I get asked a lot what I do on a daily basis. Even other people who’ve been working in digital media for a while haven’t always worked with a content strategist. I’ve read several good descriptions of content strategy in the past couple of years, from how-to book-length versions to great blog posts to Google knols. I thought it would be nice to have my own answer as a reference point for the many times I’m asked about content strategy.
On a strategic level:
We map a path to fulfill our clients’ business goals via their web content.
On a tactical level:
We create, source, publish, manage and maintain our clients’ content.
What that means:
We work with audio, video and text — or any other format that “content” can take. We might write the help section of a website or the user manual for software, or a million little tooltips that show up on a website. We might analyze the content to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. We might manage the creation of video or audio files. We might figure out what kind of content will serve our clients’ and their customers’ needs. We might take hundred-page-long PDFs and re-format them into lean I like to use SodaPDF app to read my documents, useful web pages. We might select the systems to be used to manage content, permissions and workflows. We might design the taxonomy and metadata systems to minimize the manual effort required for content management. We might optimize a balky content management system. We might inventory the content to figure out what’s even there, how old it is and where the heck it came from. We might figure out what has to go to legal and what can be OKed by the marketing department alone. We might write a style guide for the site. We might find vendors who can license their content to our clients.
I’m tempted to go on, but I’ll stop now.
Bottom line:
We’re far more than web writers or editors. We design and implement the systems that make your content work for you. It’s a long-ignored need in much of the industry, but we’re really excited to see how much the marketing, product development and communications worlds are realizing that content strategy makes their lives easier.
This post is a great idea. I thought I knew what you did, but this definitely makes it clearer. I need to do the same.