There is a Content Strategist-Shaped Hole on Your Team
Everyone on your digital team is trying their best.
Your project manager is trying to write a scope of work that accounts for everything that needs to get done to finish the project.
Your client services lead is trying to sell the project at a price that fits into your client’s budget and timeline and leaves room for a decent margin.
Your business analyst is trying to develop a BRD that’s more than just a wish-list of shiny things the client thinks they need.
Your strategy team is trying to create a project brief based on outdated user personas and paper-thin user journeys that don’t map to real content needs.
Your information architect is trying to create a sitemap without fully understanding all the different types of content that need to be accounted for.
Your UX designer is trying to translate business requirements into wireframes using Lorem Ipsum and placeholder images.
Your visual designers are trying to push the brand expression to interesting new places without a clear understanding of the brand mission and values.
Your copywriters are trying to turn client source documents into passable content without an editorial style guide or brand tone and voice to guide them.
Your project coordinator is trying to push the client to review and approve content without a clearly defined workflow or content schedule.
Your CMS dev is trying to only use out-of-the-box authoring features in order to reduce development time.
Your off-shore authoring team is trying to publish thousands of pages in time for launch without knowing what the pages are really supposed to look like.
Your QA team is so busy trying to catch all the technical bugs that they have time to make sure the content is where it’s supposed to be.
But despite everyone’s best efforts, your projects always seem to take twice as long as you thought and your margins are being eaten away by constant re-work and inaccurate scoping. You’ve tried the waterfall approach, experimented with agile and SCRUM frameworks, done exhaustive post-mortems, and you still keep running into the same problems.
That’s because you have a Content Strategist-shaped hole on your team.
An Unfortunate Truth
Although content strategy is now a recognized discipline (and has been around for decades under a variety of different names), it’s still not seen by most organizations as a must-have role for their digital teams.
Content strategists have been shouting from the rooftops for years about the importance of content strategy and the value it brings (yours truly included). But while we may see heads nodding around the conference room or positive responses on social media, that still hasn’t translated into widespread understanding of what we do and why it’s important.
After 10+ years of trying to sell the value of content strategy, both to clients and to internal teams, I still find myself having to justify the investment in a strategic approach to content.
It’s not even just that content strategy is the first thing to be cut from the scope when budgets are tight. It’s that, in a lot of cases, content strategy isn’t even included in the first place.
That’s because content is still seen as a commodity. An afterthought. Something that just gets sprinkled on at the end of the project to fill in all of the colorful boxes and buttons and screens that have been painstakingly designed and coded.
But people don’t visit websites for their aesthetically pleasing design. They don’t come to marvel at the efficiency of the code that powers it.
They come for the content.
You know, the thing that actually helps them achieve what they came to do.
Content Strategists Make Everyone Better
The business case for content strategy has been made time and time again by much brighter minds than mine. But there’s another benefit to having a content strategist on your team that I feel like isn’t talked about enough.
A content strategist makes everyone on your team better.
A content strategist can make sure your project manager accounts for all of the little things that often get left out of the SOW. Things like content discovery, competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews, client revisions and approvals, content QA, etc.
A content strategist can let the client services team know what can be cut from the scope to meet a specific budget or hit a tight timeline – so client expectations are set early on.
A content strategist can help the BA work with the client to prioritize content and features that are actually going to help users and contribute to KPIs.
A content strategist can perform additional first-party and third-party research to validate or enhance existing personas and identify the content users need at each stage of their journey.
A content strategist can explain why starting a project with a sitemap is like creating a blueprint for a house before you know who’s going to be living there.
A content strategist can document the priority and purpose of each content area to help guide wireframe creation, and can provide content to pressure test the components against real content.
A content strategist can work with the client’s brand strategy team to align on a singular value proposition statement and key message pillars, giving designers a north star for their brand explorations.
A content strategist can create a sustainable process for collaborating with client subject matter experts, along with strategic documentation that can keep all sides working with a shared understanding of what ‘good’ looks like.
A content strategist can help the project coordinator develop a realistic content review and approval process, and a way to document and communicate project risks if the client isn’t meeting their obligations.
A content strategist can document the needs and skill levels of the client’s content team to make sure that the authoring experience is intuitive and aligned with their publishing workflow.
A content strategist can create an authoring guide that documents the authorable elements of each component and any content restrictions or requirements that need to be taken into account.
A content strategist can use available resources to create a Content QA team responsible for making sure that content is where it’s supposed to be and how it’s supposed to look.
Content Strategists Embrace the Intangibles
Much has been written about the importance of intangibles in sports; those things that can’t be quantified on a stat line. Things like communication, teamwork, and leadership. You can have the most talented individual players at every position, but if they aren’t able to play together as a team, you aren’t going to get very far.
The same goes for digital teams.
And while the content strategist may not be the highest paid player, or the flashiest dresser, or have the most impressive stats, they’re often the one who does all the intangible things it takes to help the team win.
So make this the year that you fill that content strategist-shaped hole on your team.
Because content is too important to be left to chance.