People don’t take content seriously.

And why would they? When a word can mean anything, it usually ends up meaning nothing. For example, in my career, I’ve heard content described variously as any of the following:

• Blog posts

• Any editorial content

• Not banner ads

• Pictures and copy

• “The stuff that goes in the buckets on a web page”

• Personalised communications

• Emails

• Notifications

• Both the subject matter of a video or the video itself

• Words in product UI

• Messaging

• “Story”

• Some mythical thing that people talk about and make plans around but actually have no idea where it comes from or how it works.

(Okay, nobody actually defined it that last way.)

When I started writing this article, my goal was to offer a universal definition of content that people could rally around. The white board at my desk is littered with various candidates, but as often happens during my brainstorming process, they tend toward the esoteric and I balked at the amount of explaining I’d need to do. Because if I have to explain it, you’re not going rally around it.

Then Kimball Gardner, a content designer on my team, came to the rescue. He posted this great article by content strategist Jared Spool, which says this:

“We need to shift our definition of content to be what the user needs right now. It has nothing to do with how it’s produced or where it lives on the server. If the user needs it, it’s content.” (The emphasis is his. Read the whole article.)

Holy smokes. Yes. If great content is customer-centric, then this has to be the answer. It could be text, sure. But it could be a video, or a diagram, or a menu, or an algorithmically-created boarding pass (as Spool suggests), or maybe something entirely new and different. Or any combination of all of these. If the customer needs it, it’s content.

Of course, the reality is that not many people see it this way. In fact, almost no one does. Not even content people who’ve been in the game forever.

So should people take content seriously? Does it really matter? Does it matter that we all have different definitions? Does content really matter that much?

If you care about giving your customer what they need, then the answer has to be yes. But this idea represents a pretty big shift in the way businesses think about value and certainly in the way they think about content, so let’s dig in a bit.

Content bias

My list from before is not exhaustive, but it suggests a couple of possible reasons why people tend to speak superficially about the value of content, but then do nothing to plan for it.

For one thing, in thinking about content, there’s often a bias toward words. When most people talk about “content marketing,” for example, they usually mean some kind of editorial initiative. And in UX, the terms “content strategist” and “UX writer” tend to be synonymous.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a problem. But as any professional writer will tell you, people generally don’t appreciate the craft of writing. Everyone learns the basics in elementary school so most people can write a functional sentence. This leads them to dismiss the effort, thought, and value that trained writers bring to the table. Design on the other hand is arcane and mysterious, something that’s perceived to require special training, and so it’s valued differently. (I’m going to stop this before it turns into a full-on rant.)

This bias bleeds into content. There’s a tendency to prioritise the parts of the process that overtly require specialised training (visual design, UX, development, and so on) and assume that the content will somehow take care of itself. This leads to the status quo on many product design teams, where most content is an afterthought. Or it prompts an oft-heard phrase that’s guaranteed to make my blood-pressure rise: “Content is not my problem.” (Implying that whatever it is they are working on is much more important and challenging.)

And the bias toward writing cuts both ways. In organisations that are editorially inclined, the bias is reinforced, obscuring the value of the larger content ecosystem. In my career as an editor, I’ve been culpable of this. I repent.

Which leads to a second bias about content. For all our talk about content strategy, most definitions of content are quite tactical- for a product team, it’s the text in the interface; to a comms team, their content is their blog or a social post. And maybe more importantly, to a comms team, something like a banner ad is just a banner ad, not content.

A brief history of content

If you look at the history of content in business, it’s easy to see where these biases come from. Much of that history is alluded to in this discussion in Jesse James Garrett’s seminal book, The Elements of User Experience:

“When the Web started, it was all about information…People originally seized on the Web as a new publishing medium, but as technology advanced and new features were added to Web browsers and Web servers alike, the Web took on new functional capabilities…With the advent of commercial interests on the Web, this application functionality found a wide range of uses, such as electronic commerce, social media, and financial services, among others. Meanwhile, the Web continued to flourish as a publishing medium, with countless newspaper and magazine sites augmenting the wave of Web-only blogs and “e-zines” being published.

“Technology continued to advance on both fronts as all kinds of sites made the transition from static collections of information that changed infrequently to dynamic, database-driven sites that were constantly evolving. When the Web user experience community started to form, its members spoke two different languages.

“One group saw every problem as an application design problem, and applied problem-solving approaches from the traditional desktop and mainframe software worlds. (These, in turn, were rooted in common practices applied to creating all kinds of products, from cars to running shoes.) The other group saw the Web in terms of information distribution and retrieval, and applied problem-solving approaches from the traditional worlds of publishing, media, and information science. This became quite a stumbling block. Very little progress could be made when the community could not even agree on basic terminology.”

Garrett is talking about the drivers behind the modern discipline of user experience, which is an amalgam of several older disciplines — once totally distinct — that naturally came together in response to technological innovation. As these fields merged, designers and developers found they could no longer approach them separately.

Believe it or not, content has gone through exactly the same evolution. Publishing. Product. Advertising. On and on. Technology has brought these once-distinct areas of content together for customers. But in my experience, we have not seen the same merging of ideas and disciplines within organisations. Content strategy still sits in silos.

What customers need

So again. Does this matter?

Spool says:

“The thinking, until recently, has been that content was just a piece of the puzzle. An important piece, yes. But still just one piece of a large puzzle….Now that we can study how our content and our designs affect the users’ experiences, we clearly see how this separation is hurting us. We must change it.”

And that change must go beyond a user’s experience with an app or website. I’ve intentionally leaned on UX experts like Spool and Garrett in this article because their journey can be a mirror to the journey that I think we all need to make, whether we’re in product, marketing, UX, legal, or whatever.

But in today’s technology-driven, socially responsible, ethically complicated landscape, what a customer needs from a brand has radically changed. And it goes way beyond the screen. This means we need to change the way we think about what the customer needs — in other words, about content. And it means we need to change the way we think about not only the user experience but the holistic customer experience itself.

If your content is what your customer needs right now, then your content is not a just a piece of your customer experience puzzle. It is your customer experience.

Look at it like this. Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions your customer has with your brand. If in any one of those interactions, you are unable to deliver what your customer needs, the experience will be bad. It doesn’t matter whether that need is understanding how to navigate an interface, finding an answer, or deciding if your brand is the one for them. It’s all their experience and it’s all content.

So yes, your content matters. And the way you think about it matters. It’s time to rethink our approach.

Here are a few implications that I see:

1. Content matters to your customer

Stop waiting until the last minute to think about it, treating it like a tactic, keeping it in silos, making it business-centric, and — most importantly — outsourcing it or phoning it in. Everyone talks about the other pillars of customer experience-being data-driven and customer-centric. It’s time to start being content first, meaning starting every discussion with “what does the customer need? What content will meet that need? How do we deliver it?” These questions are the heart of content strategy.

2. Content strategy cannot work in silos

If multiple teams in your company are making content strategies, that’s content tactics-not strategy. One of the foundational principles of content marketing is having a documented content strategy. This needs to expand to the company level, beyond marketing. Will a blog team and a UX team execute that strategy differently? Absolutely. But everyone in the company needs to be able to refer to a clearly articulated plan of how their company meets their customer needs with content throughout the entire customer journey and with every interaction.

3. Content strategy and design need to be on the same team

Or at least be organisationally adjacent. Product teams have started to get this, but in my experience, marketing teams have not. Content strategy is not an editorial function. It needs to think bigger and it needs to be joined at the hip with the teams that bring it to life. In fact, content strategy and design are two sides of the same customer experience coin. Content strategy identifies what content the customer needs right now. Design figures out how to best deliver that content when the customer needs it. Ultimately, one cannot succeed without the other. This is actually what Spool’s article is about and here’s what he says: “Our users don’t separate our design from our content. They think of them as the same. So, why don’t we?” (Garrett’s book also does a good job of showing how these work together. I do think his definition of content is a little dated but that’s okay, since the book is 10 years old. You can get a sense of his view in this article by Oz Chen.)

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that customer experience matters. I’m arguing that this means more and more people should realise that content matters. Not like “Gee, content is nifty and/or king!” Like “we need to actually change what we value as a business, what we’re investing in, and the process we have in place to execute those values.”

That’s big. I get it. But if we want to give our customers the experience they need, we need to take content seriously.

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