So You Want To Be A Content Strategist?

So you’re a copywriter or content writer looking for a bigger crown and fatter paycheck, and you think moving up the food chain to content strategy and content marketing is the way to go (I pity you). But you’re wondering if you have the right skills to get there from here, and you aren’t exactly sure where there is.

Well, first, let’s nail down some definitions.

What is a Content Strategist?

The content marketing discipline is the Wild West. Despite what hucksters might tell you, there’s no centralized authority, no keystone books, and no commonly agreed upon definitions. So I’ll just start off by saying that despite what the term implies, there is no such real-world thing as content strategy. There is only business strategy. Marketing strategy serves the business strategy. And content strategy serves the marketing strategy through content. Therefore you're really a planner, not a strategist.

A business might have a goal such as 30% revenue growth for a certain market. Marketing might choose key solutions to focus on, key selling points (KSPs) and core messaging for each, and the channels that deliver the most bang for your buck, while a content strategist will choose the specific tactics for those channels that deliver the most bang for your buck, and adapt the core messaging and KSPs into content assets that are meant to be consumed by customers.

The big difference between content strategy and simple content creation is that you can’t think piecemeal anymore. Your job is to build the funnel, fill the funnel, and make sure it doesn’t leak. So you need to be aware of how all your content pieces fit together. But you can’t neglect the quality of the writing either, and that’s the rub. Content strategy requires you to see the forest and the trees.

You need to know how to read data, but you may or may not need to be data-driven. That really depends on what your boss wants. It also depends on what strategic content specialty you choose to focus on (more on that below).     

Is There a Difference Between Content Marketing and Content Strategy?

Using the abovementioned definition, yes. A content strategist is concerned with customers, and the customer journey, and creating and managing content assets that customers see. A content marketer, on the other hand, has a hybrid role that includes these functions, and some of the core business tasks that marketers theoretically do.

For instance, a marketer might create the message house (something never seen by customers) and then hand it to a content strategist, who adapts it into content assets for customer consumption. But if the content strategist also creates the message house, and decides what goes into it, they’re a content marketer.

So Which is Better?

There’s no right answer to this question, but think about it this way. Since a content marketer is higher up the marketing food chain than a strategist, theoretically you’ll get more of the credit if a product proves wildly successful, but also more of the blame if it fails.

Companies often employ multiple content marketers, with each responsible for filling the funnel for a particular product line or area. Which might be attractive if you want to eventually run a digital operation or even a marketing operation in house someday (though the latter is unlikely outside of startupland). But if you like variety, or value your freedom as an employee, it might not be the way to go.

Another factor to consider is how much you enjoy content creation. Pretty much every content marketer gets to write, a lot. While with content strategy, the amount of writing that you do can vary by what type of strategist you are. Pretty much every type of content strategist carries out a mixture of front-end and back-end work, but some more than others, and the more front-end your focus as a strategist, the more you’ll write. And the more back-end your focus, the more data-driven you’ll be. 

Front-End Content Strategists

Social/Digital

Typically these people are responsible for the metrics for all of a brand’s owned digital channels (except the website). Their goals usually involve creating awareness, and getting people on the website for the purposes of engagement, lead-gen, or even sales. And if you think this is a peculiar combination, you’re right, because a social strategist has to basically be both a pied piper and a blowhorn operator at the same time.

I’m not a huge fan of dividing up social responsibilities from those for the website, primarily because you can end up with a jarring and disappointing customer experience. A social media person can create a shiny and attractive Instagram post, and have it lead to a plain-as-soup-crackers webpage on your company’s older-than-dirt website, and have absolutely no say over that page whatsoever. But unfortunately this is often what happens.

Social strategy is for people who enjoy problem-solving and variety, and who have strong visual skills and sensibilities, and lots of ideas. If you’re more of a long-form features writer, social might not be for you. You may find its bite-sized interruptive nature tedious, and its real-time feedback a distraction.      

Marketing orthodoxy won’t tell you this, but I actually think a social strategist shouldn’t be too data-driven. The reason why is because social media’s ability to provide real-time data can eat your attention alive if you let it. Social media people need to be free to experiment, roll with the punches, and endure the occasional dud. They also need to be able to resist certain temptations to inflate their metrics through shortcuts that ultimately waste brand equity.

Marketing

This is the job that is most similar to being a content marketer. And it extends to all owned channels, including the website. It may or may not also include earned channels (earned-channel content is often written by Marcom or Sales), though it probably shouldn’t because earned-media content often chases the rabbit of today’s headlines in a non-strategic way.

If your company is small and narrowly focused, a single person might hold this responsibility. For a medium-sized company, one person might hold this job for each business unit. And if the company is very large, responsibilities tend to be more divvied up amongst specialists, and therefore generalists like marketing content strategists often aren’t employed, as this job requires you to do a little bit of everything (social, long-form, web, SEO, back-end).

You therefore you have to be extremely flexible, and probably quite experienced to do this job. It would be very hard for a content creator to make the leap to this specialty directly, so you’ll probably start out as a different sort of strategist else first. Though it may be possible in startupland, where a fail-fast mentality might give you the accelerated evolutionary process you need.  

And even if you aren’t carrying out marketing tasks yourself, this job still requires a rigorous understanding of the marketing discipline, so you can best make yourself useful to your marketing department and company. Remember, content strategy isn’t about building your portfolio anymore – it’s something bigger.

User Experience (UX)

In many ways, UX Strategy is the purest form of Content Strategy. As these people are responsible for mapping the user journey through content, and writing for every part of it (though much of what they write would not meet some definitions of content). Theoretically, a marketing content strategist should also be doing this, but in the real world that often doesn’t happen because of legacy siloes and a perception that the customer journey isn't a clean straight line followed entirely online. Therefore, UX strategists tend to work on apps, e-commerce, SaaS, and other strictly digital businesses that don’t have a lot of legacy. 

This is a job for experimenters, testers, and brainstormers who know how to put people at ease with their writing, and who understand how small changes to words can make big differences in how they influence people, and who can “write like people talk,” with brevity. But you also need to be data-driven, and comfortable with more abstract elements, such as creating wireframes, illustrating user journeys, and dealing with “if this, then that” scenarios.

This also tends to be contract work, often of six-months to a year, so it’s a good migration option for social media people who’ve aged out and who want to do reasonably steady full-time work that only changes periodically. It’s also a job where it’s easy to demonstrate the positive impact you’re making, so it’s a good resume-builder.

It’s also much-desired work. I see a lot of positions out there.

Hybrid Front/Back-End Content Strategists

Website

This job has a lot of the same responsibilities as a UX strategist, but it’s also responsible for migration from a legacy website, meaning there is a lot more back-end work involved. These strategists carry out audits, and create guidelines, wireframes, tags, and taxonomy for how web content is managed.

Also as with UX strategists, this is often contract work of 6 months to a year. The big difference is you’ll be working with companies that have more legacy. So they might not be cool, but they might be reliable and grown-up. It depends on what you like.

This job is also quite abstract and analytical, so it’s not for your typical flighty writer. It’s for people who are disciplined in their craft, and who have good project management skills. So, if you’ve been freelancing for a while and have learned to self-motivate and do the underlying grunt work that makes the art possible, this could be a good specialty to get into after gaining some experience as a UX strategist. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)   

These strategists handle SEO and content at the same time, and use each to reinforce the other. It’s another “peculiar mixture” discipline in that it tries to be ahead of the game through behind-the-scenes work. In terms of responsibilities, an SEO strategist is basically a UX strategist who also handles SEO, though UX strategists tend to be more focused on what users actually see than an SEO strategist, and SEO strategists have more variety in terms of who might employ them.

This is a good specialty if you are in an industry that is very search dependent (and pretty much every industry is very search dependent at the moment now that in-person events have declined). A lot of current marketing leaders also really believe in SEO because it appeals to the analytical mindset very much in favor. In other words, SEO strategy is what a UX strategist might do to move up the in-house marketing foodchain. 

And a lot of writers hate carrying out SEO. It requires a disciplined, rigorous mind that a lot of writers just don’t really have. So if you can do it, you’ll find yourself very employable, especially in contract and freelance roles (though plenty of SEO specialists with formal marketing ambitions do have regular in-house jobs).

However, as Google gets smarter, and the more the Internet becomes more pay-to-play, the less the world will need advanced SEO skills. And I’ve gotta wonder if SEO content strategy isn’t circling the drain as a discipline (more on this below). 

Back-End Content Strategists

This specialty is still new enough to be its own category. Some people refer to this position as “Content Architect” or “Intelligent Content Strategist.” These people do a lot of the same back-end work as website strategists, but it’s for the more ongoing purposes of easy and/or automated adaptation, personalization, and optimization. Basically, back-end strategists modularize your content, and transform its delivery into a game of Tetris – but in a good way.

This is the future.

It’s also highly technical and abstract, and more concerned with efficiency and scalability than your average writer may be comfortable with. In fact, you may not do much writing in this job at all. You have to know a lot about hardware and software. And a lot of companies aren’t ready to employ someone like this, yet, and many never will be. I also have no friggin’ clue how you would realistically learn to do this as a freelancer. I can only see someone learning this as an in-house Content Management System (CMS) user, or working at a CMS vendor.

Which Specialty is Best?

Based on what I just told you, you might think back-end has the most employment potential, but that’s long-term. In the meantime, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is in the midst of a meltdown. This means streets littered with marginally employed writers; so it’s a buyer’s market. This fact, combined with current WFH trends, will probably tip the course of content marketing away from AI-driven automation and more towards underpaid freelancers for a while. The large companies will go continue with their automation efforts, of course, but my guess is that if you’re reading this, you’re not in with them.

And if you’re not, UX and website strategy will stay strong for a while as companies increasingly try to move away from physical outlets and move the entire shopping experience online. And what’s more, B2B UX will be an interesting new field to get into, as in-person meetings and those once all-important trade shows decline. SEO content strategy will stay viable for at least a few more years, but my guess is AI will largely take over the content part of it eventually. 

Social strategy is another area where I see the content part declining, as companies increasingly look to use these channels for remote customer service and dark social engagement as opposed to content publishing or advertising, which won’t go away completely, but I think it’s halcyon days are over.  

Will You Ever Get to Manage People?

This is a very foolish dream to have if you write content. We rarely get to manage people in house. Why? Because most writers are weird, and many are introverted. Also because most client-side organizations are too siloed for that to ever really happen. I only know of three viable career paths to eventually running a content team. One, become a journo, rise to running a newsroom, and then get recruited to doing a similar job for a brand. Two, rise up through an agency, or perhaps launch your own. And three, join the right startup and get lucky. That’s it.

A Few Parting Thoughts

I think that a lot of mediocrities are about to be driven from our profession. Content that largely exists to take up space and be searched by search engines and journalists (blogs, press releases, and low-value product pages) will eventually be written be machines. Good content that converts will still be needed, so keeping honing your craft, but it may also be your job someday to babysit the machine writers and make sure what they’re doing is effective, so learn to read data.

And perhaps most important, long-term, learn to sell yourself, and keep adding new skills. Because good writing only sells itself till you’re about 35, which is where you start becoming expensive, and pretty much unhireable as a writer unless you know the right people. Once you’re there, you’ll need to offer something additional, and more complete in terms of problem-solving.

My thanks to Tricia Hingpit for inspiring me to write this blog.