Will the real content strategy please stand up?

When I started at Adobe, my main responsibility was to oversee the creative development of educational ebooks that were used in demand. I worked closely with the content strategy team to produce so many ebooks in a year and a half that their final combined word count rivaled a Brandon Sanderson novel. (That is not hyperbole.)

The manager of that team and I spent long hours talking about content strategy. She understood the importance it played in an organization and was eager to position her strategists well. She wanted them to command the respect they deserved, but most of our internal partners were not content people and didn’t understand what exactly they did.

In one of these conversations, I suggested that she should position her strategists as “managing editors,” a fairly common title in content marketing. This worked pretty well at first. The strategists adopted that vision and we ran with it. The metaphor gave them the focus to guide the creation of some great ebooks and to clearly explain their role to stakeholders.

But as the team’s responsibilities changed and we became responsible for more than just editorially-driven demand content, things started to stumble a bit. The strategies we’d developed under the managing editor model suddenly couldn’t satiate the other hungry channels the team was now responsible for. We tried valiantly, but in the end, other teams came in to fill the void and eventually that team was broken up.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through that experience, trying to figure out where we went wrong. We’d built an impressive strategy that had fueled a pretty cool content machine. But the problem, I eventually realized, was not that we had a bad strategy. But we did have the wrong kind of strategy.  

We were calling it a content strategy, but in reality, it was an editorial strategy. The actual content strategy (i.e. using ebooks to meet a set of demand generation requirements) was already set and pretty straightforward, so what we built was a strategy for creating consistently good work. In this case, that strategy involved a lot of thinking about storytelling and themes, how to incorporate subject matter experts, messaging frameworks, and more. In other words, an editorial strategy. And as the requirements of the underlying content strategy grew more complex, our heavy investment in the editorial strategy made it difficult to see the problem and adapt.

As I’ve talked with other content marketers, I’ve found that this confusion between content strategy and editorial strategy is really common—which isn’t that surprising. Many content marketers work on editorial platforms like a blog where the actual content strategy is more or less baked. And that’s okay. Editorial strategies are really important, a crucial part of content development. But they’re not content strategy.

Throughout my career, this confusion of strategies has happened a lot. A campaign brief may identify a set of existing assets, but that doesn’t make it a content strategy. It’s a campaign strategy (i.e., a plan to execute a campaign, which of course includes content, but the content is not the focus on the plan). Web teams will build out a plan to create a set of pages, but it’s not a content strategy. It’s a web strategy and its purpose is to meet the needs of that specific channel—and again, it may rely on content, but it’s not for content. And on and on.

I want to emphasize again that I’m not saying these other types of strategy are bad. Campaign strategies. Web strategies. These are essential pieces in the running of a business. And because these functions have an interest in content, it’s easy to let them take responsibility for the content strategy. This is not necessarily bad, but in my experience, it often is. Especially at the enterprise level.

At its most basic, content strategy is the process of answering the question, “how can we solve this problem with content?” The problem could be anything—a business goal, a specific user need, any set of requirements. Regardless of the scope of the problem—a page, a campaign plan, a UI element, or an entire company—the process is essentially the same.

First you analyze the requirements (like audience needs, business goals, the information you want to communicate, technical requirements like localization, and so on). Then you look for the right opportunities to fulfill those requirements (asking, for example, where in the customer’s journey should this fit? What’s the right channel? Or, what formats should we consider?). Lastly, you distill all this into a plan that your execution team can look to when actually developing and designing the content. Of course, in practice it’s often more complicated than it sounds, but the process itself is pretty straightforward. And it works the same for a simple content need or a vastly complicated one.

If you work in a small company, this semantic game may be just that—semantics. As I said before, if you’re on a blog team—which may be your main content channel—the majority of the content strategy is already set and will likely only need to change in small increments. So you can—and should—focus all your efforts on an editorial strategy that guides creative development.

But in bigger organizations, the customer experience begins to transcend individual channels and the content landscape becomes increasingly more complex. In this world, assuming that content strategy belongs to the channels or is a part of some other strategy leads to the content problems we all know and love—too much content, duplicative content, not enough content, inconsistent execution, underwhelming performance, technically advanced content platforms that struggle to find enough content—or worse that become dumping grounds for whatever—and so on.

(As I’ve argued before, in big organizations the best place for content strategy is in a horizontal function such as a design or creative team.)

I’m not trying to tell anybody what their job title should be. And I get it. It’s a lot easier to let all the various strategies that come into play during the process blur into the title “content strategy” and then hope it figures itself out. But in that schoolyard pick of strategies on any given day, actual content strategy is often ignored until it begrudgingly lands somewhere by default. At which point, it is usually ignored again.

In the old days of a few channels and formats, this may have been okay. In the connected, complicated world today where our content is our customer experience, it’s a huge mistake.