Content strategy, explained without the jargon

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Here is content strategy without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The short version

Content is usually the reason launches slip. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

Decide who writes it before design starts. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to do next

Less content, kept current, beats more that goes stale. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about content strategy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Decide who writes it before design starts — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.