Content Strategists
Creating a seamless content experience!
Sangeeta Raghu-Punnadi
A good content experience ensures that the user can easily onboard and get started with the product. It is important to understand what type of content the user would need at that particular moment in their journey. This helps create the right content at the right place.
San is a Content Strategist. How do they understand the content needs of the users? How do they map the user journeys? How do they envision that end-to-end content journey? Read on!
Well, I am sure we all agree! If there is no content created for the product you are delivering, no one would know about the product or how to use it. Content plays an important role not only in product onboarding and getting started, but also as a pre-purchase artifact. Content creators help not only our users but also our organizations to sell.
As we have Product Managers strategizing the product roadmap, the Documentation team also needs to have a Content Strategist who will align the content roadmap to the product roadmap. Before we dive into what exactly a Content Strategist does, let us understand what all does “content” include.
It includes all the content that helps users onboard and get started with the product. Some examples of content types are:
Product documentation
Microcopy on the UI
API and CLI documentation
Blogs
Articles
Learning paths
So, whenever Content Strategists are thinking about content, they are thinking about all the possible content types that the Documentation team can create or support with other stakeholders.
Let us see how Content Strategists influence the content space.
Product planning:
In the product journey, the work of a content strategist starts at the product planning phase. They are involved in the planning discussions, which help them understand the product roadmap and the user problems the product is going to solve. What are the business implications and how does the product align with corporate goals?Defining priorities and scope:
In this phase, the stakeholders like Product Manager, Engineering, Quality Testing, Support, and Documentation, get together to prioritize the work for a product release. The discussion includes user requirements, business requirements, and, finally, the scope of what can be achieved by all teams together in a release.
Requirement analysis:
In this phase, the content strategists start gathering more information about the users, so that they can create the content plans to deliver a good content experience.User personas:
Content strategists try to understand who the product users are. What are their roles and responsibilities? What kind of documentation would they need?User journeys:
Content strategists map out the user journeys. This helps them understand the user context and the kind of documentation users would need at the location to complete their tasks. Documentation teams can then create the right content at the right place.Content audit:
Content strategists look at the content that already exists, and figure out the content that would be required for a release. An audit can include looking at content deliverables in various formats and planning for new content where it makes most sense for our users. Audits are maintenance activities that also help in ensuring that content is always relevant. It helps in cleaning the out-of-date content.Content opportunities:
As the content strategists understand user personas, their journey, and audit the content, they find opportunities where content experience and usability can be improved. These improvements result in better user experience.
Again, these content improvements are spread across various content types. It could include creating end-to-end documentation as user stories, supporting better in-app documentation, working with stakeholders to improve the API/CLI documentation, creating a plan on how to cross link between product documentation, and more.
Prioritizing the content deliverables:
Content strategists coordinate with information architects and technical writers to create a content plan for the documentation team.Bridge between various stakeholders:
Content strategists are the point of contact between product and documentation teams. They filter out the noise and communicate the relevant information to both teams.Other content creators:
There are other content creators in the organization, such as product marketing, support engineers, and developers who create different types of contents. Blogs, knowledge articles, product pages, and so on have content that can be leveraged to create a good content experience for users. A content strategist works with these content creators to offer a more complete end-to-end consistent content experience.
These are some of the roles and responsibilities of a Content Strategist. They have to go above and beyond the regular documentation mindset and think from user perspective to create a complete, consistent, easy to use, highly functional, reliable, and usable content experience!
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About the author
Sangeeta Raghu-Punnadi
Senior Content Designer
Red Hat
As a Content Strategist, Sangeeta ensures she is a strong user advocate and pushes the documentation team to go that extra mile to create a good content experience. She also wears her writer’s hat while strategizing to understand the challenges writers face and balance the dream content experience with what is achievable.