Content strategy is a design function.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen content strategy operate in a wide variety of ways. Sometimes it’s explicitly called strategy. Other times not. At some businesses, it’s highly valued. At others, it’s outsourced. Sometimes it’s run as a part of a larger line-of-business or integrated marketing team. Other times it’s wrapped into the design organization.

In many of these situations, content strategy can thrive. But across the board, in my experience, the companies that are successful in creating content-led experiences that deliver real value to their customers are the ones that see content strategy as a design function, not a management one.

The new content world.

For product and web teams, this is probably not a big revelation. Content strategy and UX design are already fairly well integrated (though I’d argue even in these cases, content strategy is often seen as a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have). In marketing teams, however, content strategists are all over the place. Either they’re siloed as an editorial function with little insight to the broader content landscape or they’re integrated into so-called “strategy” teams responsible for delivering business outcomes.

Historically, this may have made sense. Content was used very tactically and the need for someone to think strategically about it emerged in an ad hoc way. But for companies that are trying to create integrated, consistent customer experiences—especially enterprise-level businesses—old models just aren’t good enough.

In this design-led, experience-focused world, content strategy has to be a part of the overall customer experience design. In saying this, I’m speaking to business leaders who cling to old models and are loath to give up a “strategic” function. But I’m also speaking to design and creative leaders who may still see content as somebody else’s job. Content strategy needs to be a part of design.

Here are some reasons why.

Delivering on goals.

Positioning content strategy so that it’s measured by the right goals is essential. But first, leaders must acknowledge that different teams justifiably have different goals and make a decision from there.

While everyone in the company is working toward the same high-level goals, different teams execute those goals in different ways. Business-oriented groups like product management or an integrated marketing team are responsible for driving business goals like revenue, pipeline, and so on. Design and creative teams on the other hand are tasked with creating user-focused experiences, whether in a product, on the web, or wherever. In other words, for design teams, quality is the KPI.

Even in companies that are laser-focused on experience, someone needs to keep an eye on the numbers. But a content strategist should not be that someone.

The purpose of content strategy is to make a plan for how a company can meet its goals with content. If that plan must prioritize a bottom-line goal like revenue, it may check a few boxes, but it will not create customer loyalty (we’ll see why in a minute). If, on the other hand, that plan is created with the goal of an incredible experience, it likely will. Which in turn drives greater revenue.

Following process.

Goals define process. So if content strategy is being driven by specific business-facing outcomes, it’s almost guaranteed that the process will prioritize things that only allow for quality through brute force. Efficiency, speed, scalability, cost, and so on are all obviously important. But a process that prioritizes these will almost always ignore quality.

“Perfect is the enemy of the good,” these teams love to say. But the reality is that a process that prioritizes quality can account for business priorities like efficiency and scale and even revenue and yet still be good. If you start with an assumption of quality, you can then have a clear view to what tradeoffs you can and cannot make in order to meet business goals. But if you build the process from the other end, suddenly quality becomes something you can—and most likely will—trade off.

For content strategy to be successful, it needs to drive a process that prioritizes quality, which means quality needs to be the goal.

Executing consistently.

Creative execution of content will go where content strategy points. This means if you have fifteen different content strategy teams throughout the company, you will have fifteen different executions. Or, if you don’t have content strategy, you’ll get whatever looks good at the moment.

Because of the visibility of the Design (with a big D) movement, leaders often lay the burden for consistent creative output on design and creative teams. That seems obvious, right? But if the design team is constantly having to argue with content strategists who have divergent goals, they’re going to be forced to make compromises and waste a ton of energy. If, on the other hand, content strategy sits with the design team and is working toward the same goals, the strategist can synthesize a wide variety of requests into a single, coherent plan, which empowers the designers to execute a consistent creative vision.

Being accountable.

For many years, the creative teams responsible for design have been seen as a “pair of hands.” The term “stakeholder” suggests that the person holding the budget is the one who has a “stake” in the project and the execution team should just do as they’re told.

In theory, this is changing. Design teams are more and more getting a seat at the table and are seen as strategic partners. But until design teams are given control over their budgets and explicit accountability over their work, that seat is still just a kiddie seat.

Content strategists make the plan for how a budget is going to be used to create content. It is against these plans which the designer’s work will ultimately be judged. In companies where strategy sits outside the design organization, designers are not technically “stakeholders,” meaning they are not accountable for how the budget is being used. That means that ultimately, they not accountable for their own work. It’s the strategist who must defend it and if it fails, it’s the strategist who is on the hook. But the strategist wasn’t actually a part of the team who built it (and is working toward a different set of goals), which often leads to bad feelings, silos, extra work, wasted money, and so on.

By putting content strategy in the design organization—including the budget to execute that strategy—leaders can ensure that the design organization is accountable for their work. Together, strategists and designers have made a plan for developing content to meet business needs. And together they’ve executed against that plan.

When design teams are accountable for how they’ve spent budget to deliver incredible customer experiences, they’ll have a real voice in the conference room. That accountability comes from content strategy.

Seeing broadly.

As I’ve said before, the content landscape in organizations today is extremely complex. This means it’s difficult for content strategists to gain visibility across the whole company to understand this landscape. In organizations that have internal creative or design teams, however, these teams often function horizontally across the business, servicing many teams and initiatives. This perspective puts these teams in the perfect position to develop unified, consistent content strategies. This is a position that line of business teams likely do not have.

Speaking for the customer.

A content-led customer experience is by definition customer focused. While many organizations have the responsibility to understand their customers, the mandate of the design team is unique. Whether in product, marketing, or elsewhere, design teams are tasked with deeply understanding what customers need. This oft-cited empathy for the customer allows design teams to build interactions and experiences that matter.

But if the content that fuels those experiences is driven by a strategy that’s distanced from the customer and lacks that empathy, the design team is working with one hand tied behind its back.

Fostering creativity.

At the end of the day, successful content strategy is a creative act. It requires deep human insight, the ability to make new connections, and the vision to organize ideas in fresh new ways. Fostering this creativity is essential for a good content strategist but difficult to maintain in a more left-brained environment like a business strategy team. Acknowledging that the content strategist brings a different-but-essential creativity to the creative team is part of the transformation that every experience-led business needs to make.

Customer experience design.

Obviously different businesses have different structures. Design teams may be consolidated or spread throughout the company. They may product-focused UX teams or brand focused in-house creatives. But in all cases, the burden of holistic customer experience design rests on their shoulders. By recognizing the crucial role that content strategy plays in this design and organizing accordingly, businesses can deliver content-led experiences that create real loyalty.