By Clay Delk
From marketing content to technical documentation to content strategy, we’re in a unique position to have an impact inside and outside our organizations. We communicate directly with our customers and our internal colleagues and, as a result, we often have more influence on the culture in our companies than almost anyone else.
Even so, most of us have experiences where content has been treated as an afterthought, as extra polish, or (even worse) as a sort of magic fairy dust that can make up for bad design.
Helping people understand the value of content can be a slow process, but it’s not impossible. I’ve experienced many of the highs and lows of this profession as I’ve moved from being the only copywriter at a small agency to the only content strategist at a fairly large company, to one of more than 25 content strategists at Facebook.
Here are some ways I’ve learned to heighten the impact of my content and build community through my work.
Set the Standards
We have the opportunity to set standards around how we talk about our companies, our products, and our customers. Even if you don’t control the broader marketing messages or branding decisions, you make conscious choices about the language your company uses every day. In product interfaces, support documentation, sales materials, and internal communications, your language is a key part of the overall customer experience.
Content standards are about more than just title casing and serial commas. Clear standards around word choice, phrasing, and use can keep your communications consistent and can shape the way your company thinks about its customers.
When I joined the ads team at Facebook, one of the first things I did was write an explanation for why the term targeting should refer to an ad, not to the audience. So advertisers don’t target their audiences, they target their ads. And, more specifically, they target the ads to an audience, not at an audience.
This phrasing builds a level of respect for the people who will see the ads as well as the people who will make them. I wasn’t the first person to make this point. But as a content strategist on ads, it was up to me to make it a standard.
The difference between “to” and “at” may seem minor, but the ways we talk about the people who use our products has a real effect on how we think about them, how we treat them, and how we build and design for them.
Embrace Your Expertise
Writing is a learning process. As we write, we also collect, organize, and process information. We craft stories from the things we learn.
My first job out of school was as a copywriter for a small agency, working with real estate, healthcare, and a variety of small-business clients. In the process of researching projects, writing copy for websites, and creating sales materials, I learned more about those clients than almost anyone in the company.
Before long, I was answering questions for designers, account managers, and even the clients themselves. Pretty soon, I was leading broader branding, strategy, and design decisions.
As content strategists, we must learn everything we can about the projects we’re working on. We have to know how something works, how it doesn’t, what’s possible, and what isn’t. Otherwise, it’s hard to refer to ourselves as strategists. We’re used to collecting that information and sharing it with the people outside our companies. But we should also be doing the same thing for the people inside our companies.
Look for ways to share the information you have with other teams in your organization—sales, marketing, support, leadership—and you may be surprised to see how much people value your expertise and support your efforts.
Ask Dumb Questions
This may seem like it contradicts my previous point, but it’s also important to embrace the things you don’t know. When I’m working on new projects (or even old ones), there are times when I feel like everyone understands how something works except me. Or I assume there’s a backstory about why we can’t do things a certain way, and everyone else knows it.
When I swallow my pride and ask those questions, I get honest answers that help me do my job better. And there’s almost always someone else in the room who needed that information as well.
It’s our job to give our readers the most simple, straightforward answers to their questions. Sometimes those questions are detailed, technical points that need really granular answers. Sometimes they’re just answering “What is this thing?” or “Why did that happen?”
Even if you’re worried that your question might sound simple to an engineer or an analyst, remember that the answer is likely something that your readers will need to know.
Showing vulnerability to your colleagues helps you deepen your relationships with them while also building empathy for the people using your products. Being upfront about what you don’t know is the fastest way to learn.
Ask Tough Questions
The true benefit of asking simple questions is that they often lead to the tough ones. If you have a lot of basic questions about functions and features, it can be a sign of much bigger conceptual or strategic issues that need to be discussed.
When you discuss the basic concepts and premises that your products are founded on, you can create space for dialogue and help your team think about your product in a new way.
When you’re talking with clients, stakeholders, or subject matter experts, you’re the advocate for your readers. Readers need answers to the simple questions, but they need answers to the hard ones, too.
Ask about the decisions that led to certain features or functionality. Ask about differences from and similarities to your competitors. Ask the questions that your readers would ask. Then, ask questions about the answers you get. That’s where the real breakthroughs usually happen.
Build Your Content Community
Before moving to the San Francisco Bay area, I spent eight years in Austin, TX. In that time, I was fortunate to be a part of an active community of content professionals and business owners from a variety of industries. The Austin Content MeetUps and discussions sharpened my understanding of content strategy and helped me get better at my job. But in my daily work, I still felt like the only person who did what I did.
So I organized a monthly meeting for anyone who worked on any kind of content in our company—marketing writers, social media managers, support content writers, everybody. The first meeting was pretty social. We introduced ourselves, described the types of things we worked on, and we finally put faces to the names we’d been sending emails to. After a few meetings, though, we began to touch on broader topics that plagued content across our company.
Most importantly, when someone had a question or concern about a project or feature, they had a community to reach out to. As we started working on projects or features, we could go to the group and quickly bring together the people who needed to be involved.
Be Open to Feedback
One of the best aspects of an internal content community is the ability to get feedback about our work from other professionals. But what about feedback from people outside our area of expertise?
It’s easy to take it personally when someone gives us feedback about our work. Writing is such a personal experience that even when we’re writing documentation or website content, we can become attached and defensive about it. But honest feedback is one of the most valuable ways we can make our writing better.
We use Facebook Groups to collect internal feedback on almost everything we’re working on. Just recently, I saw a post from an engineer in one of these feedback groups that was critical of something I’d been working on for a few months.
The feature he was responding to had actually been one of the most challenging parts of the project, and I was interested in an outside perspective. So instead of defending my decisions, I asked him for more details. I shared some of the other directions we had considered and asked for his thoughts on those as well.
His responses helped lead us to a new approach that challenged some fundamental decisions we had made months before, but it ultimately created a much better product, which means a better experience for our advertisers.
Be Diplomatic
This final piece of advice applies to all the others. Whatever you do to promote your work, share your content, or influence company decisions, you must do it with diplomacy.
There’s often little difference between being the person who constantly asks tough questions about your product and the person who leads the team to have tough discussions about your product … between the person who constantly corrects capitalization and phrasing in your content and the person who keeps your content polished and consistent … or between a know-it-all and a person who is in the know.
Unfortunately, the difference is often simply a matter of perception. Ask tough questions, but listen closely to the answers you get. Fix wording and naming issues, but give people information to understand why it matters. Give feedback on design and strategy, but be open to comments on your work.
Use Your Power for Good
As a content professional, make connections across teams, learn from your teammates, and use your expertise to help people do their jobs better. You’ll not only help everyone realize the true value of your content, but you’ll also (and more importantly) help build a culture of openness, collaboration, and sharing across your organization.
Think you don’t have the power to change your organization? Think again.
Clay Delk is a content strategist at Facebook, where he spends his days crafting tools to make ads better for the people that create them and the people that see them. Over the last decade, Clay has worked as a copywriter and content strategist, helping businesses of all sizes connect with the people that matter to them.
