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“Content strategy is a growing practice across many felds. This book is
an excellent introduction to content strategy, particularly for professional
and technical communicators. It provides a bird’s-eye view of everything
content, so that the learner understands the value of content strategy in
a broader context. It also gives a worm’s-eye view of the skills and steps
involved in creating compelling content. The many practical examples and
useful exercises help set this book apart.”
—Dr. Quan Zhou, Professor, Department Chair, Metropolitan State University

“This much-needed text is the frst in the feld of technical communication

to articulate—with teachers and students in mind—the practices, genres,
workfows, and underlying principles of the emerging discipline of con-
tent strategy. Teachers and students will fnd valuable guidance on how to
approach diferent stages of the content strategy process, from conducting a
content audit to developing content models to delivering, governing, and
maintaining genres. Written in an accessible and engaging style and full of
robust examples and downloadable templates, this text is a must-read for
anyone interested in learning about content strategy and developing skills
for content strategy work, which spans across disciplines and organizational
contexts, large and small.”
—Dr. Rebekka Andersen, Associate Professor, Associate
Director of Writing in the Professions, University of California, Davis

“Guiseppe Getto, Jack Labriola, and Sheryl Ruszkiewicz’s new textbook on

content strategy flls a signifcant hole in the feld of technical and profes-
sional technical communication. If you’re like me and teach whole courses
dedicated to content strategy, you already know that there are many books
for marketing or public relations students, but those devoted to TPC stu-
dents are difcult to fnd. They’re even more difcult to fnd when you’re
looking for authors who are experts in the feld with real dirt under their
fngernails gained through actual practice. I’m really looking forward to
using this book in my next content strategy course instead of having to cob-
ble together selections from disparate publications.”
—Dr. Tharon Howard, Professor, MA in Professional
Communication Graduate Program Director, Clemson University
Content Strategy

This comprehensive text provides a how-to guide for content strategy,

enabling students and professionals to understand and master the skills
needed to develop and manage technical content in a range of professional
contexts.
The landscape of technical communication has been revolutionized by
emerging technologies such as content management systems, open-source
information architecture, and application programming interfaces that change
the ways professionals create, edit, manage, and deliver content. This textbook
helps students and professionals develop relevant skills for this changing
marketplace. It takes readers through essential skills including audience analysis;
content auditing; assembling content strategy plans; collaborating with other
content developers; identifying appropriate channels of communication; and
designing, delivering, and maintaining genres appropriate to those channels.
It contains knowledge and best practices gleaned from decades of research
and practice in content strategy and provides its audience with a thorough
introductory text in this essential area.
Content Strategy works as a core or supplemental textbook for undergraduate
and graduate classes, as well as certifcation courses, in content strategy,
content management, and technical communication. It also provides an
accessible introduction for professionals looking to develop their skills and
knowledge.

Guiseppe Getto is Associate Professor of Technical Communication at

Mercer University and President and Founder of Content Garden, Inc., a
content strategy and UX consulting frm.

Jack T. Labriola is Experience Design Senior Researcher at Truist and

is Vice President of User Experience and Content Strategy at Content
Garden, Inc.

Sheryl Ruszkiewicz is Special Lecturer at Oakland University, where she

teaches in the First-Year Writing Program.
ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication
Tharon Howard, Series Editor

Editing in the Modern Classroom

Michael J. Albers and Suzan Flanagan

Translation and Localization: A Guide for Technical

Communicators
Bruce Maylath, and Kirk St. Amant

Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building

Coalitions for Action
Rebecca Walton, Kristen R. Moore and Natasha N. Jones

Content Strategy in Technical Communication

Guiseppe Getto, Jack T. Labriola and Sheryl Ruszkiewicz

Teaching Content Management in Technical and Professional

Communication
Tracy Bridgeford

The Profession and Practice of Technical Communication

Yvonne Cleary

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication:

Problems and Solutions Toward Social Sustainability
Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge

Content Strategy: A How-to Guide

Guiseppe Getto, Jack T. Labriola and Sheryl Ruszkiewicz

For additional information on this series please visit www.routledge.com/

ATTW-Series-in-Technical-and-Professional-Communication/book-
series/ATTW, and for information on other Routledge titles visit www.
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Content Strategy
A How-to Guide

Guiseppe Getto
Jack T. Labriola
Sheryl Ruszkiewicz
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2023
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Title: Content strategy: a how-to guide/Guiseppe Getto,
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ISBN: 9780367759506 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780367751036 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003164807 (ebk)
DOI: [10.4324/9781003164807]
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For all the content people out there, new and
experienced. You know who you are. May this book
make your lives a little easier.
Contents

Introduction: What Is Content Strategy? xi

1 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 1

2 The Content Strategy Process 18

3 Audience Analysis 35

4 Identifying Content Types and Channels 57

5 Content Auditing 71

6 Content Modeling 104

7 Assembling a Content Strategy Plan 120

8 Collaborating With Other Content Developers 133

9 Revising and Editing Genres 142

10 Ensuring Content Usability and Accessibility 150

11 Delivering, Governing, and Maintaining Genres 163

12 Localizing Content 171

13 Content Tools and Technologies 177

14 Establishing Yourself as a Content Strategist 191

Index 200
Introduction
What Is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is a wide-ranging feld that encompasses everything from

people who manage websites for a living to people who create reposito-
ries of content that companies can use for documentation. As organizations
across industries, including technology, engineering, healthcare, and educa-
tion, have grown, so have their needs for various types of content.
By “content” we mean useful information that an audience will consume. If
you are a cook who keeps track of recipes in a private notebook, you prob-
ably don’t think of yourself as a content strategist. If you help a food man-
ufacturing company to manage its public information across a variety of
demographics and distribution channels, however, you might, in fact, be a
content strategist.
People who manage content for a living are everywhere these days.
Besides content strategists, they include:

• Technical writers
• Technical editors
• Journalists
• Freelance writers
• Bloggers
• Creative writers
• Educators
• Instructional designers
• Researchers
• Publishers
• Website managers

Jobs like these have grown along with a global economy that involves pro-
cessing more and more information. Many of us wake up to a smart device
that serves as our alarm clock, personal digital assistant (PDA), and mes-
saging system. We check updates on our laptop via social media platforms,
company websites, online magazines, and news websites. We watch short
videos, TV shows, and flms on our smart television via streaming websites
like YouTube, Netfix, and Hulu. We shop for products ranging from food
xii Introduction
to furniture through e-commerce websites owned by both large and small
companies. We even use the websites of national and regional non-profts
to connect us to communities and individuals in need. And many of us
also work to develop, manage, or distribute information to one or more
audiences, whether we are a teacher, a communications manager for a non-
proft, a documentation specialist within a software company, or even a
lawyer.
All of these forms of information have to be managed within their spe-
cifc channels, defned as any means where content is distributed in order for it to be
consumed by a specifc audience. The same piece of information can’t seamlessly
fow through a blog displayed on a large desktop monitor, a notifcation on
a small smart device, and a streaming video watched on a digital advertising
display. Someone has to develop, format, edit, style, and deliver the content
to each of those channels. If they are very savvy and have access to the best
tools available, they may be able to save time by creating the content in a
format that will be styled by each channel appropriately. Sometimes, this
is impossible, such as when delivering the same information via a writ-
ten genre like a technical report and a videographic genre like a television
newscast.
Because of these challenges, organizations that have funding to do so,
and that know such professionals exist, hire dedicated professionals who can
help them manage all of their information for all of their channels. If they
are a larger organization, they probably hire multiple someones. Within
even small-to-medium-sized organizations, professionals such as these are
responsible for producing and managing such varying genres of content as:

• Internal reports
• Emails
• Memos
• Handbooks
• Strategy plans
• Webpages
• Ebooks
• Content repositories such as content management systems
• Social media posts

These professionals aren’t always called content strategists, but essentially

that’s what they are. What sets them apart from the professionals we men-
tioned earlier, such as technical writers or educators, you may ask?
The answer to that question is really a core purpose of this book. We want
to make it clear to people new to content strategy what this feld is, what
people in it do for a living, and how people can use its best practices in any
career that involves communication.
Keep in mind: within all these organizations we’ve alluded to so far,
within universities, and K-12 schools, and news companies, and law ofces,
 Introduction xiii
there are professionals working to develop and publish content. These folks
typically have some kind of communication-related verb in their title such
as “writer,” “editor,” or “manager.” They’re typically responsible for a specifc
type of content. A technical writer working for a software company is most
likely in charge of writing software documentation. An editor for a small
publishing company is typically responsible for editing manuscripts that the
company receives from its authors. A website manager is typically responsi-
ble for managing content within a single website, or sometimes even just a
very complex part of a single website.
But who is managing all of this content collectively within these organi-
zations? Who is making sure it all makes sense and aligns with an organiza-
tion’s goals? Who is making sure that it’s appropriate to every channel an
audience uses to consume it? Who is making sure it’s updated, optimized,
and delivered on time?
Enter the role of the content strategist as purveyor and manager of rel-
evant information. This is a person who is not a manager, a writer, or an
editor, per se, but who often works in close proximity with these other types
of professionals to make sure content is useful and usable for its target audi-
ences. Content strategists will often conduct focus groups or other research
to adapt existing content to customer needs. Overall, they manage, shape,
and deliver content and teach organizations, and people within organiza-
tions, how to do so as well.
And there are several books on content strategy that have been written
over the past several decades since the feld emerged. Some of them are
listed in Chapter 1 of this book as examples of further reading. Few of them
serve as introductory texts for content strategy, however, which is where this
book comes in.
This book is for:

• Undergraduate students who are interested in a brief introduction to

content strategy, including some of its important skills, genres of docu-
ments used in the feld, and further readings to learn more
• Graduate students who are interested in learning specializations in con-
tent strategy, as well as more advanced skills, workfows, and best prac-
tices associated with content strategy
• Technical communication teachers looking to learn content strategy or
to add it to their pedagogies within academic or workplace contexts
• Technical communication researchers seeking a reference guide as to
best practices within this growing discipline
• Technical communication practitioners working in industry who are
being called upon to do content strategy work in some way, shape, or
form and need to quickly skill up in this feld
• Technical communication practitioners seeking to inject content
strategy best practices into their organizations through training or
teaching
xiv Introduction
Defning Content Strategy
There are multiple defnitions for content strategy that are currently used
within the feld. Rahel Bailie has defned content strategy as “a repeatable
system that governs the management of content throughout the entire life-
cycle” (as cited in O’Keefe & Pringle, 2012, p. 18). Additionally, Kristina
Halvorson famously defned content strategy in a 2008 article as “plan-
ning for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”
These two broad defnitions still apply to a lot of what modern content
strategists do:

• Planning: Content strategists are responsible for developing plans, tem-

plates, and guidelines for content.
• Creation: Content strategists are responsible for developing, or oversee-
ing the development of, a wide variety of content, from reusable content
stored in a repository to individual articles for a public-facing website.
• Publication: Content strategists are responsible for ensuring that content
is published and delivered through the correct communication channels
and is formatted correctly for specifc genres that are appropriate to
those channels.
• Governance: Content strategists are responsible for managing content
once it’s published, including keeping it updated, relevant, and authori-
tative over time, a process that should begin as soon as goals are set and
technologies assembled to manage content.

If that sounds like a lot of work for one professional, it is! That’s why con-
tent strategists often collaborate with other types of professionals who are
responsible in some way for content. More than anything, however: con-
tent strategists manage content for their organizations. They create plans and
strategies for the organization to follow and ensure everyone in the organi-
zation follows them.
At their heart, though, content strategists are efective writers and com-
municators. They have outstanding instincts when it comes to develop-
ing the right messaging for a specifc audience. Whether they are creating
content for a complex website or a simple handbook, content strategists
understand how to craft a wide range of written genres for a wide range of
audiences and how to manage this type of writing work in a way that melds
well with organizational goals.

Tools of the Trade

Of course, lots of things have changed since Halvorson frst brought content
strategy to the attention of many content-focused professionals in 2008.
Most notably, technologies have gotten more complex, including those that
writers use to develop and deliver content.
 Introduction xv
Within your average organization, writers may be using technologies as
diverse as:

• Desktop publishing software

• Collaboration tools such as video conferencing software and collabora-
tive word processors (like Google Docs or OneDrive)
• Authoring tools that allow writers to quickly create content in a basic
format and then output that content into a variety of other formats
• Open-source information architecture that helps writers structure con-
tent in such a way that it can be used by a variety of other people and
technologies
• Content management systems (CMSs) or technologies that automati-
cally store and format content for future use
• Component-based content management systems (CCMSs) that break
content down into its basic components so that it can be reassembled
later into complex genres such as large-scale manuals that need con-
tinuous updates and are distributed to thousands of audience members
simultaneously
• Application programming interfaces (APIs) or tools within existing
applications that enable writers to build their own, simpler applications,
often for the purposes of storing content within those larger applications

Only the largest companies, such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, use many
or all of these technologies for managing their content, but many compa-
nies use at least some of them. Such technologies help organizations, such
as small, regional non-profts, mid-sized software development frms, and
engineering frms, to develop, publish, and manage their content more ef-
ciently than if they were writing without them.
Most notably, these technologies allow organizations to store content in
a central repository that they can then draw on later for all the genres they
need to write and deliver. This practice is commonly referred to as “single-
sourcing” because the organization is able to keep all of their content in a
single, authoritative repository that serves as the single source for all of their
published genres.

Putting the Tools to Work: The Case of

Educational Services
Just imagine for a moment being a technical writer for a regional educational
services company that specializes in providing after-school programs and
associated content to K-12 schools. These programs are provided through
proprietary manuals on how schools can run each program, available for
a subscription fee to the company. For an additional fee, staf of the com-
pany will administer the programs in-person, in which case the programs
need to be reviewed by administrators of each school for compliance with
xvi Introduction
their ongoing programs and policies. Because of these multiple audiences,
each educational program manual has to be produced with very complex
specifcations in mind so everyone involved in their production, from school
administrators looking for new after-school programming to teachers look-
ing to bring new after-school programs to their school to parents trying to
assess the appropriateness of programming for their individual child, need to
have continual access to this educational manual content at all times. And if
a policy or state law should change, this change needs to be instantly com-
municated to everyone involved in the process.
Before the internet, such technical content was much more difcult
to manage. It had to be published in print and shipped to all the people
associated with the educational services frm. For this to happen, it had
to be written, edited for accuracy, formatted, printed, mass-produced, and
shipped by snail mail. Then, if any aspect of the after-school programming
changed, the process had to happen all over again. And some of these manu-
als were hundreds of pages long!
Now, imagine the same educational services frm today that has all of their
content stored in a content management system. The content management
system is set up to display the most current after-school programming for
everyone involved. It is organized by the type of audience member trying to
access it: administrator, teacher, parent, technical writer, or program staf. It
is searchable by article, too, so people don’t have to wade through hundreds
of pages of writing to fnd the information they need. Most importantly,
however, any changes can be made by logging into the system, making edits,
and hitting publish.
If it is a very large company or has a smart content strategist, this content
might also be hooked to a lot of other publishing platforms, such as the
help forum for teachers looking to run their own after-school programs, a
newsletter system for parents that provides updates about what their kids are
doing in individual programs, and even a mobile app that allows administra-
tors to look up the information they need about policy compliance on their
smartphones. When a technical writer at the company updates any piece of
content, it instantly updates to all these other genres as well.
Someone has to keep this system working, however. Someone has to
oversee the whole process to ensure that the content is working properly,
that it gets published to the correct formats, that it makes sense for each dif-
ferent audience it serves. Someone has to be responsible, in other words, for
getting the right content to the right people at the right time for the right
reasons.
That someone is a content strategist.

Introducing This Book

This book showcases many of the essential skills, workfows, and tools you’ll
need to become a content strategist.
 Introduction xvii
Lots of books exist on what content strategy is and how to do it. What
this book adds are:

• An easily understandable introduction to this emerging feld catered

toward students and others who are brand new to it
• A commonsense overview of the workfows and tools used by modern-
day content strategists
• Examples of how to use these workfows and tools within actual projects
• Exercises and assignments educators and trainers can use to help any
type of learner skill up in content strategy

In the past, it was enough to be a talented writer and editor to make it as a

writing professional in a technical feld, such as technical writing or techni-
cal editing. That simply isn’t the case anymore. If you are someone who has
a passion for delivering useful, usable information to people who need it,
then you’ll need to learn how to manage content and you’ll need to master
a variety of tools to do so.
This book has arisen from the experiences of the authors, some of whom
have worked as active content strategists for several years now. All of us have
discussed new developments in the feld of technical communication with a
host of practitioners, however. We’ve learned about the challenges they face
on a daily basis. And we’ve learned how they solve problems.
Next we describe some of the ways these professionals solve problems.

The Strategy Part of Content Strategy

Content strategists do a lot of work to develop and publish useful, usable
information for a variety of audiences. They typically do this by working
within organizations to break down what Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper
(2012) have called “content silos” (p. 133). Sticking with our running exam-
ple, what if the education services frm, to save money, decided not to hire
a content strategist. So, rather than building a content management system
to manage all their content, they just have their technical writers work in
isolation on individual pieces of content.
The writers then store these pieces of content wherever it is convenient
for them to do so. Some versions are kept on the laptops of individual writ-
ers. Some get uploaded to a company intranet so they’re available to other
departments. These disparate content pieces then get used by marketers,
customer service specialists, and other professionals within the company,
and many of these professionals also create new versions of them that are in
turn stored in other places.
Over time, the versions of these content pieces get stored up in these con-
tent silos. Because no one person is paying attention to all the content, it’s
getting created, and recreated, and reused willy nilly. School administrators
are getting angry because the requirements they’re asking customer service
xviii Introduction
specialists and marketers for aren’t ending up in the fnal after-school pro-
gram manuals they receive. The company is losing money because of this
as customers cancel their subscriptions and ask for a refund. This is further
slowing down the process of producing program manuals for new custom-
ers, who are also getting angry about these delays.
Some of these customers decide to purchase their educational programs
from another company because of this. The superintendent of one very
large school district serving several dozen schools decides to sue the frm
for breach of contract when they receive several manuals that aren’t to spec.
They want to be paid for the time lost, which has damaged their reputation
with several parent associations and local school boards who have been wait-
ing for the programs to be put in place and aren’t seeing progress.
The educational services frm falls on hard times and eventually goes
bankrupt, leaving hundreds of employees out of work.
This may seem like a doomsday scenario, but the current economy is
littered with failed companies who were unable to adapt to current market
demands. Many companies exist in very competitive marketplaces, mean-
ing that if they fall behind, their competitors will begin to lure customers
away.
Successful companies know that they need a strategy for their content
that covers everything from marketing to customer acquisition to sales to
customer service to customer support after purchase. Customers want to
buy from highly organized companies that take care of them. They want to
see the same information in every piece of content. If they see conficting
information, they lose confdence.
In order to ensure all the content an organization is publishing to every
source is current, authoritative, and credible, someone has to manage that
process. Someone has to make sure that new content is developed and pub-
lished in tandem with organizational goals. Without that someone, or sev-
eral someones if the organization is large or has very complex content needs,
content will quickly become siloed again and will begin to drift away from
organizational goals.
This is why many content strategists create frameworks, guidelines, and
templates for content within their organizations. Known collectively as
content models, these frameworks ensure that anyone developing content
within the organization is following the same rules. These content models
are often included as part of overall content strategy plans, which often
include:

• Goals: measurable, achievable, simple, task-oriented objectives for what

content should do for an audience
• Audiences: a descriptive rendering of each audience group as a persona
or representative audience member
• Channels: a complete listing of all the various communication channels
through which content will be delivered
 Introduction xix
• Content models: frameworks for messaging within each channel that
align the specifc requirements of the channel with content goals and
audience needs
• Editorial calendars: lists of tasks that need to be accomplished on a regu-
lar basis, including which tools are best suited for which tasks

And, of course, as we’ve already mentioned, many of these content models

are now built into the technologies that organizations use to write in the
frst place. That way the technologies control the formatting of every piece
of writing produced and everyone is on the same page.
Regardless, someone has to make sure all of that happens. It’s the con-
tent strategist’s job to make sure that every audience the organization serves
receives appropriate information.
Next, we turn to some of the ways content strategists ensure audiences
are served.

Zeroing in on Audiences
Recall that the overall goal of content strategy is to plan for the creation,
publication, and governance of useful, usable information. This also means
doing so in a repeatable manner by creating consistently structured con-
tent for reuse, managing that content in a defnitive source, and assembling
content on demand to meet audience needs. All the best laid content plans
will amount to nothing if they don’t result in content that meets audience
needs. Audiences drive this process. Content that is seen as useful by target
audience members must be published in a timely manner and must reach
each audience member in the appropriate genre—no small feat in the sea of
communication channels that currently exist.
This is why content strategists need to pay close attention to audience
needs. And they need to match those needs with appropriate communica-
tion channels and genres. A blog post probably isn’t an appropriate genre
for specifc programming information tailored toward school administra-
tors who are existing customers, for example. It is probably an appropriate
genre for administrators who are shopping around for a new supplier of
after-school programming, however, because it is easily fndable in a search
engine.
Such a blog post that is focused on customer acquisition might mention
general aspects of after-school programs, such as the types of activities avail-
able, but wouldn’t divulge such information as how to run entire programs
for a given school year. Information like the latter should probably be part
of a password-protected content management system that only existing cus-
tomers with a paid subscription have access to. That way, the company can
ensure that only paying customers have access to full programming and can
indemnify themselves against anyone attempting to implement one of their
after-school programs in a way in which it wasn’t intended.
xx Introduction
A content strategist serving these two very diferent audiences, new cus-
tomers and existing customers, needs to produce very diferent types of
content. In order to do so, they need to know their audience inside and out.
They need to know what each type of audience expects, what they value,
and what will most appeal to them. They need to know what type of infor-
mation is useful and usable to each audience, in other words.
There are a lot of diferent research methods, or ways to gather data on
audience preferences, such as:

• Surveys of audience members that ask them about demographic infor-

mation and content preferences
• Interviews with randomly selected audience members to uncover more
detailed needs and pain points
• Usability testing of content in a variety of media
• Analysis of data collected through analytics programs or through routine
organizational processes such as consumer complaints or error reports
• Analysis of search engine data
• Analysis of usage data within a consumer-facing content management
system or other platform

The goal of this audience analysis is to understand the needs of specifc types
of audience members in order to create content that appeals to each type of
audience member who will see a specifc piece of content.
Content strategists often display the results of audience analysis as perso-
nas, or archetypal audience members. Such personas typically include the
following information for each type of audience:

• Name
• Photo
• Demographics (age, race, gender, location, occupation, etc.)
• Story: What makes them a good audience member for this content?
What cultural values do they bring to the content?
• Goals and challenges: What is the audience member trying to accom-
plish with the help of this content? What pain points are they experi-
encing that can be alleviated through this useful information?
• How I can help: What can the strategist do through their content to
help the audience member achieve their goals and alleviate their pain?

Many companies have multiple personas that they use across departments.
These personas should be tied to actual customer demographics to ensure
they represent real, live customers the organization is serving.

What the Future Holds for Content Strategy

Content strategy will only grow in importance as organizations, and the
products and services they provide, increase in complexity. As this complexity
 Introduction xxi
increases, the content associated with it will also grow in complexity. All this
complexity will require people who can make complexity simple for a spe-
cifc audience.
Content will continue to be critical in all contexts, across all sectors of the
world economy. The strategies for developing and delivering it to people
will change, however. That’s why the workfows presented in this book are
technology- and genre-agnostic, meaning they can be applied in a variety of
contexts, regardless of the tools available.

Book Takeaways
This is a book for content strategy students, teachers, researchers, and prac-
titioners, as well as students within the feld of technical communication and
adjacent felds (user experience, marketing, communication, business, etc.).
In its pages you will learn:

• Best practices for the creation, publication, and governance of useful,

usable information
• Best practices for managing content in a wide variety of formats
• Best practices for assembling content on demand to meet audience needs
• Best practices for creating repeatable systems for doing all these things

Overview of Book Chapters

Here is an overview of all the chapters in the book.
Chapter 1 introduces key concepts emerging within content strategy that
represent the best practices that are central to the feld. These concepts
include intelligent content, unifed content strategy, and the content strat-
egy quad. The concepts are discussed in the context of a rapidly evolving
feld. The chapter ends with a list of further reading to help learners do their
own research into content strategy.
Chapter 2 discusses many of the essential workfows of modern-day con-
tent strategists, including how to analyze an audience, how to audit existing
content, how to model content, how to assemble a content strategy plan,
how to work with other content developers, how to navigate content and
constraints within an organization, and how to develop specifc content
genres for specifc channels of communication while adhering to an organi-
zation’s mission, vision, and goals. These workfows are explained as an
overarching process of writing, editing, publishing, managing, and deliver-
ing technical content. Each succeeding chapter will then discuss each work-
fow in-depth, providing in-depth examples, discussion questions, example
assignments, and learning outcomes for that specifc workfow.
Chapter 3 delves into the intricacies of audience analysis, including
identifying potential audiences, gathering audience data through diferent
research methods, and developing audience personas. The overall goal of the
chapter is to emphasize that a concrete sense of audience must be established
xxii Introduction
before any other workfow can take place, and that depending on the audi-
ence, the type of content that needs to be created and accessed can vary.
Chapter 4 helps readers identify diferent content types and their impor-
tance to content strategy. In order to share content, you need to identify the
diferent channels for delivering content, as well as how to develop a chan-
nel plan best suited to a specifc situation. The chapter emphasizes that there
is no one-size-fts-all approach to content development, but that content
must be created with a specifc audience and channel in mind.
Chapter 5 introduces readers to the essential task of content auditing, or
the method of assessing existing content before developing new content.
The chapter covers many aspects important to content auditing, includ-
ing developing a content rubric, conducting a thorough content inventory,
assessing content via a rubric, and reporting out fndings to external audi-
ences. This chapter also raises the importance of understanding the objective
of your content audit, and auditing with a goal-oriented mindset. Addition-
ally, this chapter discusses tools that are useful during this process, including
site-mapping technologies and search engine web crawlers.
Chapter 6 delves into content modeling by providing a large list of genres
that are common to content strategy in technical communication, including
blog posts, social media posts, emails, webpages, and structured content built
into a component-based content management system. Heuristics are also
included in this chapter that will help readers quickly assess the key attrib-
utes of any genre, the appropriate genre for a specifc channel, and how to
produce content to those specifcations.
Chapter 7 discusses the necessity of putting together a formal content
strategy plan that contains goals, audiences, channels, content models for
specifc genres, and an ongoing editorial calendar that includes a workfow
for making use of tools. This chapter helps readers develop such plans in a
hands-on, contextualized manner, including by providing a planning cheat
sheet developed by the authors.
Chapter 8 covers collaboration with other content developers, including
technical writers, technical editors, subject matter experts, marketers, and
managers. Specifc workfows for collaboration that are common to content
strategy are discussed, including organizing planning meetings, developing
an editorial calendar, and revising and editing content.
Chapter 9 assists readers in revising and editing specifc content genres
through the introduction of best practices in peer review, editing, revision,
and audience alignment.
Chapter 10 explains how learners can ensure their content is usable and
accessible for their target audiences. The chapter includes explanations of
usability testing research methods, accessibility guidelines, how to assess the
usability and accessibility requirements of specifc audiences, and how to
adapt content to meet these requirements before delivery.
Chapter 11 covers the fner points of governing content throughout its
lifecycle. Emphasis is placed on continuing the best practices introduced
throughout the book including audience analysis, content auditing, and
 Introduction xxiii
content strategy planning to ensure content remains relevant, authoritative,
and credible over time.
Chapter 12 explores how to localize content to specifc cultures, includ-
ing international and non-English-speaking audiences. Emphasis is placed
on the diferences between localization, which focuses on cultural knowl-
edge, and translation, which focuses on linguistic variance. Transcreation of
genres across cultures is also discussed, as are strategies for localizing multi-
lingual content within disparate cultures while it is being developed.
Chapter 13 introduces learners to some of the core tools and technologies
of content strategy, including desktop publishing, collaboration tools, author-
ing tools, content management systems (CMSs), component-based content
management systems (CCMSs), and application programming interfaces
(APIs). Using Hovde & Renguette’s (2017) technological literacy framework,
each technology is explored within the context of a specifc type of content
project so that readers can evaluate its function and use within a specifc con-
text, as well as its place within the broader content strategy landscape.
Finally, Chapter 14 concludes the book by discussing strategies for formal
education, lifelong learning, and career development in content strategy.
The chapter includes exercises learners can engage in to help them network
with others interested in content strategy, to develop an active portfolio in
the discipline, and to seek out related internships and jobs.

Getting Started Guide: Exploring Content Strategy

To explore the burgeoning world of content strategy, try doing some

of your own research about the feld. Review one or more of the
sources listed in the Further Reading section. Also, try using Google
(or your other favorite search engine) to search for phrases like:

• What is content strategy?

• Content strategy defnition
• Content strategy skill sets

Peruse the information you fnd and use it to answer some of the fol-
lowing questions about the topics presented in this chapter:

1. What alternative defnitions of content strategy did you come

across? How do these alternative defnitions compare with the
defnitions presented in this chapter?
2. What specifc skill sets did you see mentioned in blogs and articles
about content strategy? How do these skill sets compare to the
ones presented in this chapter?
xxiv Introduction
References
Halvorson, K. (2008). The discipline of content strategy. A List Apart. Retrieved from:
http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy.
Hovde, M. & Renguette, C. (2017). Technological literacy: A framework for teach-
ing technical communication software tools. Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(4),
395–411.
O’Keefe, S. S. & Pringle, A. S. (2012). Content strategy 101: Transform technical content into
a business asset. Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc.
Rockley, A. & Cooper, C. (2012). Managing Enterprise Content: A Unifed Content Strategy.
2nd ed. New Riders.

Further Reading
Andersen, R. (2015). The emergence of content strategy work and recommended
resources. Communication Design Quarterly, 2(4), 6–13.
Content strategy: The SEO’s guide to content marketing. Moz. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20,
2022, from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-strategy
Department of Health and Human Services. (2016, January 24). Content strategy basics.
Usability.gov. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.usability.gov/what-and-why/
content-strategy.html
Halvorson, K. (2017, October 26). What is content strategy? Connecting the dots between
disciplines. Brain Trafc. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.braintrafc.com/
insights/what-is-content-strategy
Patel, N. (2022, January 7). Content strategy: What is it & how to develop one [2022]. Neil
Patel. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-strategy-
a-development-guide/
1 Key Concepts in Content
Strategy

As a feld, content strategy has been around for some time now. Kristina
Halvorson notably defned content strategy in a 2008 article as “planning
for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content,”
so many mark that year as the birth date of the feld. However, strategists
like Halvorson were already working to develop content in a strategic
manner, mostly for websites, for several years before she wrote that arti-
cle. Halvorson’s article and her ensuing book Content Strategy for the Web
certainly put a name to this burgeoning collection of professional prac-
tices, as well as bringing it into the professional spotlight as a feld in its
own right.
As McCoy (2021) pointed out, the practice of content strategy dates back
to the advent of early publications like Poor Richard’s Almanack, a genre that
Benjamin Franklin used to disseminate aphorisms and proverbs, many of
which are still with us to this day. Franklin, being the savvy content creator
he was, knew that simply disseminating practical information on the calen-
dar, weather, astronomy, and astrology of his time wasn’t enough to capture
an audience’s attention. So, Franklin created the persona of Poor Richard,
a relatable astrologer and lover of learning who told witty stories that read-
ers of the time could relate to. These stories were serialized, meaning that
people had to buy the newest edition to read the next installment.
This was content strategy, because the content, the information used by audi-
ences, was the selling point of Franklin’s publication, not the container, or
channel. There were a number of almanacs being published at the time.
Franklin’s version sold so well because he gave his audience something extra,
something they couldn’t get from other publications, something they could
relate to as people.
At the same time, his almanac made use of cutting-edge technology, at
least for the mid-eighteenth century. Though the printing press had been
invented centuries before, there were few citizens of the original 13 colonies
that would become the United States who had access to one, much less the
ability to utilize one for their own economic beneft. The ability to publish

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164807-1
2 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
and distribute high-quality, printed content was the best way to reach a large
audience during this time.
Hundreds of years later, content strategists are still attempting to do what
Franklin did so well: to create timely content that will reach and engage
its target audience. Things are a little more complex now, however. We
have internet, mobile devices, wearable devices, e-readers, and thousands of
applications that run on these technologies. We have websites, mobile apps,
augmented reality, and even virtual reality.
The challenge of specializing in a feld like content strategy is that
the means of distributing content change constantly. At the same time,
there are technologies that have been with us since the early days of the
internet, such as search engines and webpages. Print is very much still a
thing, with book sales still regularly exceeding 650 million units per year
(Watson, 2021). Rather than subtracting technologies since print was the
only real means of disseminating information to a broad audience, we’ve
added many new technologies that people can interact with in completely
novel ways.
Social media was just getting started when Halvorson frst declared con-
tent strategy a profession in 2008, as one example. Now we have dozens of
social media applications, with new ones being rolled out every year. As a
case in point, only a handful of social media channels have emerged that
capture a sizable portion of internet users. Many content channels don’t
make the cut and end up falling by the wayside. Some readers of this book
may remember a little website called MySpace that captured the collective
imagination of an entire generation. And though it continues to exist in
a new form (https://myspace.com/), it is no longer the preeminent virtual
meeting space it once was.
What all of these technologies have in common is that they all:

• Are centered around content, or useful information

• Provide that content to a defned audience of people
• Are used by organizations to promote products and services
• Use some kind of publishing model that distributes content in a defn-
able manner
• Are businesses in their own right, meaning they proft of of the dis-
tribution of content, typically through selling advertisers the ability to
reach audience members

Outside of these broad strokes, however, all content-based technologies are

very diferent from one another. They use diferent means of disseminating
content. They target diferent groups of people. They allow people to use,
distribute, and create their own content in diferent ways. And they use dif-
ferent content types to accomplish all this.
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 3
These diferences are the key to concepts we’ve seen arising in content
strategy since 2008. At time of writing, no one person can claim to be a
strategist of every type of content that exists. No one person can claim to
be an expert on distributing content via all the currently available chan-
nels. Rather, today’s content strategists often brand themselves as experts
of particular types of content, particular types of channels, even particular
industries.
Employers want content strategists with experience that closely mir-
rors their organizational goals. And with organizations ranging from K-12
schools to large technology companies discovering and utilizing content
strategy, this means there are many, many opportunities for specialization in
this feld.
As mentioned earlier, specialization can also mean one’s approach to par-
ticular technologies, content types, or content channels. Or it can mean a
specifc approach to the very practice of content strategy itself that sets one apart
from what other practitioners are doing. Most people defne this kind of
specialization in a feld as a “best practice,” meaning a practice that other
members of the feld should follow. We’ll start with this broadest defnition
of specialization here because we think it will help readers best understand
the current shape of this feld.

Content Strategy Best Practices

As a rule, we’re going to introduce content strategy concepts in this sec-
tion that appear to fall under the heading of “best practices,” meaning
that a lot of people in the feld of content strategy continue to agree
that they’re useful in many situations. Many best practices have fallen
by the wayside over the years as technologies change or audience needs
shift. Older readers of this book may remember something called RSS
(or Really Simple Syndication) that was once an efective way for website
owners to allow users to subscribe to their website for updates. As open-
source content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress, Drupal, and
Joomla! began to develop their own internal features for subscribing users
that came pre-packaged with their default settings, RSS slowly lost its
dominance as a delivery mechanism for website content (though podcast-
ers still use it).
There is also a lesson about content strategy best practices in this story,
however, because from our viewpoint as people who have followed the con-
tent strategy conversation for many years now, we’ve seen many practices
come and go. The ones that seem to endure are mostly technology-agnostic,
meaning they focus on the strategy part of content strategy, rather than on a
very specifc content type or content channel.
One of the frst such concepts was Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy
Quad (Figure 1.1):
4 Key Concepts in Content Strategy

Substance Workflow

Core
Strategy

Structure Governance

Content Components People Components

Figure 1.1 The content strategy quad
Source: Copyright 2022, Brain Trafc Inc. All rights reserved.
https://www.braintrafc.com/insights/brain-trafc-lands-the-quad

As Halvorson’s company Brain Trafc describes the quad, “At the center
is the core content strategy, the approach you’ll take with your website,
product, or service content to meet user needs and achieve your business
goals” (Brain Trafc, 2017). As you can see from the image, this core content
strategy involves separating content components from people components.
First published in her 2012 book Content Strategy for the Web with Melissa
Rach, the quad was one of the frst depictions of content strategy as involv-
ing both content and people. It was also one of the frst depictions to break
up content strategy into four interlocking concerns: substance, structure,
workfow, and governance. Put simply:
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 5
Content-focused components
• Substance: What kind of content do we need (topics, types, sources, etc.),
and what messages does content need to communicate to our audience?
• Structure: How is content prioritized, organized, formatted, and dis-
played? (Structure can include communication planning, IA, metadata,
data modeling, and linking strategies)

People-focused components
• Workfow: What processes, tools, and human resources are required for
content initiatives to launch successfully and maintain ongoing quality?
• Governance: How are key decisions about content and content strategy
made? How are changes initiated and communicated?
(Brain Trafc, 2017)

The impact of these ideas on the feld of content strategy can’t be over-
stated. The quad was arguably the frst time anyone had created a simple
infographic that depicted what content strategy is. And reading through the
dozens of books and articles that have been published in the feld since, the
idea that content strategy involves both people and content components that
are mobilized in a variety of strategic processes is still at the heart of how
content strategy is thought of today.
Another early concept for the entire process of content strategy is the
Unifed Content Strategy. First introduced by Rockley & Cooper (2012),
they defned this concept in the following way:

A unifed content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all con-

tent requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for
reuse, managing that content in a defnitive source, and assembling con-
tent on demand to meet customer needs. A unifed content strategy
can help organizations avoid the content silo trap, reducing the costs of
creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensuring that content
efectively supports both organizational and customer needs.
(p. 10)

Some keywords that would heavily infuence later thoughts on content

strategy here are “repeatable,” “structured,” and “silo.” Essentially, Rockley
and Cooper were arguably the frst thinkers to identify a major problem
within many organizations: that they are creating content in a haphazard
manner without a repeatable system in place. This siloing of content causes a
lot of waste as individual content creators between departments in the same
organization duplicate eforts, or even create content that works at cross
purposes against the content of other departments.
Another cause of content siloing is the creation of content in a spe-
cifc format. If you publish content in a webpage and then try to use
6 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
that same content in a help doc, often the formatting doesn’t translate
between channels. This creates further waste as you have to reformat
content constantly. Rockley and Cooper were early adopters of the idea
of “structured content,” meaning content that is stripped of a specifc
generic format (e.g., blog post) and stored in its most basic form (e.g., as
textual information in a database). We discuss structured content more
thoroughly in Chapter 8, but the key point here is that structuring con-
tent allows content creators to pull up content in its basic form and then
publish it on demand in specifc formats without having to remove all the
markers of its last published format.
An important attribute of content that content strategists should strive
for that was also introduced by Rockley and Cooper is the idea of intel-
ligent content. As they put it, “[i]ntelligent content is designed to be
modular, structured, reusable, format free, and semantically rich and, as a
consequence, discoverable, reconfgurable, and adaptable” (p. 16). As they
would later clarify with their coauthor Scott Able in the book Intelligent
Content: A Primer: “There are two parts to this defnition. The character-
istics that make content intelligent (modular, structured, reusable, format
free, and semantically rich) and the capabilities we gain from adding intel-
ligence to our content (discoverability, reconfgurability, and adaptability)”
(Rockley, et al, 2015, p. 1). Essentially, intelligent content is diferentiated
from regular content because it’s reusable and can be easily adapted to new
situations, largely through stripping it of its generic format as we described
earlier.
As we’ve mentioned before, a lot of what has driven the evolution of con-
tent strategy are changes in technology. Changes in technology mean that
organizations often have to create content diferently than they did before.
Thus, in 2018, Halvorson revamped the Content Strategy Quad to better
account for modern processes of content development (Figure 1.2).
This new version of the quad attempted to account for the growing
complexity of content development in a world with an increasing array
of devices and user needs. As Halvorson (2018) herself put it: “it’s next
to impossible to separate out workfow from governance—one can’t (or
shouldn’t) exist without the other.” This redefned quad also introduced two
new keywords that are growing in importance as content strategy evolves:
content design and systems design.
According to Halvorson, content design, a term she borrows from Con-
tent Design London (n.d.), is “the process of using data and evidence to
give the audience the content they need, at the time they need it, and in
a way they expect.” So, this defnition of content creation shows the shift
in thinking toward several aspects that are increasingly important for con-
tent strategy: audience targeting, timeliness, and the role of technology in
delivering content. As we write this book, there are hundreds of diferent
types of devices available to consumers, and almost all of those devices
serve consumers some type of content. And in the coming years, even
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 7

Content design

Editorial Experience

Content
Strategy

Structure Process

Systems design
Figure 1.2 The updated content strategy quad
Source: Copyright 2022, Brain Trafc Inc. All rights reserved.
https://www.braintrafc.com/insights/new-thinking-brain-trafcs-content-strategy-quad

more types of devices will be invented and made available to the wider
public. This is why design is now a key factor in how efective content is:
content has to interact with a specifc device and the content genres that
device supports.
Systems design, on the other hand, is “the process of defning the
architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specifed
8 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
requirements.” She goes on to explain: “[w]e’re interested in creating repeat-
able systems—both for machines and for people—to ensure content integ-
rity over time and allow us to create, deliver, and manage content according
to consistent standards and meaningful outcomes” (Halvorson, 2018). If
you’re reading this book straight through, then this may sound like a lot
of technological jargon at this point, but bear with us. The more you read
about content strategy, the more that jargon will start to make sense!
Following on the technology thread, what this quote really means is that
at the same time that technology is advancing how people consume content,
it’s also advancing how people produce and manage it. Gone are the days
when the bleeding edge of content development was developing content
in a single format, sending that document to a publisher, and then having
that content distributed to a waiting audience. We’ve come a long way from
Poor Richard’s Almanack. And don’t get us wrong, desktop publishing soft-
ware like Microsoft Word is still important. But so are collaborative word
processors like Google Docs or OneDrive, authoring tools like Oxygen that
allow writers to quickly create content in a basic format and then output
that content into a variety of other formats, open-source information archi-
tecture that helps writers structure content in such a way that it can be used
by a variety of other people and technologies, content management systems
(CMSs), or technologies that automatically store and format content for
future use, the list goes on.
And if you’re not familiar with most of these technologies, that’s ok!
You’ll learn about them later in this book, specifcally in Chapter 13. The
point is: there are entire systems now for developing, storing, publishing, and
delivering content. And these systems are just as important as the technolo-
gies that allow people to access content. You have to take them into account
when you develop a content strategy.
And there are two very important systems, websites and internal content
repositories, that almost every organization has to contend with now. We
discuss these systems next.

Websites and Internal Content Repositories

The rise of content strategy as a feld can be explained as the rise of many
felds probably can: as a response to specifc types of problems. To illustrate
two very common problems content strategists face, let’s look at two quotes
from some of the thought leaders in the feld.
First, this is how Halvorson & Rach (2012) explain why content strategy
became important for websites:

While organizations have struggled for decades—centuries, even—to

make sense of their content, they were always able to keep the chaos
(and consequences) to themselves. Then came websites, which created
the perfect content strategy storm. Suddenly, organizations had to put
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 9
all of their content (product info, investor reports, press releases, etc.,
etc.) in one place. For the frst time. For all the world to see. And it
hurt.
(p. xvii)

If you’re below the age of 30, you might not remember how much the
information we use on a daily basis changed, seemingly overnight, with the
advent of websites. Some of us can remember having to call businesses on
the phone (or even send them a letter!) to request service. Suddenly, tons
of information about everything you could possibly imagine was available
online. Many organizations struggled, and continue to struggle, with being
always available to consumers.
And websites have only grown in complexity over the years. Now they
must attract users via search engines to stay relevant. They must display
well on mobile devices. They must utilize a variety of features, from auto-
mated newsletters to GPS-enabled advertising. The requirements for a
modern website are only growing by the day. Imagine being a content
strategist for a large organization when all you had to do was turn informa-
tion into webpages! Now you might need to manage such diverse channels
as webpages, blogs, social media, email newsletters, white papers, journal
articles, paid online advertisements, print catalogs, books, ebooks, the list
goes on!
If you’re hosting a website of a certain level of complexity, working with
a content strategist is now a necessity, unless, of course, you like to strug-
gle and experience lots of problems. And believe it or not, many managers
and executives continue to choose to struggle rather than hiring a com-
petent content strategist. In our personal experience, in fact, this still hap-
pens more often than not. But at the same time, many, many people who
run organizations, be they universities, hospitals, or engineering frms, are
learning how important content strategy is to ensure they have an efective
web presence. And that’s one reason why we’re seeing such job growth in
the feld.
Another reason we’re seeing growth in content strategy jobs, however, is
what happens within organizations. To explain what happens with content
creation within all too many organizations, we turn again to Rockley &
Cooper (2012) who describe something they call the “content silo trap”:

Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation from oth-

ers within the organization. Walls are being erected between content
areas and even within content areas. This leads to content being cre-
ated, and recreated, and recreated, often with changes or diferences
introduced at each iteration. No one has a complete picture of the
customer’s content requirements and no one has the responsibility to
manage the customer experience.
(p. 5)
10 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
As messy as many organizations are with their web presence, inside they are
even worse. Just imagine the mayhem that an organization with thousands
of employees can get up to when creating content for no rhyme or reason.
Collectively, we’ve spoken to hundreds of content creators who describe
conficts between individuals, departments, goals, and others within their
workplaces. We’ve spoken to technical writers who are practically at war
with their marketing department who make promises to customers that the
organization’s product or service simply can’t fulfll. We’ve spoken to mar-
keters who beg technical writers to allow them to use information about
a product or service that is getting lots of hits over search engines, but the
technical writer sees the information as “theirs” and won’t allow it to be
listed on the website. We’ve spoken to managers who put their content into a
particular format years ago (such as PDF) that they were told was “universal”
and now they need to put it into a format that didn’t exist when it was frst
created (such as an internal content management system that also publishes
content to the organization’s website), but they can’t easily free the content
from the format it was created in without reproducing it all from scratch.
And we’ve spoken to many, many professionals who are responsible for
content and who simply don’t know what to do with it. Should they put it
into a content management system like WordPress? Should they store it on
a hard drive? Should they put into the cloud? Should they buy software to
manage it? Should they do all of these things? As technologies for creating,
storing, publishing, delivering, and managing content have multiplied, so
have the options for content creators. Just try doing a Google Image Search
for “content fow” to see all the depictions experts have created for the ways
content goes through an organization to its intended audience.
And this has led many content strategists to the startling conclusion:
maybe there isn’t one right way to do content strategy for every organization
out there. Like the feld of technical communication, we’re starting to see
the rise of subject matter expertise as an important factor for content strategists.
Members of the feld are learning that it’s going to be diferent working as
a content strategist for a software development company than it is working
for a K-12 school.
Of course, not every industry out there is hiring content strategists at the
same rate. There are far more content strategy jobs in the technology sector
of the economy (i.e., electronics, software, computers, artifcial intelligence)
than in other sectors, such as education. As all of the authors of this book
work at universities or have worked at universities, we are painfully aware of
how poorly represented content strategy is in higher education, for exam-
ple. Many colleges and universities simply purchase a content management
system for their website and call it good. Many don’t even have a central
place to store content, allowing it to be controlled by dozens of diferent
technologies. And thus, many of these organizations are wasting precious
resources every year creating and recreating (and recreating!) content that
could be better managed.
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 11
So what industries are hiring the most content strategists? Well, we sim-
ply don’t have comprehensive data on that question right now. Content
strategy is so new compared to a feld like marketing that there simply hasn’t
been a truly collective efort by the feld to track its job growth, though
several thought leaders have conducted surveys with small samples of people
(i.e., The state of content, n.d.). As people who have been paying attention to
this feld for many years now, however, we do have some resources to share
with you where you can join the conversation.
We turn to those resources next.

Sources of Information on Content Strategy

(AKA Further Reading)
What we can’t present to you in this section, for the reasons we described
earlier, is a complete breakdown of which industries are hiring content strat-
egists and at what rate. There simply isn’t a centralized database of infor-
mation out there that we could analyze to tell you that. What we can do is
tell you where you can fnd the highest concentration of content strategy
jobs and up-to-date information on the feld so that you can investigate this
question for yourself.
This will also not be a comprehensive list of all the sources of information
on content strategy out there. That would be a book in and of itself and we
want this book to be an introduction to how to do content strategy. This
list is strongly shaped by our own experience with content strategy. In other
words, by presenting this list we’re saying that we’ve personally found all
of these sources to be useful. And we’re also saying that if you peruse these
sources of information, which we break down by genre next, you will gain
a much better understanding of the state of the feld than any one book can
provide. We should also note that this list of resources will take the place of
the Further Reading section you’ll see in every other chapter of this book.
We thought this was necessary because it’s such a long list of sources and
because every other Further Reading section is a lot more tailored to the
topics presented in each specifc chapter.
Following this list, we close this chapter with our thoughts on the future
of content strategy.
Without further ado, here’s our semi-comprehensive list of sources on
content strategy!

Academic Journal Articles and Special Issues

Bailie, R. A. (Ed.). (2019). Special issue on content strategy. Technical
Communication, 66(2), 121–199.
Batova, T. (2018). Negotiating multilingual quality in component con-
tent-management environments. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, 61(1), 77–100.
12 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
Batova, T. & Andersen, R. (Eds.). (2015). Special issue on internal con-
tent management. Transactions on Professional Communication, 58(3),
241–347.
Batova, T. & Andersen, R. (Eds.). (2016). Special issue on web-based
content strategy. Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(1), 1–67.
Pullman, G. & Gu, B. (Eds.). (2008). Special issue on content manage-
ment. Technical Communication Quarterly, 17(1), 1–148.
Walwelma, J., Sarat-St. Peter, H., & Chong, F. (Eds.). (2019). Special
issue on user-generated content. IEEE Transactions on Professional Com-
munication, 62(4), 315–407.

Articles Published to the Web

Department of Health and Human Services. (2016, January 24). Con-
tent strategy basics. Usability.gov. Retrieved September 16, 2021, from
www.usability.gov/what-and-why/content-strategy.html
Halvorson, K. (2008). The discipline of content strategy. A List Apart.
Retrieved January 20, 2022 from: http://alistapart.com/article/
thedisciplineofcontentstrategy

Books by Academics
Albers, M. & Mazur, M. (Eds.). (2003). Content and complexity: Informa-
tion design in technical communication. Routledge.
Bridgeford, T. (Ed.). (2020). Teaching content management in technical and
professional communication. Routledge.
Getto, G., Labriola, J. T., & Ruszkiewicz, S. (Eds.). (2019). Content strat-
egy in technical communication. New York, NY: Routledge.

Books by Practitioners
Abel, S. & Baile, R. A. (2014). The language of content strategy. XML Press.
Atherton, A. & Hane, C. (2017). Designing connected content: Plan and
model digital products for today and tomorrow. New Riders.
Baile, R. A. & Urbina, N. (2012). Content strategy: Connecting the dots
between business, brand, and benefts. XML Press.
Bloomstein, M. (2013). Content strategy at work: Real world stories to
strengthen every interactive project. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufmann.
Casey, M. (2015). The content strategy toolkit: Methods, guidelines, and tem-
plates for getting content right. New Riders.
Frick, T. & Eyler-Werve, K. (2015). Return on engagement: Content strategy
and web design techniques for digital marketing. 2nd ed. Taylor & Francis.
Halvorson, K. & Rach, M. (2012). Content strategy for the web. 2nd ed.
New Riders.
Land, P. (2014). Content audits and inventories: A handbook. XML Press.
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 13
McCoy, J. (2017). Practical content strategy & marketing: The content strategy &
marketing course guidebook. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Metts, M. & Welfe, A. (2020). Writing is designing: Words and the user
experience. Rosenfeld Media.
Nichols, K. & Rockley, A. (2015). Enterprise content strategy: A project
guide. XML Press.
Podmajersky, T. (2019). Strategic writing for UX: Drive engagement, conver-
sion, and retention with every word. O’Reilly Media.
Reddish, J. (2012). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works.
2nd ed. Morgan Kaufmann.
Richards, R. (2017). Content design. Content Design London.
Rockley, A. & Cooper, C. (2012). Managing enterprise content: A unifed
content strategy. 2nd ed. New Riders.
Rockley, A., Cooper, C., & Abel, S. (2015). Intelligent content: A primer.
XML Press.
Wachter-Boettcher, S. (2012). Content everywhere: Strategy and structure for
future-ready content. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.
Welchman, L. (2015). Managing chaos: Digital governance by design. Brooklyn,
NY: Rosenfeld Media.
Wilson, P. (2018). Master content strategy: How to maximize your reach and
boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. BIG Brand Books.

Blogs
Blog. Content Company, Inc.—Digital & Content Strategy Consulting
for Content-Rich Websites—Hilary Marsh. Retrieved January 20,
2022, from https://contentcompany.biz/blog/
Blog. Content Garden. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.
contentgarden.org/blog/
Blog. Scriptorium. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.scriptorium.
com/blog/
Blog. The Content Wrangler. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://
thecontentwrangler.com/blog/
Content strategy articles. Brain Trafc. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from
www.braintrafc.com/insights/

Conferences and Professional Societies

Confab: The content strategy conference. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17,
2022, from www.confabevents.com/
Technical Communication Summit. (2021, December 6). Retrieved
February 17, 2022, from https://summit.stc.org/
The LavaCon Content Strategy Conference. (n.d.). Retrieved Febru-
ary 17, 2022, from https://lavacon.org/
Society for Technical Communication. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17,
2022, from www.stc.org/
14 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
Job Search Engines
Indeed. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.indeed.com/
LinkedIn job search: Find us jobs, internships, jobs near me. LinkedIn. (n.d.).
Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.linkedin.com/jobs/
Salary database. Society for Technical Communication. (n.d.). Retrieved
January 20, 2022, from www.stc.org/publications/salary-database/
(Note: requires membership to view)

Social Media
Content strategists. Facebook. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from
www.facebook.com/groups/132535916799137
Content strategy. LinkedIn. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from www.
linkedin.com/groups/1879338/
Welcome to Content Strategy. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from
https://community.content-strategy.com/

University Programs
Content Strategy Certifcate Program. Content Strategy Certifcate Program
| Northwestern SPS: School of Professional Studies. (n.d.). Retrieved
March 21, 2022, from https://sps.northwestern.edu/advanced-graduate-
certifcate/content-strategy/#Content%20Strategy%20Required%20
Courses
FH Joanneum Content Strategy. Content-Strategie/Content Strat-
egy. (n.d.). Retrieved January 21, 2022, from www.fh-joanneum.
at/content-strategie-und-digitale-kommunikation/master/en/
programme/
Transmedia Certifcate Program: Content Strategy. Content Strategy—
University of Houston. (2022, February 15). Retrieved March 21, 2022,
from https://uh.edu/tech/digitalmedia/transmedia/content_strategy/
UW Professional & Continuing Education. (n.d.). Certifcate in story-
telling & content strategy. UW Professional & Continuing Education.
Retrieved March 22, 2022, from www.pce.uw.edu/certifcates/
storytelling-and-content-strategy

Industry Certifcates
Content Strategy Course Inc. (2022, March 3). The content strategy & market-
ing course: Your anchor in the Content Sea. Content Strategy & Marketing
Course. Retrieved March 22, 2022, from https://contentstrategycourse.
com/
Content strategy course: Learn how to create a successful content strategy. HubSpot
Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved March 22, 2022, from https://academy.
hubspot.com/courses/content-strategy
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 15
Content Strategy in the Future
This fnal section of this chapter is where we really go out on a limb,
because predicting the future of a feld as rapidly changing as content strat-
egy is like trying to predict the stock market. The easy answer is that we
think the future continues to be very bright for this feld. There continues
to be a lot of demand for the skills associated with content strategy and
too few people to fll these roles. This is partially because higher education
hasn’t kept up with content strategy like it has with other emerging felds,
such as UX. There are individual courses in content strategy springing up
in technical communication, communication, and marketing programs,
but there are precious few comprehensive programs in it like there are
with UX (we only know of one at a school in Germany, currently: FH
Joanneum, n.d.).
As far as future trends in the feld, we predict that, like technical com-
munication and other content-focused felds, subject matter expertise will
continue to matter. Someone with insider experience as a content strate-
gist for healthcare will probably be better positioned within that industry
than someone with experience as a content strategist for software. Beyond
subject matter expertise, however, technical fuency will continue to be
very important. This means that if an organization needs help taming
their website that is built in WordPress, familiarity with WordPress, or at
least familiarity with open-source content management systems, will be
important.
At the same time, the non-technical skill sets associated with content
strategy that we’ve mentioned so far, and will continue to explore through-
out this book, continue to be the real heart of this feld. We explore these
skill sets in-depth in Chapter 2 and so won’t go into them here, but they
include skills like audience analysis, content auditing, and content govern-
ance. These will continue to be the threshold skills of content strategy,
meaning the ones that will diferentiate someone who has real expertise in
content strategy from someone with a passing interest.
And we may see increased specialization in these individual skills, like
we’re seeing in related felds. There may be jobs where you just do con-
tent auditing or just do audience analysis in the near future. Right now,
it seems like most of the jobs we see for content strategists want all the
skill sets they can pack into an individual. They want someone to run the
whole content process, rather than taking on a piece of it. That being
said, there are related roles like “content manager,” “website manager,”
and “content creator” you may see in job search engines. These are cer-
tainly in the vicinity of content strategy and are likely a great entry point
into the feld.
And there’s always the omnipresent role of the content strategy consult-
ant. Many of the thought leaders we’ve mentioned in this chapter—Kristina
Halvorson, Rahel Anne Baile, Scott Abel, Ann Rockley, and the like—
are folks that get paid to be themselves. They work outside of any one
16 Key Concepts in Content Strategy
organization by consulting with lots of diferent organizations to help them
improve their content strategies. They are the godmothers and godfathers of
this feld and will largely continue to shape it in years to come.
Outside of these few predictions? We don’t have a lot for you, unfortu-
nately. We’re just beginning to see the impact of something like artifcial
intelligence (AI) on content strategy with the advent of things like chatbots
within various forms of content (e.g., user help forums). We don’t really
know yet how something like the Internet of Things will afect how peo-
ple consume content, because the technology that powers IoT isn’t widely
available to most consumers.
One thing is certain: there will be a continued need for people who can
help meld organizational goals and audience goals. Organizations will con-
tinue to need people who understand why human beings consume content
in the ways that they do. Many of the tools, skills, and exercises throughout
the rest of this book were developed by just such people. We welcome you
to this rich, vast feld flled with so much potential. Happy exploring!

Getting Started Guide: Exploring Key Concepts in

Content Strategy

To explore key concepts in content strategy, try doing some of your

own research about the feld. Review one or more of the sources listed
in the Sources of Information on Content Strategy (AKA Further
Reading) section. Also, try using Indeed (or your other favorite search
engine for jobs) to search for jobs in content strategy. Current jobs
being advertised are probably the best source to see what skills are in
demand right now.
Peruse the information you fnd across 3–5 job ads that peak your
interest and use them to answer some of the following questions about
the topics presented in this chapter:

1. What are the primary skill sets the employer is looking for?
2. Do these skill sets use any of the keywords introduced in this
chapter (i.e., intelligent content, content design, systems design)?
3. Does the employer want a content strategist who is familiar with
a particular industry context (i.e., medicine, education, engineer-
ing, software)?
4. What “soft skill” attributes does the employer want in a content
strategist (i.e., ability to work in cross-functional teams, ability to
work with a specifc other type of professional such as a software
designer, ability to work with subject matter experts)?
 Key Concepts in Content Strategy 17
References
Brain trafc lands the quad! Brain Trafc. (2017, July 6). Retrieved January 7, 2022, from
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master/en/programme/
Halvorson, K. (2008). The discipline of content strategy. A List Apart. Retrieved from:
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2nd ed. New Riders.
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66(2), 121–199.
Batova, T. (2018). Negotiating multilingual quality in component content-management
environments. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 61(1), 77–100.
Batova, T. & Andersen, R. (Eds.). (2015). Special issue on internal content management.
Transactions on Professional Communication, 58(3), 241–347.
Batova, T. & Andersen, R. (Eds.). (2016). Special issue on web-based content strategy.
Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(1), 1–67.
Pullman, G. & Gu, B. (Eds.). (2008). Special issue on content management. Technical
Communication Quarterly, 17(1), 1–148.
Walwelma, J., Sarat-St. Peter, H., & Chong, F. (Eds.). (2019). Special issue on user-
generated content. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 62(4), 315–407.
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Albers, M. & Mazur, M. (Eds.). (2003). Content and complexity: Information design in
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Bridgeford, T. (Ed.). (2020). Teaching content management in technical and professional
communication. Routledge.
Getto, G., Labriola, J. T., & Ruszkiewicz, S. (Eds.). (2019). Content strategy in technical
communication. New York, NY: Routledge.
Abel, S. & Baile, R. A. (2014). The language of content strategy. XML Press.
Atherton, A. & Hane, C. (2017). Designing connected content: Plan and model digital
products for today and tomorrow. New Riders.
Baile, R. A. & Urbina, N. (2012). Content strategy: Connecting the dots between business,
brand, and benefits. XML Press.
Bloomstein, M. (2013). Content strategy at work: Real world stories to strengthen every
interactive project. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufmann.
Casey, M. (2015). The content strategy toolkit: Methods, guidelines, and templates for getting
content right. New Riders.
Frick, T. & Eyler-Werve, K. (2015). Return on engagement: Content strategy and web design
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Halvorson, K. & Rach, M. (2012). Content strategy for the web. 2nd ed. New Riders.
Land, P. (2014). Content audits and inventories: A handbook. XML Press.
McCoy, J. (2017). Practical content strategy & marketing: The content strategy & marketing
course guidebook. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Metts, M. & Welfle, A. (2020). Writing is designing: Words and the user experience.
Rosenfeld Media.
Nichols, K. & Rockley, A. (2015). Enterprise content strategy: A project guide. XML Press.
Podmajersky, T. (2019). Strategic writing for UX: Drive engagement, conversion, and
retention with every word. O'Reilly Media.
Reddish, J. (2012). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. 2nd ed. Morgan
Kaufmann.
Richards, R. (2017). Content design. Content Design London.
Rockley, A. & Cooper, C. (2012). Managing enterprise content: A unified content strategy.
2nd ed. New Riders.
Rockley, A., Cooper, C., & Abel, S. (2015). Intelligent content: A primer. XML Press.
Wachter-Boettcher, S. (2012). Content everywhere: Strategy and structure for future-ready
content. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.
Welchman, L. (2015). Managing chaos: Digital governance by design. Brooklyn, NY:
Rosenfeld Media.
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bottom line every time you hit publish. BIG Brand Books.
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The Content Strategy Process

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Audience Analysis
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A complete guide for analyzing and defining your target audience. Point Visible. (2021,
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building/what-is-audience-analysis/

Identifying Content Types and Channels

Dorland, B. (2019, November 7). The comprehensive guide to multichannel marketing
planning. DIVVY HQ. https://divvyhq.com/content-marketing/multichannel-content-planning/
Hane, C. (2016, November 16). A useful guide to content types, part 1. UX Booth.
www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-useful-guide-to-content-types-part-1/
Lester, M. C. (2011, August 23). What is content? The Word Factory.
https://thewordfactory.com/what-is-content/
Pulizzi, J. (2012, July 28). 7 steps to creating your content marketing channel plan. Content
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marketing-channel-plan/
A complete guide to cross-channel marketing. A Complete Guide to Cross-Channel
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Pulizzi, J. (2012, July 28). Content marketing channel plan strategy in 7 steps. Content
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Sullivan, F. C. (2021, January 5). How to build a content & channel strategy in 2021. Medium.
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Content Auditing
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Spencer, D. (2014, October 16). How to conduct a content audit. UX Mastery. Retrieved
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Content Modeling
Bunting, J. (2021, January 20). How long should your blog post be? A Writer's Guide. The
Write Practice. Retrieved March 22, 2022, from https://thewritepractice.com/blog-post-length/
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23, 2022, from www.brandmuscle.com/resources/the-80-20-rule-explained/
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Pope, L. (2021, November 15). Content model: Why you need one and how to make your
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Swisher, V. (2016, June 6). Structured authoring: Without it, you're spending way too much
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https://contentrules.com/structured-authoring-save-time-creating-content/

Assembling a Content Strategy Plan

Pew Research Center. (2021, November 23). Demographics of social media users and
adoption in the United States. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved
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Forsey, C. (2021, October 21). How to develop a content strategy in 7 steps: A start-to-finish
guide. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from
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Peters, S. (2020, July 31). 10 free content strategy and editorial calendar templates.
Builtvisible. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://builtvisible.com/content-strategy-
editorialcalendar-templates/

Collaborating With Other Content Developers

Monkhouse, P. (2015). My project is failing, it is not my fault. Project Management Institute.
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Petersen, R. (2021, October 28). A terrific 12-step editorial guidelines template to help you
establish trust with high-quality content. CoSchedule Blog. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from
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Sharma, P. (2022, March 15). Why content collaboration matters and how to make a go of it.
GatherContent. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://gathercontent.com/blog/a-6-step-
strategy-to-build-strong-content-marketing-collaboration
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technical-writing/
Stobierski, T. (2020, September 10). How to create editorial guidelines for your content. Pep-
perland Marketing. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from
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team

Revising and Editing Genres

Casey, M. (2017, March 30). Why you need content strategy before editorial planning.
Content Marketing Institute. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/03/content-strategy-
editorial-planning/
Clark-Keane, C. (2019, November 6). The last guide to content editing you'll ever need.
WordStream. www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/11/06/content-editing
Albers, M. & Flanagan, S. (2019). Editing in the modern classroom. Routledge.
Büky, E., Schwartz, M., & Einsohn, A. (2019). The copyeditor's workbook: Exercises and tips
for honing your editorial judgment. University of California Press.
Einsohn, A. & Schwartz, M. (2019). The copyeditor's handbook: A guide for book publishing
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How to start a peer review circle to improve your content. Content Garden. (2018, October 3).
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Team Kapost. (n.d.). Why every content strategy needs a managing editor. Upland Software.
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Ensuring Content Usability and Accessibility

Alternative text. WebAIM. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2022, from
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Colter, A. (2010, December 14). Testing content. A List Apart. Retrieved April 2, 2022, from
https://alistapart.com/article/testing-content/
Henry, S. (Ed.). (2022, March). Introduction to web accessibility. Web Accessibility Initiative
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How screen readers make digital content accessible. AudioEye. (2019, April 5). Retrieved
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Moran, K. (2021, February 7). Testing content with users. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved
April 2, 2022, from www.nngroup.com/articles/testing-content-websites/
Nielsen, J. (2012, January 3). Usability 101: Introduction to usability. Nielsen Norman Group.
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usability/
Schade, A. (2013, December 15). Competitive usability evaluations: Definition. Nielsen
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What is usability? The Interaction Design Foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2022, from
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Colman, G. (2016, May 17). The Writer's Guide to making accessible web content. Zapier.
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Farmen, N. (2019, September 3). A/B testing: Optimizing the UX. Usability Geek. Retrieved
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Horton, S. & Quesenbery, W. (2013). A web for everyone: Designing accessible user
experiences. Rosenfeld media.
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McGee, L. (2021, January). Accessibility. W3C. Retrieved April 2, 2022, from
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Delivering, Governing, and Maintaining Genres

Brewster, C. (n.d.). 7 examples of apis in use today. Trio. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from
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Baldwin, E. (2021, December 23). Content governance: Principles for before and after
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Rago, M. (2021, July 27). Content governance: What it is and how to get started. 18F.
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Speiser, M. (2020, July 13). The essentials of content governance. Knotch: Pros & Content.
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Welchman, L. (2015). Managing chaos: Digital governance by design. Brooklyn, NY:
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Localizing Content
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Dutta, S. (2020, September 8). The 5 do's and don'ts of global content creation and
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Evans, N. (2018, May 18). Effective global content strategy—it's more than translation. CMS
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with Adobe Experience Manager. Scriptorium. www.scriptorium.com/2017/05/the-age-of-
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2022, from www.openlogic.com/blog/proprietary-vs-open-source

Establishing Yourself as a Content Strategist

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