Building a Content Strategy Practice
How drafting some team values can help you find your footing and aspire to greatness
I made the switch from content writer to content strategist about a year ago. Content strategy is a relatively new field that fuses editorial strategy with UX design. Many content strategists are former journalists, publicists, and copywriters who now work in tech. Since content strategy is such a new field, I had to explain the writer/strategist distinction a lot in the beginning as I found my footing.
As Meghan Casey writes in her industry bible The Content Strategy Toolkit, “Content strategy helps organizations provide the right content, to the right people, at the right times, for the right reasons.” If content writers primarily write copy, content strategists write copy in addition to…
- Planning content delivery — On what devices do users interact with our content? How is our content translated? What edge cases might impact what content a user sees when?
- Measuring content effectiveness — Does certain copy perform better? How do we measure comprehension and satisfaction?
- Testing content — Should we A/B test certain content? What might we learn from a think-aloud study of new content? Can we prove that our content is helping us achieve business goals?
- Working within regulatory frameworks — How do we make sure all of our content stays compliant? How do we work with other stakeholders to ensure our content is accurate and actionable? How do we run efficient reviews with numerous stakeholders?
- Ensuring content accessibility — How do we ensure our content is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)?
When I became my company’s first content strategist, I had a textbook idea of my roles and responsibilities. What I was less clear on was how to build a content strategy practice — a well-defined functional niche within the broader org.
I knew what my day-to-day responsibilities were, but how would I communicate the value of content strategy to product managers, designers, and UX researchers? What was the mission statement that would guide more subjective editorial decisions? And how would my own content strategy team differentiate itself from those at other companies?
For content strategists just starting out, articulating three to five team values is an invaluable first step to carving out a practice within a larger org. After many brainstorms with the product design team, we landed on three team values. These values give our content strategy team its unique flavor while solidifying the value of content strategy within the broader org. These values also guide content collaborations with other teams as well as day-to-day editorial decisions.
Write until it’s tight.
Test copy until the message works for all audiences. Use anecdotes from focus groups and quantitative data from other forms of user testing to back up editorial decisions as much as possible. Ship final drafts that are as clear as they are concise. And sweat the details.
Join forces with a word nerd.
Words help achieve business goals. Not only are words the easiest and cheapest way to test new product features, but they can also minimize user error and turn casual users into evangelists. Encourage stakeholders to bring a content strategist in early and often, whether it’s for low-hanging copy wins or for mapping complex content ecosystems.
Copy is a conversation.
In-product copy should be as simple and as human as a conversation — no science-y jargon. Words should inspire customers to learn more and take action.
Establishing these team values is just one of the exercises I found to be helpful. Carving out a brand new function at any established company (and communicating the value of that function) presents a unique set of challenges. I owe a lot to the Slack, Meetup, Facebook, and LinkedIn content strategy communities for helping me navigate this new field, and to all my amazing teammates for championing these values.
Final note: All of the musings expressed above are mine, and don’t reflect the views of my company, 23andMe.
