributor, but they’re generally an affable addition to your team.
How does this help your product?
Aside from the obvious benefit of a People-Person working with other people, Content Strategists possess the empathy, conversational skills, and endless curiosity that drives qualitative user research and ethnographies. Many have backgrounds in journalism or a B.A. in psychology, so they know how to ask an open-ended question that inspires their subject to reveal more than surface-level answers. This can only lead to better quality data and uncover directions and potential solutions that could otherwise be missed.
4. They don’t care that much about your designs. Really.
If the Content Strategist is brought in early and often in the process, helps shape the user or consumer experience and defines the overall value proposition, they’re not going to nitpick your color choice or the rounded corners of a button. They know what it’s like to have an unqualified committee micro-engineer their sentences, and to quote Alexandra Hunter, Senior Content Strategist at Shopify Plus, they know that “design is not democratic.”
How does this help your project?
Knowing when to stay out of the way keeps your project running smoothly, on-track, and with minimal resentments.
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Sometimes you just need a writer to slap decent UX copy on an MVP. Content Strategists do that too, but they’re most useful when the whole team strives to humanize a digital product, elevate the user experience, and/or build a brand that people are inexplicably drawn to.
They’re the Digital Humanist to your Digital Machinist, and can only do great things through open and honest collaboration.
