What Does a Content Strategist Do?

With so many digital marketing skills, techniques, and strategies out there, we want to help you get to grips with what a content strategist does, and how they can take your content from OK… to OH WOW.

 

Content has never been more important in digital marketing. The term ‘content is king’, or ahem, ‘queen’ has stuck around for a reason. Content strategies can sometimes be overlooked as often we’re eager to get to the bright and shiny content itself.

So, whether you are a business owner looking to grow your audience and meet your business goals, or even if you’re a copywriter looking to expand your key skills, the content strategist role could be something that you’re looking to explore. And rightly so.

This guide is for anyone who wants to hire a content strategist or become one.

Content strategy is rather like playing chess. It’s all about strategically moving the key pieces of the board to get the best overall outcome, often having to think outside the box to beat your opponent who could be your competitor, the algorithm or even your content from last month!

Grab a beverage and let’s explore the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘how’, behind what a content strategist does in the realm of content marketing.

Do I Need To Know About Content Marketing?

1000% yes! If you’re a business owner, marketer or CEO who needs to create high demand content that will attract, engage and retain your audience, content marketing should be part of your digital marketing strategy.

There are so many types of marketing out there that you can utilize to achieve your business objectives including:

• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing 
• Search Engine Optimization Marketing
• Event Management
• Product Marketing 
• Influencer Marketing 
• Inbound Marketing
• Brand Management
• Affiliate Marketing

And do you know what ties all of these together? You got it. Content marketing with a strong content marketing strategy behind it. We’re talking podcasts, blogs, social media posts, emails, anything that keeps your brand on the top of your audiences’ mind. Do you create content like this?

The premise around content marketing is not to overtly shout about your brand. Oh no, it’s to create value-led related content that will stimulate a response from your audience; to transport them on the next step of their journey with you across multiple digital channels.

Good content marketing builds trust, connection, and intrigue between you and your audience.

Enter the content strategist.

What is a Content Strategy?

Stay with me, we’re getting there, I promise. But before we dive into the nitty gritty of what a content strategist does, let’s take a step back and nail down what a content strategy is.

It’s easy to look at social media accounts with juicy content that leaves you thinking, how do they think of this stuff!? Well, more often than not, behind the scenes a well-researched content strategy has been conjured and pure content marketing magic made.

Content strategies help us remain consistent, organised and increase the chances of our digital content resonating with new and existing clients all while harnessing the intentions of the bigger picture. The masterplan of the business, if you will.

Here’s The Ultimate Checklist For Your Content Strategy

Give Your Content Purpose

A successful content strategy is all about purpose.

This is the research and development stage where you decide what you want the content you create to achieve, what actions you want your audience to take, what are the key messages you want them to understand. Nail this and you’ll consistently generate leads.

Once you’ve decided on your key message, and learnt about consumer behavior through analytics data, now is a good time to conduct your keyword research and start content planning for your projects (exciting!).

Managing content marketing campaigns or regular content in general needs organization, otherwise you risk your hard worked messages losing their purpose.

Content Planning

Before you start, content planning needs to follow on from your content strategy. Usually editorial calendars will be created and content plotted which will cover, time, dates, type of content, channels, key messaging and connected assets.

The content strategist will not only plot in key content dates, but will also use the calendar to look in retrospect at content to keep an eye on content performance. Here’s where your content strategists organizational skills come into practice.

Now, let the digital content creation begin!

Create Your Content

Get creative with your content. There are plenty of content rabbit holes for us to burrow and get lost in, which is why your content needs to stand out. This is where your strong brand and key messages really come into play.

Top Tip For Content Creation

When you discover what content works for your audience (we’ll get to that in a minute) create templates to keep your content consistent and on brand. This will also save you so much time if you or your team have other tasks to complete.

Optimize your content by using data analysis and the search engine optimization research you’ve done to get the most out of your content creation. Evergreen web content can be chopped and changed to create new ‘usable content’ across multiple channels while maintaining your key message.

Distribute Your Content

Choose your channels wisely. Just because you have accounts across all social media platforms doesn’t mean you should post the same content all over them. As well as picking the right platforms to share your content on, there also may be those that don’t suit your content or audience online.

Something the content strategists will continually review and implement.

Invest in your organization’s content management system as they are the best way to manage and distribute your content. They allow you to schedule your online content in advance and saves so much time compared to manual publishing so you can focus on fine-tuning your content strategy.

Review, Learn, and Optimize Your Content

Data. Data. Data. This is one of the BIGGEST components of a compelling content strategy. You should always be reviewing your content even once it has been published. How did it perform against your other content? Could the keywords be updated? Did you generate any leads from it? All of these questions will lend to how you adjust your content strategy, creation and distribution.

Role and Responsibilities of a Content Strategist

Now we’re getting into the details of, what does a content strategist do? Digital marketing jobs have a tendency to merge responsibilities of different key tasks due to the need for cross collaboration. The beauty of a content strategist is that they take a little from all of these skill sets to influence their work and paint the bigger picture.

Content strategists develop the components that tie together your digital marketing efforts. This can include standard operating procedures and content workflows, tone of voice style guides, and much more…

The Content Strategist Checklist For 2024

Assessing Marketing Data

To keep ahead of the curve, the content strategist will look at your content performance but also have a keen eye for industry trends and what people are talking about in your area. They’ll also be able to set and interpret marketing KPIs such as website traffic, click-through-rates, and engagement across multiple channels to influence their strategies.

Define Key Messages

You can’t create a content strategy without nailing your key brand messages. Why? This comes back to making sure that your content has purpose. Your content strategist will need great writing skills to create your key message and then break it down into content pillars.

What Are Content Pillars?

These are key themes or topics that your content will branch from making them easily recognisable to your audience.

You need to repeat your key message consistently (and often) for it to truly resonate with your target audience, especially if you are trying to expand your audience.

Conduct SEO Research

In this age of digital marketing, SEO is not only important, but powerful. Performing keyword research based on what your audience is on the lookout for will help you carve not only high quality but relevant content.

To get the most out of your content apply any new keyword research to transform existing content to engaging content that will appeal to new and existing customers.

Create Content Workflows

Getting processes together with your content strategy team is pretty crucial when it comes to creating a healthy project life cycle

What Is a Project Life Cycle?

The different stages of your project from start to finish.

This will improve your content delivery and effectiveness tenfold. Your content strategist will create a clear understanding of steps to get your content from ideated, planned, written, scheduled, distributed and reviewed usually with the help of well-oiled content management systems.

This isn’t just important for your digital marketing plans, it also lends to good process practices that will help your business bloom.

Everyone knows what they are doing and when, saving time wasted with miscommunication.

Manage and Maintain Editorial Calendars

An editorial content calendar is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your content is planned properly, that you don’t have any overlapping messages, and keeps a record of when content has gone out so you can test it later down the road.

Creating An Editorial Calendar

There are a few ways you can format your editorial calendar, whether that’s through a shared Google Sheet, or on a project management tool like Asana.

The content strategist, content marketer, or content manager can be responsible for this depending on who you have in your marketing team.

Do I Need a Content Strategist?

The above is all well and good, and makes sense, right? But the question is… do you actually need a senior content strategist to help grow your small business, big business (and any business in between), or is it a career worth investing in?

Create a Clear Message

The next big idea can sometimes pull us away from our main message making us look sloppy and inconsistent. Your content strategist along with the copywriting team will help keep your message on-brand, consistent and clear across all channels, platforms and content types.

Optimize Your Content

We can all put content together, but does it perform? Content strategists have a knack for taking your current content and streamlining it so that it’s cohesive with your brand, it can be broken down into several pieces of content repeating your message and reaching a target audience, and improve search engine rankings while remaining as high quality content.

Content strategists will also keep a record of any web content that has been written. As part of their content strategies they’ll aim to create ‘evergreen content’.

What is Evergreen Content?

Content aimed to remain ‘fresh’ to readers and keep performance in search engine rankings beyond its publish date.

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Save You Time

Creating efficient processes and content workflows may seem like a no brainer, but putting these processes into practice will not only allow your content strategist to keep on top of their content strategy, production, reporting and implementing, but also allow you the time to grow your business.

A Challenging Career

Content strategists are creative and critical, a healthy mix of both worlds. However, creating content strategies are not for the faint hearted. It takes a lot of research, forward planning, multiple moving parts, all while having to get buy in from internal stakeholders that your strategy is the way to go.

That said, content strategists are high in demand and if you get a kick out of collaboration, progressing your career as well as business objectives, seeing the results of your strategy flood in, then the job title content strategist might be one you want to explore.

Could You Be a Content Strategist?

Maybe you’re a small business owner and you wear all the job titles for your marketing efforts. You’ve read this blog and you’re thinking… yeah, I reckon I could do that. Or, you might be looking for your new venture and you’re currently a:

• Copywriter or Content Writer
• SEO Specialist
• UX Writer
• Digital Marketing Specialist
• Content Marketer

All of these roles lend beautifully to becoming an epic content strategist.

Key Skills Needed to Become a Content Strategist

What will you find in a content strategist job description? Here are the key skills you need to look for if you’re looking to hire, or have if you’re an aspiring content strategist.

To be a content strategist you need a few digital marketing techniques under your belt, including excellent writing skills, client facing skills, and understanding of marketing goals and business objectives as well as confidence using and understanding analytics tools.

Writing and Editing Skills

Your content strategist needs to be a confident writer and editor. This is why copywriters make great content strategists. They have an understanding of how to use their wordsmithery and psychology to persuade, resonate, and connect with your target audience.

Content Delivery Skills

Plucking ideas from your head and having to explain them in a clear and easy-to-understand way sounds a lot easier than it may seem. Your content strategist needs to be able to relay their ideas to the relevant stakeholders, so they need strong client facing skills.

If your content strategist can’t present their ideas internally to C-suite it’s unlikely they’ll be able to present their ideas externally.

Marketing Campaigns

A holistic view of the activities that your marketing strategy is crucial. To create an effective content strategy your content strategist needs to understand all areas of your marketing campaigns KPIs, such as website traffic, email sign ups, or social media engagement for instance.

There are a lot of moving parts in a digital marketing campaign. People don’t like (and can’t afford) to have their time wasted. So a clear, direct approach to the content strategy is something the creative team will need to deliver a successful campaign.

Branding

Before you create content, your content strategist must be a brand expert so that they can ensure cohesive content across the board. Your audience needs to recognize your values, message and product from the content being distributed.

To you it may seem like you are saying the same thing over, and over again (Yawn!). But in reality, your audience won’t necessarily see all of your other content. And when they do it will be in a sea of competitors’, different industries, and personal content.

Use your content strategy to repeat, repeat, repeat, your brand key messages consistently for the ultimate payoff.

SEO

Have experience with SEO research software. There isn’t much point creating content that no one is searching for or interested in.

Search engine optimization is something that can be applied not only to your website content, but also your social media channels and is a huge part what the content strategist will consider when putting together the content plan.

Creativity

Originality is something we all strive for in marketing, we want to be the ones to identify trends before they start trending.

A content strategist must be able to think outside the box and use their creativity to find innovative and valuable ways of sharing and creating digital content. Especially if they pepper in a little humour and portray authenticity.

Critical Thinking

Content marketing data combined with creativity is a match made in paradise. Your content strategist can’t be led astray by what they think is good, they need to make decisions based on data and content performance to influence how they deliver their strategy, then publishing relevant content based on logic.

A challenge that a content strategist might come up against is convincing the likes of peers and C-suite that their content strategy is the way to go (even when they have logic backing them).

So they need to be leaders and strong communicators.

Leadership and Communication

Project management experience is a key skill for your content strategist to have. They should have the confidence to lead projects and be able to communicate their ideas and strategy with internal stakeholders.

Multitasking and organizational skills are something content strategists shouldn’t think twice about.

In some instances a content strategist will have their own content team and manage creative professionals including, content managers, designers, and copywriters who will create content to execute the content strategy.

So, What Does A Content Strategist Do?

In summary to everything we’ve discussed, job titles ultimately give us an indication of the skillset needed. ‘Content strategist’, we know this is a strategic role.

But to be an effective content strategist you need to be a creative marketing professional who has the company’s business goals front of mind all the time, they have the creativity to think outside the box while taking into account content marketing data to create informed decisions before they deliver content to existing and prospective clients.

Ready to find or become a digital marketing content strategist who will own the content strategy chessboard?

Checkmate.

Work With Empowered English

Are you looking to take the effectiveness of your content to the next level? Work with one of our experienced copywriting experts today. Simply get in touch to book your free consultation — we can’t wait to get started.

… Or, if you’re an aspiring content strategist or copywriter, feel free to reach out, we’re always on the lookout for talented content creators to join our team.

Hiring a Content Strategist FAQ