In this last blog post for my Digital Content Strategies course, I’ll reflect on my experience with the class. I’ll talk about the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do and the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should not do. Finally, I’ll talk about the most meaningful aspect of content strategy in terms of my own career goals.
What’s the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do?
The most important thing someone coming into content strategy should do is to think about content primarily as a business asset. Recently, we were lucky to have a guest speaker, Val Swisher, a content expert and CEO of Content Rules, give a lecture in our course, and she really helped me understand that the overall purpose of a content strategist is to be the bridge between the users and the shareholders. A lot of times, it’s easy to say that content quality should come first, but if being hyper-focused on content quality won’t increase revenue or decrease expenses, then, as Val Swisher would say, “so what?”
In the first module of our course, we learned about the content audit. Specifically, we learned why the content audit is important. In the book “Content Audits and Inventories,” Paula Landenburg Land states that “content projects exist in a business context.” Further, Land states that the largest reason to undergo a content audit is because “the business wants the content to achieve something,” such as the fulfillment of “core business and user goals.” So, within a company, content is created purely to achieve business goals, but those business goals are being met by understanding what the users want from the company. Therefore, the content strategist acts as the bridge between user values and company goals.
Someone new to the field should keep this paradigm in their mind at all times when learning about content strategies. Focusing too much on user goals could come at a cost to business value, but focusing on user goals as a way to increase business value will keep one’s mind in the right place as they undergo a content audit.
What’s the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should NOT do?
If you’re learning about content strategy for the first time, don’t just stay in a content strategy bubble. Learn about other areas within a business, even if it’s just a little bit. Learning a small amount about software development, UI/UX design, and general business practices will help you complete a content audit. Knowing about different niches in a company will help you communicate with other teams as you’re assessing content, and building relationships with people outside of your content team can help if you need to make changes to an organization’s content.
As Paula Land states in “Content Audits and Inventories,” you need to spend time with the content creators within an organization in order to “understand their processes and what they know about the business and the audiences.” Knowing a bit about HTML can help you speak to UI/UX designers who are designing the overall content, whether it be on webpages or in software. In your audit, you might notice that users respond negatively to certain UI elements. Knowing HTML, for example, will help you properly diagnose the problem and effectively communicate to the UI team why the content isn’t working.
Content strategy is a field in which you’ll need to communicate with all types of people throughout an organization. Learning the basics from different fields will help you out immensely in the long run.
What was most meaningful about content strategy for your own career goals? Why?
Learning about the content audit itself felt really familiar. In my first blog post, I talked about how the content audit process reminded me of the process of planning a software project. In both types of projects, the planning phase is instrumental in creating a foundation for success. Most importantly, keeping the business context, or overall project context, in mind while planning a content audit will help your team stay focused on auditing as a way to increase business value. Learning that a lot of these principles are applicable across different fields is a reminder that no matter what type of work you’re doing, it’s important to have soft skills like teamwork and critical thinking to find success in your field.
When I entered this course, I was really just interested in becoming a technical writer, but now that I understand the field of content strategy a bit more, I’d be interested to explore my options and expanding my job search to include content strategist roles. Keeping the principles that I shared in this blog post in mind will help me become a business-oriented, collaborative employee who can help add business value to an organization.