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Model Thinking

Where content strategy, content design, and content engineering overlap


Issue 21

Imagine one day you stroll into your content strategy job at Acme SaaS Corp, ready to run some audits, lead a workshop, and pop into some weekly meetings, but first you join the company all-hands meeting and you hear about the company’s new “premium” offering that will bring additional functionality to higher-paying customers of your SaaS software product.

With your most strategic hat on (is that a helmet? A fedora? Interesting side trail …), you immediately start thinking that something is going to need to change when it comes to content because the company has new goals and users will have new needs. You assume there’s going to be new marketing pages, probably some thought leadership blogs, and the product documentation and knowledge base will need to be updated.

Let’s focus on the product documentation and knowledge base. Will you use callouts in existing docs to highlight premium functionality? Should you keep existing docs as-is and add “premium” docs entries? Can you easily create a navigational path on the docs site to information that premium users will need? Will the content management system (CMS) support all this? Will changes need to be made to the CMS?

As these questions bubble up, you’re directly in the overlap of content strategy, content design, and content engineering. That’s three of four of the roles or practices that I see in the content professions. (The fourth is content operations, and I talked about how content operations and content engineering overlap in Issue 20.)

You can read an overview about each role and how the four interplay in Issue 13.

The idea is that these roles or practices are a descriptive framework of what happens in varying degrees on any content project. Sometimes one person fills all the roles, and other times there are specialized positions that collaborate with each other.

Content strategy

In today’s scenario, the content strategist is starting to think about what strategic needs there are for content.

  • What goal does the business have? The business wants more customers to upgrade to premium. The business wants people who use the premium trial to successfully use premium functionality and view it as crucial to their product usage. The business wants paying customers to adopt premium functionality and continue paying premium prices.
  • What needs do users have? Users “need” to know the premium package exists. They need to know what problems the premium functionality solves. They need to know what the premium plan will cost. They need to know how to successfully upgrade to the premium plan, and they need to know how to effectively use the premium functionality.
  • How will we measure the success of our premium content? This is very important, but probably comes a little later when you know what types of content are involved. The metrics for marketing success will likely be a lot different than the metrics for documentation and knowledge base.

Content design

What specific content and experiences will address those business goals and user needs? That’s where you’ve shifted from content strategy more into content design. Here’s some representative content design questions.

  • Will you use callouts in existing docs to highlight premium functionality? Should you keep existing docs as-is and add “premium” docs? There may be no clear correct answer here. Expect to do some user research to narrow down on the preferred solution.
  • Can you easily create a navigational path on the docs site to information that premium users will need? The answer might be “no,” but the content designer is best suited to advocate on behalf of the user, and highlight that even if it’s not easy to do, navigation needs to happen as soon as possible. But also, user research can validate how important this is for your audience. At this point, the content designer isn’t figuring out how to build the navigational path.
  • What is the proper name for “premium” functionality? Does it need to be named in the product? This is a spot where content designers should have a relationship with marketing to have a constructive discussion. (And this bumps into the “content operations” practice with its oversight of governance, but that’s not the focus of this issue.)

Content engineering

Both the strategy and design start to become tangible when content engineering gets involved. Of those initial questions from the content strategist, here are some content engineering questions:

  • Will the content management system (CMS) support all this? The answer should rarely be “no.” It’s a matter of having a content engineering practice that understands content architecture and your CMS, and having a healthy collaboration with developers (on the web team and any other publishing channel) and content operations.
  • Will changes need to be made to the CMS? Most likely. It’s fundamental to understand that a healthy CMS implementation is an evolving CMS implementation. The content models driving the CMS should be changing as the company changes and as content teams understand user needs more clearly. Instead of fearing content model changes, make sure you’re staffing with content architects who can oversee the CMS implementation.

If the recommended content design is callouts, maybe an existing content model in the CMS needs an update. If the recommendation is a new content type, then new content models will be needed. If, somehow, the content models don’t change to reflect new user-facing content, the content models may still require tweaks to add “premium” metadata to enable the navigation step.

Conclusion

If you can learn to see when your content work is shifting between practices, you can scope your work neatly, clarify who is responsible for different pieces of work, and bring in the necessary collaborators to make your intentions a reality.

Far beyond having a content strategist involved in the project—you really need folks to roll up their sleeves and figure out how it’s going to fit together in execution.

 

Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project by Margot Bloomstein

Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

  • My LinkedIn post about Issue 20 got shared widely and seemed to resonate well there and Issue 20 did well by other metrics, leading to my highest two-week increase in subscribers since I announced the newsletter in December of 2024.
    • To those who shared the LinkedIn post or the newsletter, thank you!
    • To those of you who are new to Model Thinking, welcome. I’m honored to have you join us, and I hope you continue to find value in what I share. I’d love to learn more about you, so if you’re reading this in email, feel free to reply and introduce yourself. You can read previous issues here.
  • I haven’t really addressed this here, but maybe it would be wise. While I’m very interested in pursuing my consulting and fractional content expert business (along with other ventures), I am also open to full-time work. If you like what you’ve read here and have an opening or have an introduction to make, I’d be keen to hear about it.

Trying to sort through the CMS market?

I launched a service to help CMS buyers get personalized, expert recommendations and a CMS implementation readiness assessment.

If you’re considering a new CMS—or are already neck-deep in one you want to optimize—I’d love to help. Head over to Choose Your CMS to get started.

John Collins

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