The Ultimate Guide to UX Content Strategy: Steps to Get You Started

An effective user experience (UX) strategy is vital to producing a digital experience that speaks directly to your users while aligning with your business goals. When you’re looking to create a website, your UX strategy will be crucial as 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. In today’s digital world, users expect a seamless, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing experience.

Table of Contents

What Is UX Content Strategy?
What Is The Role of a UX Content Strategist?
How to Build a UX Content Strategy
Benefits of An Effective UX Content Strategy

What Is UX Content Strategy?

UX content strategy refers to the planning and approach to creating a product that provides an optimal user experience while aligning your vision with your user needs. It ensures that a user can intuitively find the information they are looking for across their user journey to have a positive and engaging experience.

UX Content Strategist: Bridging content strategy, content architecture and content management

Content strategist, content architect, information architect, or content operations manager; there are many ways to describe the role of a UX Content Strategist. Ultimately, it involves understanding an organization’s goals, content, and user journey. This knowledge allows UX content strategists to collaborate efficiently with designers and developers. 

When building a digital experience, the aim is to make content accessible, scalable, and easy to find. This involves two facets of digital marketing – content strategy and content management – and an important element of UX strategy: content architecture. Content architecture acts as the glue between these two areas ensuring that they function harmoniously.

• Content strategy is the planning, creation and delivery of content.
• Content management is the maintenance of content across digital platforms, including the tools and platforms that make it happen, often through a content management system (CMS).
• Content architecture is the structuring of content within a website or digital product making sure it’s organized, easy to find, and easy to understand.

Content architecture bridges content strategy and content management to create a cohesive and logical structure.

What Is the Role of a UX Content Strategist?

A UX Content Strategist’s role is to have an intimate knowledge of an organization’s content strategy and content management process to create its content architecture. For example, when creating a website, it’s fundamental to understand a user’s journey across the site but also how a site is being used internally to facilitate workflows. A UX Content Strategist makes sure a site’s functionality works seamlessly for both the user and website administrators. 

How to Build a UX Content Strategy

The Discovery Phase

The discovery phase is the initial stage of a web design and development project where the project’s foundation is built. All the necessary information is gathered to encourage a smooth workflow that meets business goals, user needs, and technical requirements. This phase is crucial to align all stakeholders and further define the scope of a project. 

1. Perform a Content Audit

Before the design and development stages, it’s valuable to assess the current state of a website. A content audit identifies content gaps and areas of redundancy and highlights the content that should be updated or improved. The audit will form the basis for some strategic decisions made throughout the process. 

2. Create User Personas & Journey Maps

To ensure content resonates with target users, you must understand who they are and their needs. Developing a user persona can create a clear example of a target audience, while journey mapping focuses on the different stages a user goes through while interacting with a website. Both will provide insights throughout the strategy and design stages. 

3. Hold Stakeholder Interviews

Engaging with key stakeholders guarantees that business goals are taken into account in the content architecture. They help uncover objectives, provide insight into internal workflows, highlight pain points, and allow the team to align their efforts. 

4. Perform a Competitive Analysis

Reviewing competitors and similar organizations can define industry standards and user expectations, and uncover opportunities for differentiation. 

Building the Content Architecture

Once you have an understanding of the project, it’s time to begin creating the content architecture, working alongside UX Designers and Web Developers. 

What is Content Architecture?

Content architecture is a process that focuses on how content flows between the backend and frontend, thinking about how it is structured, distributed and managed. From wireframes and content modelling to content management systems, content architecture integrates all these elements to create a unified system that works for users and admins alike. 

5. Create Content Models

Content modelling refers to the structure of individual content items. For example, a blog post might have fields for title, author, category tags, body content, and comments. Whereas a service page might have a service name, description, images, contact information, and an FAQ.  A content model certifies that every piece of information is accounted for and consistently structured across the website.

This also involves creating a component list for UX designers to see which content blocks across the site can be reused due to similar structure or content. Anticipating future content needs helps to design a system that can easily scale as the organization grows. 

6. Design Wireframes

Wireframes are digital blueprints of how content will appear on different pages. While a UX content strategist won’t design wireframes, they will create a component list outlining all the content blocks needed to aid with wireframe development. 

7. Define Content Limits

Working alongside designers and developers, the content needs to fit within a website’s visual and technical constraints. This is why planning for character counts, image sizes, or video formats is key to working within the framework being created. 

8. Outline the Information Architecture

Information architecture is the practice of organizing and structuring content to help users find information and perform actions. This includes creating post types, taxonomies, and metadata. This also includes navigation through menus, breadcrumbs, and filters. 

Supporting a Flexible Content Management System

9. Support Internal Workflows

A CMS is a tool that supports content creation, content management, editing, and publishing. It’s important to understand how internal teams are using this tool to adequately handle content models and how they are integrated into other tools and plugins. The CMS must be able to scale with the organization as content grows. 

10. Measure Your Performance

This is where an iterative process can be established through data and insights. SEO best practices should be integrated throughout your content architecture to make certain that it is optimized for search engines. Tracking performance will inform how content is performing and identify areas of improvement.

Benefits of an Effective UX Content Strategy

• Scalability: A well-structured content system allows you to scale as your content needs grow, ensuring the system can handle more content, users, and channels without breaking down.
• Improved Workflows & Collaboration: By streamlining the processes and communication channels between content teams, the workflows become more efficient, reducing redundancy and friction.
• Enhanced User Experience: A cohesive content architecture assures users can easily find, engage with, and consume content, improving overall satisfaction.
• Greater Flexibility for Independence: Well-architected systems enable teams to work independently without requiring developer intervention for small changes, fostering agility.
• Increased Engagement: Better content organization and delivery lead to more personalized and relevant content for users, driving higher engagement.
• Improved SEO: A well-structured content system improves SEO outcomes, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content.
• Consistency: With a strong content framework, content creators can adhere to a consistent style, format, and structure.
• Faster Updates: A streamlined content architecture system allows for faster updates to content, keeping your site fresh and up-to-date.

UX content strategy isn’t all about writing content – it’s about supporting the design and development process to create a content system that works for all parties involved. A well-thought-out UX strategy lays the foundation for a scalable, user-friendly content experience that supports business goals, enhances workflows, and effectively engages users.