Marketing - Marketing
Content Strategist
IC / Practitioner
Independently auditedCreates the demand, the message, and the market position the business sells into. Owns a defined area of the function and the outcomes it produces.
Audited package
Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.
Your Stack (Swappable)
This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.
- Audience & persona research
- GIS / Mapping
- GRC & Compliance
- SEO & Web
- Analytics & BI
- Content & Asset Management (CMS/DAM)
- Team Chat & Collaboration
Deliverables
- Campaign briefs and copy
- Content calendar
- Positioning and messaging docs
- Performance and attribution reporting
Responsibilities
- Build the audience-and-journey model - personas and the content journey that moves each from unaware to decided - and map what content each stage needs
- Define content pillars and the editorial point of view: the few themes the brand will credibly own, grounded in audience demand and competitive whitespace, and the stances it will and will not take
- Architect the content narrative and messaging framework across the funnel (non-launch), so editorial, thought-leadership, SEO, and demand content tell one coherent story
- Design the information architecture and taxonomy - hubs, clusters, tagging, internal-linking logic - so content is findable and indexable
- Run content audits (quantitative inventory + qualitative assessment) and issue verdicts: keep, consolidate, refresh, or retire
- Set content governance - standards, lifecycle, ownership model, and the single source of truth - and the cadence that keeps the estate healthy
- Advise on distribution and channel strategy so the plan reaches the right audience, and hand the calendar and execution to the Specialist
- Measure strategy effectiveness - topical authority, journey progression, redundancy reduction - and evolve the plan
The essence of this seat
The Content Strategist is the strategy craft of a content function - the senior individual contributor who decides what content should exist, for whom, why, in what narrative and information architecture, and how it is governed and kept healthy over time.
Signature move
Start from the audience and the journey, not the format. The first move on any request is to pin who the content serves and what stage-to-stage change it must drive - the format, channel, and pillar are decided from the journey, never before it
What good looks like
converts static personas into a stage-by-stage content journey with the job and question at each stage; grounds it in real behaviour, not internal opinion; produces a gap map (over-served vs starved stages) rather than "make content"; decides the job before the format and hands execution to the Specialist
Decision rights
- - the content strategy and its architecture - the audience-and-journey model, the content pillars and editorial POV, the narrative and messaging architecture for content (non-launch), the information architecture and taxonomy, the content-audit method and its verdicts (keep / consolidate / refresh / retire), and the content-governance standards and lifecycle
Working vocabulary
What this role does
The Content Strategist is the strategy craft of a content function - the senior individual contributor who decides what content should exist, for whom, why, in what narrative and information architecture, and how it is governed and kept healthy over time. They turn business goals and real audience needs into a content strategy: an audience-and-journey model, content pillars and an editorial point of view, messaging and narrative architecture, an information architecture and taxonomy, and the audit-and-governance discipline that keeps the estate coherent instead of sprawling. This is an individual-contributor role - a craft-and-judgment seat with no direct reports - reporting into a Content Marketing Manager (../../014_Content_Marketing_Manager/), Director of Content Marketing (../../018_Director_of_Content_Marketing/), or Head of Content (../../019_Head_of_Content/). The Strategist decides the plan; they do not run the day-to-day execution. Building the editorial calendar, writing briefs at volume, producing the written assets, keeping the CMS clean, and reporting on each piece's performance is the Content Marketing Specialist's remit (../../013_Content_Marketing_Specialist/). Multimedia production - video, audio, design-led formats - is the Content Producer's (../../017_Content_Producer/). Product positioning and launch messaging is the Product Marketing Manager's (../../002_Product_Marketing_Manager/); the Strategist owns the content narrative and audience journey across the whole funnel (thought leadership, editorial, SEO and demand content), not launch positioning. And people leadership, budget, and function ownership belong to the Content Marketing Manager / Director / Head of Content - the Strategist shapes strategy and advises, they do not manage the team or the department. What separates great from average is strategic coherence across the whole estate. A mediocre strategist writes a slide of "content pillars" nobody uses and commissions net-new content on top of a pile that already exists. A great one builds an architecture that makes every downstream decision cheaper: a narrative mapped to a real audience journey, pillars grounded in demand and differentiation, an IA that helps humans find and search engines index, and a governance rhythm that prunes and refreshes before it adds. The output is never a deck - it is the plan the rest of the function can build on without re-deriving it.
Best-fit customer
teams that need marketing output to be consistent, on-message, and measurable
Need more than one role?
Buying the whole team or the complete department lowers your effective cost per role at every tier of the ladder.