When content strategy is worth the effort

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Content strategy is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is worth it

Content is usually the reason launches slip. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How to decide

Less content, kept current, beats more that goes stale. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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 are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.