Content strategy is the practice of planning, creating, delivering, and governing useful, usable content. Where technical writing focuses on producing individual documents, content strategy focuses on the systems and decisions that determine what content exists, who maintains it, and how it stays useful over time.
Kristina Halvorson defined content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content” [@halvorson2012]. The key word is governance: content strategy asks not just “how do we write this?” but “who owns this content? when does it get updated? what happens when it goes stale? what do we stop producing?”
Content strategy addresses problems that individual technical writing can’t solve:
- Content bloat — organizations produce more content than they can maintain. Outdated pages accumulate, contradicting each other and confusing users. Content strategy includes auditing existing content and removing what no longer serves a purpose.
- Inconsistency across channels — the same information appears in different forms across different platforms (website, help system, knowledge base, onboarding materials), often contradicting itself. Content strategy unifies messaging and structure across channels.
- Missing governance — content gets created but nobody is responsible for keeping it current. Content strategy assigns ownership, defines review cycles, and establishes standards.
- Style and voice consistency — style guides provide the rules; content strategy ensures they’re applied consistently across teams, products, and time.
For this vault, content strategy operates implicitly through the style guide’s content type conventions, the plain language specification’s standards, and the organizational structure of discipline modules. Each page has a defined type (term, lesson, index, etc.), each type has conventions, and the conventions create a consistent reader experience across hundreds of pages.
Content strategy connects writing studies to information architecture: both ask how content should be organized, but content strategy adds the temporal dimension — how content is created, maintained, and retired over its lifecycle.
Related terms
- information architecture — IA structures content spatially; content strategy manages it temporally
- style-guide — style guides are a content strategy tool for maintaining consistency
- genre — content types are genres that content strategy standardizes across an organization
- document design — document design handles the visual and structural presentation that content strategy governs
- audience — content strategy requires knowing who the content serves and what they need