Skills For A Content Strategist: Definition And Examples

Updated 5 March 2023

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Content strategists are professionals who impact the growth of a company by planning and executing the brand's content through various marketing channels. They have a variety of skills, including writing, editing and campaigning. If you want to become a content strategist, knowing what skills to develop can help you progress efficiently in your career path. In this article, we list important skills for content strategists and share ways to highlight them at the workplace and in the job application process.

Please note that none of the companies, institutions or organisations mentioned in this article are associated with Indeed.

What Are Skills For Content Strategists?

Skills for content strategists are those hard and soft abilities that are essential for a content strategist to be successful in their role. The role involves creating content for the company's brand and presenting it effectively to the target market. Content strategists typically design the tone of the brand and are involved in editing the content that the company releases into the market. Content strategising may also involve analysing the reports of content marketing activities.

Skills such as writing, editing, business and analytical thinking are key to growing effectively in this career path, whereas soft skills like collaboration and communication are often essential.

Essential Skills For Content Strategists

Here are important skills that a content strategist can develop to perform their tasks more efficiently:

Writing skills

One of the most important skills for a content strategist is writing a unique and attractive copy. As a content strategist, your role may include managing content writers and checking the quality of their writing. Though you may not write all the content yourself, in some scenarios you may require writing portions of it. For example, if the company has a blog and a writer to contribute content for it regularly, the company may still ask you to write posts that can achieve a potentially higher reach.

Presentation skills

Content for a brand can be of various forms. Examples include a social media message, a blog post, an advertisement banner or a customer outreach email. Typically, the target audience determines the form of content and the ways to present it. As a content strategist, knowing which form to use in what context and how to deliver the intended message through it requires you to develop strong presentation skills.

Communication skills

As you strategise the content marketing requirements of the company, you may interact with a variety of teams regularly. Some examples of these teams include content writers, web designers, social media specialists, marketing managers, customers, leadership and analysts. It is important that you have excellent communication skills to liaise with people working in such a wide range of roles.

Campaigning skills

Your role as a content strategist may involve working directly on campaigns through content marketing. To ensure that the marketing campaign is successful, you can work on developing your campaigning skills. This means learning about marketing metrics, knowing how to work on market research data, understanding sales funnels, learning about customers and researching the industry's market size.

Business skills

Developing business skills can allow you to understand how to monetise the content effectively. Most organisations use content to improve sales of their product or service. For example, an e-commerce retailer of fashion accessories may have a blog that posts several articles explaining to readers how to accessorise themselves. Such posts can get readers excited about buying their items. Proficiency in understanding how businesses work, how to increase profits and how to retain customers can help you deliver quality content.

Organisation skills

As a content strategist, you may manage multiple projects simultaneously. The projects often require collaborating with other teams, clients and the leadership. Your typical day at work may involve meetings with writers, designers, marketing managers and social media experts to discuss work details. Apart from that, you may also require writing the content yourself. Organisation skills can help you work on your tasks efficiently on a priority basis.

Editing skills

You may often edit the final content before publishing it when you work as a content strategist. Expert editing skills can help you edit content immaculately. Editing experience can also develop a keen attention to detail. This typically becomes more important during the migration of documents during rebranding as you sort through all the content to keep the ones necessary for the rebranding purpose.

Analytical skills

Companies typically post content on various online platforms, such as blogs, company websites and social media platforms, to gain publicity. Using several analytics applications, you can monitor the performance of the campaigns in terms of views, clicks and comments. As a content strategist, your job may involve analysing this data to understand what kind of content can be the focus of the company for the next marketing campaign. Developing analytical skills can help you efficiently process the data and make relevant conclusions.

How To Improve Content Strategist Skills?

Here are the steps to improve your skills for content strategist roles:

1. Build storylines

You can develop your content writing and editing skills by working on campaigns where you can design a storyline. Understanding the final purpose of the content that the company creates can help you engage with writers and editors to form the storyline. You can also research the mindset of the company's users and analyse their feedback to help improve the company's brand story.

2. Take training on search engine optimisation (SEO)

If your online content ranks on the search engines, it may attract more visitors, which can increase sales of the products or services of the company. To increase the search engine ranking, you may take training on SEO. Optimising your online content for search engines includes knowing how to write meta descriptions, focusing on the right keyword density and writing attractive titles for long-form content.

3. Learn the marketing concepts

As a content strategist, most of your work may involve interestingly telling stories of the brand, to convert as many of the audience to permanent customers of the brand. Knowledge about marketing can help understand the effectiveness of the content. Taking a course in the basics of marketing may help you achieve more success in this role.

4. Work with publishing companies

Publishing the content that the copywriting team creates can be an important aspect of your job. It may be helpful to work with a publishing company for a few years to understand the details of publishing. This is because publishing companies usually have strict guidelines about style, formatting, vocabulary and tone. They also have strong, established editing policies. Learning about these guidelines may help you strategise marketing campaigns more easily.

Ways To Use Content Strategist Skills In The Workplace

Here are some ways you can use content strategist skills in the workplace:

Collaborate with the marketing team. Working together with the marketing team can provide you with an opportunity to present your campaigning skills. It can also be an effective way to use your analytical skills to evaluate market research data.
Gather feedback from leadership. You can set up meetings with the leadership teams to help them understand the statistics of how your content is performing. You can also gather their feedback to improve your strategies or find new domains where you can publish the content.
Talk to your mentor. Daily or weekly discussions with your mentor can help you present your analytical and business skills. Your mentor can also advise you on how to improve the content strategies based on your editing skills.

Ways To Highlight Content Strategist Skills

Here are the different ways to highlight your content strategist skills on your resume, cover letter and at a job interview:

Content strategist skills on a resume

You can highlight your most important content strategist skills in the summary of your resume. Examples include writing and editing skills. The skills section of your resume may include the remaining of your content strategist skills. As you continue to add work experiences to your resume, you can add key skills into your role descriptions as well.

Content strategist skills for a cover letter

On your cover letter, you can elaborate the skills on your resume by giving examples of how you used them in your previous jobs. This can help the managers assess your proficiencies and if you are suitable for the role. Consider including measurable metrics to show your efficiency in performing specific tasks.

Content strategist skills for an interview

When you are at a job interview, you can get more opportunities to elaborate your skills as a content strategist, as you include these skills in your answers to the interviewer's questions. You can give examples from your previous roles to highlight how your skills match the position for which you are interviewing. For example, you might say, "I bring years of publishing experience that has helped the marketing team in Medieey Corp to achieve 90% customer conversion rates."