By Jack Molisani | Fellow
One of the most interesting aspects of the technical communication field is that “technical communication” encompasses so many fields of practice. I have a session in which I identify the core competencies needed to be a technical communicator, such as critical thinking skills, design skills, project management skills, etc. (for slides to my session, see www.prospringstaffing.com/Resource/Alternate_Career_Paths.pdf).
While you might use some or all of those skills as part of your job, you could easily transition into a job that specializes in one of those skills, such as a business analyst, user interface designer, or project manager. Let’s add content strategist to that list.
What is Content Strategy?
Before we dive into how you can transition into content strategy, we should define the term. The component
parts are:
- Content: The things that are written in a book, magazine, letter, document, etc.
- Strategy: The skill of planning how to achieve something, especially in war or business (Macmillan Dictionary)
While one could easily think, “I’ve been doing that for years,” the term wasn’t really recognized as a needed, full-time, specialized skill or profession until content management systems and multichannel publishing gained a foothold in the industry.
For those of you unfamiliar with content management systems (CMSs), multichannel publishing, and content strategy, I offer the following real-world examples.
Take a company like Herbalife that sells hundreds of nutritional products, each of which needs product labeling, marketing collateral, sales brochures, training materials, and the like. Multiply that by the number of publishing channels needed (printed, Web, ebooks, etc.). Then multiply that by the number of platforms used to read that content (laptops, print, mobile devices, etc.). Then multiply that by the number of languages needed to sell those products into more than 80 countries.
It would be impossible to store all that content in individual documents and still be able to effectively author, translate, manage, and publish the information. Instead, such a company would take all the content and put it into a database (a content management system), tag the content with extra information about the content, then publish the content when the consumer wanted it, in the format the consumer wanted it, and in the language the consumer wanted it.
The person who figured out how to import old legacy content into the CMS and how to author, store, and publish new content is a content strategist.
But, wait, there’s more.
Content Marketing
Marketing people are always looking for ways to get information about their company and products ranked higher in Internet search engines and reach more customers.
Once most companies learned how to tweak metatags (search engine optimization) on their websites, there was this huge, fundamental discovery of what makes websites valuable to the consumer—content.
While we have known this for years (after all, it’s the very core of what we do as professional communicators), the phrase “content is king” finally hit home and companies began to fund content development as a marketing tool (content marketing), and to also realize they needed a content strategy to accomplish it. This, however, is where the marketing and tech comm paths diverged.
For years now, all marketing has been concerned with was publishing website content. We, the tech comm professionals, had to tackle website content and user manuals and training guides and how-to videos and all the other flavors of professional communications—and make them readable on a computer screen and a cell phone and a mobile device—in 25 languages!
In other words (as a simplification), tech comm departments looked to content strategists to figure out how to import legacy content, how to tag it with metadata, and to publish it. While marketing, in turn, looked to content strategists to decide what content to leave in, what to leave out, and when and where to publish it. Yet both camps call the work content strategy.
A Unified Content Strategy
In their book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper discuss the liabilities of having content kept in “silos” (business units that don’t share information) and what that’s costing companies. They offer that it is possible to create a content strategy that spans marketing and technical publications, a “unified content strategy” that includes any business unit that might need a hand in the content development game. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a unified content strategy, so we’re back to “us” and “them.”
You Want to be a Content Strategist? What Kind?
Before I start discussing how to become a content strategist, let me repeat that content strategy means different things to different people, depending on where you are in the organization. Also keep in mind that you may take a content strategist job only to find out that the position is more about managing cross-silo politics than it is metatags and CMSs.
If I haven’t scared you away yet (and I tried my best), let’s look at how other people have made the transition into content strategy and what their jobs entail.
Transitioning into Content Strategy
To find out how people who are working in content strategy got into those jobs, I created a survey and posted it to several content-strategy-related groups on the Internet (LinkedIn groups, MeetUp groups, Facebook groups, etc.). I received about 100 self-selected responses with the following results.
1. Do you do content strategy for your organization, for clients, or both?
For my organization 50.5%
For clients 21.4%
Both 28.2%
2. Are you an employee or independent contractor/consultant?
Employee 65.0%
Independent contractor/consultant 35.0%
3. On average, what percentage of your work week is spent on content strategy tasks?
0–25 28.8%
26–50 28.8%
51–75 25.0%
76–100 17.3%
4. Does your company recognize “content strategist” as a role, or is it just something you do as part of your job?
Content strategist is recognized as a role 41.7%
It’s just something I do as part of my job 58.3%
5. What is the job title for your current position?
“Content strategist” was 17% of the responses.
- Application Developer
- Architect
- Assistant Professor
- Associate Communications Officer
- Associate Creative Director
- Associate Manager
- B2B Marketing Strategist
- Business lead, employee portal
- Communications & Design Specialist
- Communications and Content Editor
- Consultant (x2)
- Consultant, Web Content Strategist
- Content Administrator
- Content Manager
- Content Marketing Manager
- Content Project Manager
- Content Quality Analyst (x2)
- Content Strategist and Authoring SME
- Content Strategist/Communications Specialist
- Content Strategy Consultant
- Content Strategy Manager
- Creative Content Writer
- Delivery Specialist
- Director of Content Marketing and Strategy
- Director of Content Strategy
- Director of Social Media
- Director Operations, Technical Documentation
- Director, Program Design and Training
- Documentation manager
- Documentation Team Manager
- Editorial Consultant, specialized in digital media
- Editorial Director
- Electronics Engineering Technologist
- IMO
- Information Architect (x3)
- Information Design Manager
- Information Developer (x3)
- Information Experience Strategist and Architect
- Lead Content Strategist
- Lead Documentation Specialist
- Localization Leader (there’s another person acting as the IA)
- M&A Strategist
- Manager of Content Architecture
- Manager of Integrated Digital Communications
- Manager, Brand & Content
- Manager, Content Strategy
- Managing Editor (x3)
- Marketing Communications Manager
- Marketing Specialist
- Owner (x3)
- Owner/Consultant
- PR Consultant and SEO
- President
- President and Chief Optimizer
- Principle Information Developer
- Principal
- Principal Content
- Strategist (x2)
- Principal Information Developer
- Process Manager, Manager
- Rich Media Program Manager
- Team Leader Technical Writing Services
- Tech Writer
- Technical Author, API Documentation
- Technical Communicator (x2)
- Technical Writer (x6)
- Technical Writer III
- UI Editorial Manager
- User Experience Content Specialist
- Web Content Editor
- Web Content Strategist
- Web Editor (x2)
- Web Project Manager
- Writer
6. Do you do content strategy mostly for content marketing or multichannel publishing (documentation)?
Content marketing 15.5%
Multichannel publishing 47.4%
Both 37.1%
7. Does your company have a unified content strategy the spans both content marketing and multichannel publishing?
Yes 19.8%
No 80.2%
8. How did you learn to do content strategy? That is, how did you learn what you need to know to work as a professional content strategist?
Tabulation Summary: (totals more than 100 due to multiple answers per respondent)
On-the-job experience/trial and error 50%
Books/websites/self taught 41%
Attend conferences/webinars 30%
College/other coursework 5%
Meeting/MeetUps/networking 4%
Hired someone/outsourced 4%
9. Anything else you’d care to say or ask?
Here are a few of the comments respondents added:
“Content Strategy is a superset of technical communication. While a technical communicator is focused on delivery, the content strategist is more focused on business case and strategy.”
“I was at a marketing and communications agency that was pivoting to become a customer experience consulting firm and they wanted me to be a consultant, which I didn’t want to do. I looked around and based on my understanding of the industry, told them they wanted a CS. I wrote my job description and the process for working with the consultants. They adopted it and that was six years ago now.”
“It’s about the strategy, not the CMS.”
“Most organizations don’t understand the full potential of content strategy and as a result the opportunities are weighed down by lack of resources. While some results can be easily quantified, others cannot without more resources, wherein that becomes the justification for not investing in the right tools and right people.”
“The over-arching impact of a unified content strategy seems to be hitting home for more and more companies. Strategists are learning to prove their knowledge, impact, and usefulness by speaking in a business-oriented language, and executives are listening.”
The fact that 96% of the respondents doing content strategy reported they taught themselves the skill via books, attending conferences, and trial and error is yet another example of a drum I’ve been beating in Intercom since 2005:
- You not only choose the path you walk in your career, you create the path you walk.
- Want to increase your standard of living? Leverage your core competencies and create a new path!
Summary
Out of the 104 people who responded to the survey, the vast majority were self-taught through reading books, going to conferences, and/or on-the-job trial and error.
One respondent, however, added these words of advice: “Stop reading and start doing. There are countless books and articles to read on how to do content strategy; however, learning comes from doing.”
Another respondent echoed my observation that content strategy means different things to different people: “There are no universal definitions of what a content strategist is. It’s evolving, albeit slowly. I am struck by how it encompasses many slices from many different disciplines, at least at its best: it takes story telling, data organization, operations, marketing, analysis, research, and on and on.”
Finally, Amanda Cross from Crosswise Consulting offered this on what content strategy is and why companies need it:
“I’ve found that it makes sense to everyone in business, not just content creators. Redundancy and information silos are things that everyone has experience with.
Every business has content: website content, technical documentation, solutions created by customer service, training materials, sales materials, the list goes on. But when so many different people are creating content for the same company, you naturally get overlaps, which means wasted time and money, and conflicts, which can send a confusing message to customers and damage your brand.
Content strategy is about planning in advance who should be creating what kinds of content and using tools and processes to make sure you’re realizing efficiencies and getting the information to everyone who needs it.”
Having unified content strategy reduces duplication of effort and enables companies to respond to market changes and manage the customer total information experience. Chances are, your company needs a chief content officer. Well, what are you waiting for?
JACK MOLISANI (jack@lavacon.org) is an STC Fellow and the executive director of The LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies (lavacon.org). You can follow Jack on Twitter @JackMolisani and @LavaCon.
