After completing my course assignments and instructional materials in digital content strategy, I have learned several lessons.
Based on the instructional materials and my experiences in the course assignments, I believe the most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do is connect content strategy to business goals.
The most important thing someone learning about content strategy should not do is start auditing without a comprehensive plan.
The most meaningful idea from content strategy for my career goals is considering content in the context of the organization’s entire body of content and governance.
Connecting Content Strategy to Business Goals
Connecting content improvements to business goals is the most important thing for someone learning about content strategy to do in any project they undertake going forward.
Kim Sydow Campbell and Val Swisher’s article “A Maturity Model for Content Strategy Development and Technical Communicator Leadership” identifies an inability to explain the business value of content strategy as a common cause of disrespect and poor treatment by internal customers. Val Swisher explains that companies only care about the aspects of content that increase revenue, decrease expenses, or decrease risk. Connecting content to business goals can motivate clients to care about the content.
In my experience conducting a content audit for a client (Client X), we heavily relied on their mission statement and style guide to establish our audit criteria and standards. This increased the usefulness of our analysis by demonstrating how improving the aspects of the content that we identified as opportunities for enhancement could increase profitability. My team received specific positive feedback from Client X in response to how we connected our content analysis to their brand goals.
Clients generally only value content quality if it leads to profit growth or risk reduction. Therefore, it’s important to describe how your suggestions can deliver these results.
Auditing without a Plan
When learning about content strategy, it is important to avoid starting an audit without a clear understanding of its goals, how the team will assess content, and the manageability of its scope. Paula Land describes these as conditions when one shouldn’t audit in Content Audits and Inventories. If you start an audit unprepared, it might never be finished, and even if it does, it is unlikely to produce valuable results.
To avoid going into an audit unprepared, conduct a pilot audit to see if your process is ready. Paula Land describes how a pilot audit will allow you to test your audit criteria, test how quickly your team can audit, and validate your process.
In my project for Client X, the pilot audit was very important. In the pilot audit, my team found two issues. First, we lacked sufficient detail in defining some audit criteria. Second, one criterion took considerably longer to assess than the others. By identifying problems in the pilot audit, we prevented overloading one team member and ensured effective findings with accurate descriptions.
As someone learning about content strategy, it is essential to avoid starting an audit without a clear understanding of its goals, scope, and criteria. Auditing without a clear plan will decrease the value of your results and might prevent you from completing the audit as planned. Fortunately, you can easily avoid this by conducting a pilot audit to verify your process, timeline, and criteria.
Analyzing the Context of Content
Content strategy is crucial for my career goals as it allows me to consider content in its complete context rather than looking at it as just an individual document. Examining content for consistency predicts its ease of translation and reuse; Inconsistencies can also result from gaps in an organization’s authoring or content governance processes.
When you analyze content-related issues and connect them to trends and the content process, you can prioritize finding proactive solutions to prevent these issues instead of merely addressing them reactively after they occur.
Also, by analyzing content through the lens of strategy, rather than focusing on the individual pieces, it becomes much easier to quantify the value of improving content. It is both hard to fix, and hard to see the value of fixing individual issues with certain documents. The value of content improvements is much easier to quantify when fixing a trend will improve a measurable percentage of content to increase profit.
I expect the importance of this level of strategic thinking to increase as the use of AI increases in content strategy. An article by Tom Johnson titled: “What I learned in using AI for planning and prioritization: Content strategy might be safe from automation” describes how AI tools are poorly suited for strategic analysis and decision making. Despite their strategic and decision-making weaknesses, AI tools allow content strategists to analyze and improve tone and style consistency with greatly increased efficiency. Although AI tools may not be the perfect fit for planning, they already enhance the value of content strategists by streamlining implementation of their plans.
Strategic analysis and decision making are valuable skills in technical communication, and that value is only increased with the use of AI tools. The ability to analyze content in the full context of an organization’s body of content and business goals allows you to connect issues in content to process causes in a way that current AI tools are not capable of.