What’s the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do?
The most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do is ask an annoying amount of both broad and detailed questions. What is the content? How does it work? Who writes it? Who’s the audience? How many typos are there? Why are there typos? How does the organization treat its content?
Over time, learners will begin to see which questions are actually pertinent to the content and which are not. Some analysis will obviously be inappropriate for certain types of content. Also, I suspect that, with experience, strategists learn what types of content warrant which question. However, during the learning process, there is no such thing as a stupid question, just wrong questions. Strategists must learn how to ask the right questions.
What’s the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should not do?
When learning about content strategy, do not rush the process. Some elements of content strategy seem easy to grasp, but their application takes time to realize the full scope of what they mean. For example, evaluating content for maturity may seem easy and obvious. Sometimes, it is. Based on your assessment content may clearly fall in one of five categories. However, strategists need to be able to explain why they arrived at the assessment. For me, I initially evaluated the maturity of the content for the client for this class as level 2, rudimentary. While this was my final evaluation, I did find myself bouncing between levels of maturity based on the questions I would ask.
What was most meaningful about content strategy for your own career goals?
Most meaningful to my own career goals was the slow and methodical process of dismantling how and why content is created with content analysis. Creating a content strategy requires careful consideration of a lot of factors. Within each influential piece of the process–audience, style, design, the creators themselves–lies a host of elements that can be assessed with both quantitative and qualitative means. Content analysis requires asking more questions about the content than a curious 4-year-old could possibly dream up, and then researching and considering the impact of each answer. Yes, content analysis is content creation in and of itself, but this type of meta-content ultimately serves the purpose of understanding how and why.
When developing a content strategy, this analysis serves as the springboard for developing milestones for content maturity. Having an intimate knowledge of the content helps strategists pinpoint specific changes or incorporate specialized tools into the strategy recommendations.
This is helpful for me because understanding these concepts have forced me to consider how I create and produce content myself, making me more efficient in communicating, editing the content I receive, and developing content to address problems I continually encounter. For example, while I pride myself on a well-managed email inbox, I did notice I routinely answer the same types of emails. A quick 30-minute assessment of my organized inbox revealed I routinely write three types of replies. Now, I have three templates, ready for updating based on the recipient. Another example is the development of content for a webpage redesign for our department. If not for this class, my team would have ignored the bigger picture of user-focus and collaboration with other teams, and wasted hours focused on pointlessly editing content we won’t ever use.
I recently explained content strategy to my husband like this: You are a 3 year-old company and your content is a Rubik’s Cube. You’re trying to figure out how to get all the sides the same color as fast as possible. You realize you don’t really know how to solve it after all, so you hand it to an adult and they solve it for you and then teach you how to solve it yourself. Content strategists are the content grown-ups teaching organizations how to solve their content cubes as quickly as possible. But to do that, strategists have to learn how to ask the right questions.