Why content strategy matters more than it looks

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Content strategy is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What it costs to ignore

Content is usually the reason launches slip. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Decide who writes it before design starts. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Warning signs

Less content, kept current, beats more that goes stale. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about content strategy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Less content, kept current, beats more that goes stale — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.