Content Strategy: Why Would You Make a Creative Do It?

You like to torture people

Okay, I assume you don’t really like to torture people, but placing a creative writer in the position to do strategy work is like making a rodeo rider do a wrangler’s job. One is focused on finessing one piece of content at a time, the other on making sure the entire herd makes it to pasture.

Which isn’t to say one person can’t perform both roles; often they do, yet it’s not optimal on an enterprise-level project. If a creative writer isn’t allowed to be creative with the content because they’re always responding to drive-by’s requesting additional assets, then the final product suffers.

You’re really not sure about the distinction

These folks all deal with words, text, right? Yes, and no. While user-facing textual content is still a mainstay in web content development, the discussion has enlarged to include all the other stuff that goes into creating digital developments:

• Keywords and metadata
• Taxonomies
• Content models
• Content inventories
• CMS compatabilities

And these are just a few of the items you need to consider when managing through an enterprise-level content development (don’t get me started on multiple-platform content development).

Some historical perspective

Back in the day before there was such a thing as disciplined web professionals, most large sites were maintained by IT departments. Now, while IT programmers are great at making things like point-of-sale credit card transactions happen, their minds aren’t focused as much on the customer swiping the card or the sales person behind the register.

Thus, the need for front-end developers grounded in human factors and user experience. Essentially the presentation layer (what the customer / user encounters) was separated from the back-end systems (what makes transactions take place) in order to provide the proper focus for the developer of each.

And the world of content development is evolving in much the same way. Now it’s optimal to have a content strategist separate what sits behind the words (rules for formatting, character space count, placement in UI) from what the creative writer needs to focus on: the words themselves.

You don’t have a choice

The content strategist role is still fairly new to many organizations that employ web writers, so although you may be thinking, “Yeah, it’d be great to have someone like that around”, your organization just isn’t set up to create a role like that.

That’s been fairly typical in my experience.  I’ve worked with content strategy consultants on large migration projects, other times I’ve had to act as the content strategist in my organization.

In the lone content strategist role, I’ve had to leverage web writers to do some of the legwork, like doing keyword research or working on inventories. The key has been timing the work. I try not to dump a bunch of wrangling on someone who’s in the middle of riding in a rodeo. I wait until they fall off the bull and ask them to help in their downtime between creative projects. 

While this is tricky (it’s always a challenge to balance a team member’s inclinations against the needs of the organization), if you’re trying to flatten out some of the ups and downs that occur in your enterprise-level projects, you’ll just need to set expectations:

• Here’s the type of content you’ll have to create
• Here’s when you compile the metadata
• Here’s when you help create URL structures
• Etc.

Let the writers write

That’s really the whole point. I can’t tell you how many Franken-copydecks I’ve sadly beheld shambling in and out of reviews, pitchforks waving at the bewildered writers. 

You can’t wait until the end of a project to determine content strategy. It and all of its components need to be considered early, chunked out in phases, and the requisite chunk delivered into your writers’ hands. 

However you decide to do it, remember that you can have a much greater chance of project success—from planning to review to implementation—if you make the distinction between content strategy and the true role of a creative web writer.