A content strategist sets the direction for an organisation’s content and designs the arrangements that put it into practice: who the content serves, what it should and shouldn’t cover, how it’s structured, who makes it and how it’s governed. The job usually involves research with audiences and colleagues, auditing what already exists and recording decisions in a form people will use. Strategists mostly make things happen through others, often with influence across many teams and line management of very few people.
The role takes many forms. Some strategists work across a whole organisation, others specialise in product content, taxonomy and structure or marketing, and many work as consultants brought in for a redesign or a reset. Most are expert in part of the discipline while knowing enough about the rest to see how it fits together.
Why an organisation needs a content strategist
Content decisions get made whether or not anyone is responsible for them. Without a strategist, they’re made one request at a time by whichever team is publishing, and the result is an estate that reflects the organisation chart rather than the people it serves. A strategist makes those decisions deliberately and early: what to stop, what to merge, which audience comes first, what the CMS needs to support. They’re often the person who can explain a content problem to a chief executive in terms of cost and risk, and to an editor in terms of what changes on Monday.
The need usually arrives with a moment of change, such as a redesign, a merger, a new service or a CMS migration. It also appears more slowly, when an organisation notices that its content has grown faster than its ability to look after it. The role needs access to senior decision-makers and permission to make choices some colleagues won’t like. A strategist can’t deliver the strategy alone either: a content manager, editors or an operations lead have to turn it into everyday practice, and the strategist’s influence fades if nobody owns that work once the document is signed off.
How AI changes the role
Much of the AI work that lands on content teams is strategic before it’s technical: deciding which tasks to hand to assistants, what the tools may draw on and what good output looks like. Strategists are increasingly the people asked to make those calls, often in organisations where AI arrived through a side door before anyone agreed what it was for. That adds new deliverables to the job. Alongside audits and frameworks, a strategist may now write guidelines for using AI in content work, specify the sources and standards an assistant works from and design evaluation criteria with technical colleagues.
The role also moves towards structure. Systems that retrieve and recombine content depend on it being well modelled, consistently tagged and clearly owned, so taxonomy and content modelling, once specialisms within the discipline, move closer to the centre of a strategist’s job. A job description might now ask for experience of content modelling, AI governance and working with engineers, alongside the familiar research, auditing and stakeholder skills. The need for someone with the standing to decide what an organisation’s content is for doesn’t go away; cheaper production makes that decision harder to avoid.
Questions people ask
- How is a content strategist different from a content manager?
A strategist sets direction and designs the system; a manager runs it week by week. The strategist asks what the content should achieve and how it should be organised, while the manager makes sure it’s planned, produced and kept in good order. Smaller organisations often combine the two, which works as long as daily demands don’t crowd out the longer view.
- Do we need a permanent strategist or a consultant?
Either can work. A consultant suits a defined moment, such as a redesign or a reset, and brings an outside view. A permanent strategist suits large or complex estates where decisions keep arising and someone needs to hold the direction over years. Many organisations use a consultant to set the strategy, then appoint or develop someone internally to keep it alive.
- Where should a content strategist sit?
Close to the people who make organisation-wide decisions, whether in digital, communications, product or service leadership. In UK government, for example, the role is defined as an expert practitioner working alongside lead content designers.
- What makes a good content strategist?
The ability to research, analyse and decide, combined with the patience to bring people along. Strong strategists are as comfortable with a spreadsheet as with a senior meeting, can explain structure to editors and editorial judgement to developers and know enough about each part of the discipline to see where a problem starts.
Learn more
- What Does a Content Strategist Do? – Kristina Halvorson’s map of the activities that fall to content strategists, and her observation that every strategist specialises in a subset while needing to understand the rest.
- Content strategist – the UK government’s role description, which sets the job at expert-practitioner level with a focus on governance, workflows and taxonomy; one employer’s definition, but a useful benchmark for a job description.
- The content operating model in the AI age – Contentious on the seven questions a strategy answers and the operating model that puts those answers to work.