Drawing a line in the sand about content roles
If there’s one constant in the content world, it’s that job titles are a mess.
Are writers content strategists? Or designers? Maybe in UX, but what about marketing? If content strategy is really just a fancy word for microcopy writing, what do you call people who develop strategies for how a business uses content, word-based or otherwise? Or plan content programs but don’t actually do the execution? What’s the difference between a content designer and a content strategist? Or a UX content strategist and a web content strategist. Or a content marketing content strategist?
Yes, lacking a more technical description, it’s safe to say the landscape of content professions is a dumpster fire. So much so that when I interview candidates for content strategy roles on my team, I always ask them first what they think this job is, so I can help manage expectations.
There are many reasons for this, but I think one of the most prevalent (one I have fallen victim to in my own career) is a need for legitimacy. Much of the true work content professionals do is hidden, poorly understood, and difficult to evangelise. So it’s natural to try and brand ourselves in some way that seems easier to grok. It’s a ‘cobbler’s shoes’ kind of irony that professionals who often come from writing backgrounds are stuck behind a bunch of dumb, ‘jargony’ words that seem to have been stripped of any real meaning.
Another piece of the puzzle of course is silos. Organisational silos built around things that don’t care about the permeability of content force content teams to take sides. UX content folks are trying to stake a claim in one world with one set of rules while marketing folks or technical professionals are in their own worlds and never the twain (or…thrain?) shall meet. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with content pros on the other side of whatever aisle I’m on who nod sagely about the universality of content problems, but then shrug when I point out that the label they have chosen (usually content strategist) is actually undermining some other team’s ability to be successful by conflating two different distinct roles under one name.
Personally, I’m tired of it. I would be happy to never again begin an introduction with, “I’m a content strategist, but not that kind of content strategist.”
I’m also tired of apologizing for my craft as a writer by hiding behind some other name.
And of course, I would love to never have to say the words, “content is not just words” ever again.
To that end, I’m proposing a solution. I have been blessed in my career to work in a wide variety of content fields across marketing, UX, writing, design, video, and more. If there’s a content job I have not done personally, I’ve probably collaborated with or managed someone who has. And I think there’s a pretty easy way to carve things up that can span every inch of an organisation — and across our entire community.
Even better, this breakdown is intrinsically tied to my favourite definition of content: information structured for a purpose.
That definition contains three elements. Accordingly, I think we can broadly break content roles into three categories:
· Content strategists are concerned with the purpose of content. In other words, the why.
· Content designers are concerned with the structure of the content. In other words, the what.
· Content creators are concerned with the information in the content. In other words, the how.
Before I proceed, a few caveats:
1. My main intent here is to differentiate the work itself (along with the artefacts that work produces). It is not to directly address the issue of job titles. I think ultimately job titles need to follow from a coherent point of view of the work, which I don’t think currently exists. Any number of current job titles could fit under these three categories. But I’m a take-things-one-step-at-a-time kind of guy so I’m starting with what I think is the root of the problem.
2. The breakdown I’m providing here is not currently reflected in any organisation that I’ve been a part of or heard about. You might argue that it’s futile to spell out a solution that does not reflect reality, but that’s the whole ‘line in the sand’ thing. I believe in defining an ideal outcome, then prioritising the steps to get there, however far off it is.
3. Along these lines, I have no desire to tell anyone what they can or should call themselves. In spite of the “line in the sand” thing, I’m not trying to offend anyone, so please, take this in the spirit of starting a conversation in the industry about a better way forward. And call yourself what you need to.
Enough setup. Let’s talk content roles.
Content strategy: The ‘why’
To paraphrase Kristina Halvorson (of course!), content strategy is making a plan for how any organisation will use content to meet user needs in order to achieve business goals. It is, by definition, a strategic function as opposed to an executional one.
The way I often explain it is like this:
There’s a lot of information out there that you could share with your users.
There are also any number of ways you could structure that information on many levels. First and foremost, what medium do you use? Digital? Print? Video, text, art, etc.? Each of these are high-level ways of structuring content, but when you drill down, there are many other possible ways of structuring it. For example, if you chose words, which words? What tone will you adopt? But say you decide to go with a video. What style? What lenses? How will you light it? And on and on.
The question implied by all these “coulds” is what information should you share with your users? And how should you structure that information?
This is where content strategy comes in. If content is information structured for a purpose, content strategy is what defines that purpose:
· You should choose this information because this is the information your users need to be successful in the outcomes you’ve identified as valuable for them and your business.
· You should structure that information in this way because that structure is the most effective way of delivering said information to said users through the channels by which they will consume it.
This is the work of a content strategist. Establishing these purposes — the why — and documenting them in a way that can meaningfully inform decision-making. It is also standardizing these whys, defining them, and providing clear acceptance criteria and metrics of success for them. This is the marriage of user needs with business goals.
A content strategist might, for example, look at a business goal like SEO. Instead of saying, “Let’s just make a ton of content that will get us traffic,” they might ask, “What are we really trying to accomplish here? If the user-oriented outcome we want is to attract qualified people to our website, who will then engage with us and take some kind of meaningful next step, then what information is most likely to accomplish this?” They will conduct user research to understand what might draw people to their site, then standardise a series of content types that can consistently meet those needs. Lastly, they will define clear metrics of success (traffic? click-throughs? share of voice?) that will allow teams to optimize existing content instead of simply creating something new.
If a content strategist has done their job, they will have taken much of the guesswork out of other content pros’ work. Now, when a blog team sits down to create SEO content, they know why they’re doing it (to attract qualified people to their site) as well as how to measure their success.
And while I’ve chosen an easy marketing example here, this same principle can apply in any context. I literally had a conversation while writing this with the help content team in my organisation today about how a strategy like this could help them produce better content and measure it’s impact. And sure, for in-product content, metrics for success may not be as easy to define, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t needed.
Ironically, while I think ‘content strategist’ is the most popular job title out there for content professionals, in my experience it is the least represented in practice. Instead, content strategies are usually developed in ad hoc ways, often unintentionally or subconsciously by other people, either business folks (PMs, campaign managers, etc.) or content creators who cannot proceed to structure the required information without some kind of purpose.
This is why, in my opinion, calling content creators (like UX or blog writers) ‘content strategists’ is a slippery slope. Imagine if a product team said, “We’ve decided to forgo creating a centralised product strategy. Instead, each individual PM will be on the hook to develop their own strategies based on their own individual biases and vision. And we’re going to start calling them all business strategists.” That’s a recipe for bankruptcy.
That’s not to say content creators should not be influencing or contributing to a larger strategy, but strategy is really something that that needs to sit outside individual projects, campaigns, and so on. It needs to be intensely aligned with a larger business strategy and also have broad access to users in a way that many on the frontlines do not have. That’s not to say you can’t create small-scale content strategies or that every strategy needs to be org-wide (if that’s even possible), but content strategy is ultimately a horizontal function, one that needs to go wide instead of deep.
The hill that content strategy needs to climb is that, as a strategic function, its work is pretty cerebral and its outputs are often difficult for a lay executive or creator to easily understand (hence them being underrepresented). Content strategists are conducting extensive user research, picking apart business strategies, developing models and maps and so on. So the most effective content strategists are those who can grasp a high level of abstraction, but then convert it alchemically into real, practical decision-making tools that can be meaningfully understood by business partners and can practically guide the work of other content professionals. (This is the subject of another article.)
Another challenge content strategists face is in differentiating the value of a content strategy from other strategies. But again, that’s a topic for its own article (I wrote one long ago, but should probably revisit).
In short, content strategists are a crucial piece of a mature content practice, but today are often understaffed, underrepresented, and woefully misunderstood.
Content design: the ‘what’
The more I’ve thought about this topic, the more I think most people today who call themselves content strategists are actually content designers. This is certainly true in the product space where folks who want to be acknowledged as — and actually are — more than just ‘wordsmiths’ (a term I loathe, by the way) have sought legitimacy in the more strategic sounding, well, content strategy.
But I think it’s true in other fields as well. In fact, most of the folks I know in content marketing who have content strategy titles function more as content designers, simply at a campaign or program level, rather than a webpage or interface one.
So let me back up. If a content strategist is defining the purpose for which information is going to be structured in a certain way, a content designer is defining what structures will be most effective at achieving that purpose. In this model, they’re not the ones writing the words, making the pictures, or producing the videos. They’re the ones saying, “Here, we should use words. Here we should put a picture. Here we should use a video.”
Content designers make real much of what content strategists have defined in abstract. For example, a content strategist might understand that users need product information, or help, or just a quick orientation for where they are in an experience. As such, they may define in their strategy certain content types like a product overview, or a tutorial, or a navigational element for wayfinding, along with clear definitions and goals those content types need to be successful.
A content designer takes those content types and puts shape to them in ways that will drive the desired outcome in specific contexts and in ways that can be optimized. Some examples:
A content strategist might define ‘product overview’ as a necessary content type. They will describe its purpose, where it fits in the journey, typical channels that might drive to it, and how its success will be measured. A content designer’s job is to take that criteria and determine that it should be a webpage, or maybe two web pages, and what content should go on that page to drive that success. Do we need product imagery? Demos? What tone should we adopt? Should we lean heavily into marketing value props or simply describe product features, etc. They would also define if the product overview for one product may need to differ from the overview of a different product, while ensuring both still map to the strategy.
Similarly, the strategist may have defined a breadcrumb as a standardised wayfinding content type for in-product experiences, one that helps drive certain behaviours and reduces user confusion. The content designers’ job then is to is to think about how the information in that breadcrumb should be structured consistently. Should we used ellipses? How far back in the journey are we going to show? Do we use technical terms for past screens or more readable ones? And so on.
These two examples are both tied to specific content types in discrete experiences, but like I said, I think the same concepts can apply to campaign-driven content marketing as well. For example, while a content strategist will have laid out an overall plan for content and how that content should be used to connect a user to a specific business outcome, a content designer (as I’ve defined that role in this context) would be responsible for designing a content program to meet the needs of a specific campaign. Do we use blog posts? Videos? An event activation? A combination of all of these? This would mean tapping into the strategy to understand which types of content will most likely drive the outcomes of the campaign given the channels and users involved and how to structure it.
The artefacts of a content designer’s work are varied, but all fall into the camp of documentation describing the needed content and principles for how to execute said content. It may be a content priority document, or a content skeleton. It might be a brief or an information architecture. But in an ideal case, it has both the list of materials and the principles that help creators structure their work toward the content’s goal.
While content strategy work happens at a business level, content design is often — though not always — more aligned to a specific project or outcome (though I think systems content designers are the future — the list of future articles keeps growing). As such, they work much more closely with other roles like experience designers and content creators. A content designer would create the content skeleton for the product page described above or the breadcrumbs, but an experience designer would likely create the wireframe or the prototype.
And, while content strategy is often interested in users in aggregate (i.e., users visiting our site need this kind of information to convert), content designers must be intensely user-focused on a specific subset of users trying to accomplish a specific task and then be ruthless at delivering against those user needs.
Content creation: The ‘how’
This is where the rubber hits the road. A strategist has determined the purpose. A designer has defined the structure. Now it’s time for a content creator to actually communicate the needed information. So a content creator’s job is to determine how that information best fits within those structures to meet that purpose.
Content creators come in many varieties. In fact, unlike content strategist and content designer, both of which I think could work as job titles, content creator as group represent a large number of professions: UX writers, copywriters, art directors, UI designers, icon designers, illustrators, and so on.
For me, the value in calling creators out as distinct from designers and strategists has to do with the value I place on “the craft.” When I was mainly a writer, I was often frustrated with how much time I had to spend thinking about bigger issues like, “Who am I writing for? What’s the goal of this piece?” and so on. The best work I did was when those decisions were already made and I could focus my efforts entirely on writing the best possible words I could.
The craft — i.e. the ‘how’ — is also important because it is what differentiates one piece of content from another. The why and the what are important factors in effectively answering the how, but the how is ultimately where creative problem-solving comes into play to avoid staleness when it’s a problem and lean into consistency when it’s not.
I’ll use another SEO example here mainly because I think it’s easy for most people to understand. It’s no secret that much SEO content reads like a robot wrote it (and with generative AI, a robot probably did write it). In the model I’ve laid out, a content strategist would answer the question of why SEO matters to the business and why you should make one kind of article over another. A content designer would explore the best ways to structure those articles to win in SEO (do we need FAQs? Videos? How should we structure headlines?).
This leaves it to a creator, within those constraints, to discover the best way to make an article that actually speaks to a human, that delivers real value, and that not only attracts someone, but actually makes them want to come back. Believe me, that takes real craft.
Still, I understand why creators, especially writers, often want to call themselves something else in an attempt to convince others their work is legitimate. I don’t begrudge them that. But I do also think doing so undermines the value of true craftspersonship and in the end makes fighting for it even harder.
“But what about…?”
Of course, there are any number of content professions or content-adjacent professions that aren’t explicitly called out here: information architects, taxonomists, content ops folks, etc. I’m not dismissing the crucial role these professions play, but in my experience, these kinds of roles often can align with work at either the strategy layer, the design layer, or the creator layer.
If I were going to get deep into job titles here (which I’m not), I think those roles could easily slot into titles like Senior Content Strategist, Information Architecture, or Content Designer, Ops.
The line is drawn
This is of course an ideal. In a small organisation, obviously content pros are likely having to do all these things. And even in a big organisation, there’s a lot of collaboration and overlap between the why, the what, and the how.
What I mainly want to achieve here is to make a distinction between the discrete roles that go into an effective content practice. Hopefully, this helps us as professionals think about how we talk about our jobs. But I also think it’s important to spell this out as a step toward greater content maturity.
In other words, if your organisation is not explicitly supporting the work of each of these three roles, they’re likely not on a path toward maturity.
As I said before, at the end of the day, everyone should feel empowered to call themselves what they need to do to feel supported and protected. But as an industry, I think it behoves us to not ‘flatten’ our roles. We should expand them, examine them, and evangelise for them.
What I’ve laid out here is one way to approach it.
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