Content Strategist Job Description

A Content Strategist decides what an organization should publish, why, who owns it, how it is structured and when it comes down. The writing, video and social posts are tactics. The strategist works one level above them, on the plan those tactics serve.

Nielsen Norman Group's Content Strategy 101 traces the discipline's working definition to Kristina Halvorson's 2009 book, Content Strategy for the Web: the ongoing practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable and effective content. NN/g splits the work into four phases (planning, creation, maintenance and unpublishing) and points out that content keeps cycling through the first three until someone retires it. Planning for that last step, the retirement of a page, is part of the strategist's job from the start.

In a marketing department, the week usually mixes four kinds of work.

Audits and inventories. The strategist crawls the site, exports every URL into a spreadsheet and scores each page against a goal: accurate or stale, findable or buried, duplicated or unique, worth keeping or ready to redirect. NN/g suggests starting with at least a 3-month interval for reviewing content and its supporting collateral, then folding new pages into the same audit.

Structure. Content models, taxonomies, metadata fields and URL patterns decide whether a product page, a case study and a help article can share components in the CMS and show up correctly in site search. The strategist designs those structures with developers and UX designers, ideally before a migration rather than after it.

Governance. Someone has to answer NN/g's blunt questions: who can request content, who has subject-matter authority, and who creates, reviews, approves and publishes it. The strategist writes that answer down as a governance model, a RACI chart and an editorial style guide, then trains the teams that have to follow it.

Measurement. Each content type gets a job and a metric: a pricing page is judged on demo requests, a help article on deflected support tickets, a newsletter on subscribers kept. The strategist reports on whether content is doing its job and recommends what to fix, merge or cut.

The title shows up in more than one occupational bucket. O*NET's job titles file places Content Strategist under Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, and also under Public Relations Specialists and Document Management Specialists. That spread is a fair picture of the role: part marketer, part communicator, part librarian. The job sits next to content marketing managers, who run the publishing calendar and the writers, and UX writers, who own interface copy; the strategist sets the system both of them publish into. NN/g also found that some content professionals working as one-person UX teams were expected to author, edit and market content, which leaves little room for the planning this title is supposed to cover.

Education. A bachelor's degree is the usual starting point, in communications, journalism, English, marketing, library and information science, or human-computer interaction. Library and information science coursework maps to the taxonomy and metadata side of the job; journalism and English coursework maps to the editorial side. A graduate degree is not a requirement, though a master's in information science or HCI can help for enterprise and product-content roles.

Experience. As a rough guide, strategists arrive after several years as a writer, editor, SEO specialist, web producer, UX writer or information architect. The common thread is having owned a body of content long enough to see what happens when nobody maintains it. A portfolio makes the case: an audit spreadsheet with a scoring rubric, a content model diagram, a governance charter, a style guide, and a before-and-after story about a migration or cleanup.

Core skills.

• Running a content inventory and audit at site scale, including crawl exports, scoring rubrics and redirect plans
• Designing taxonomies, content types and metadata schemas that a CMS can enforce
• Writing governance models: ownership, review cycles, approval paths and retirement rules
• Building and maintaining editorial style guides and voice-and-tone documentation
• Basic user research: card sorting, tree testing, interviews and search-log analysis
• Search fundamentals: site architecture, internal linking, structured data and canonical URLs
• Accessibility basics, including how WCAG success criteria apply to headings, link text, alt text and documents
• Presenting to executives and negotiating with product, legal and brand owners

Tools. Crawlers such as Screaming Frog and Sitebulb for audits; Google Analytics, Google Search Console and spreadsheet tools for performance data; headless and traditional CMS platforms such as Contentful, Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress and Drupal; Optimal Workshop for card sorts and tree tests; Miro or FigJam for content modeling workshops; and Confluence or Notion for governance documentation. Familiarity with the team's generative AI tools helps too, since a strategist may be the one writing the guardrails around them.

Credentials. No license is required and no single certification defines the field. Two that map to parts of the job:

• Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), awarded by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP)
• Certified Information Professional (CIP), awarded by AIIM, for strategists who lean toward records, document management and information governance

Showing judgment. A strong application shows that the candidate can say no. Strategy work means retiring pages that someone is attached to, refusing a microsite that duplicates an existing section, and holding a style rule when a senior stakeholder wants an exception. A useful portfolio piece shows a decision the candidate made, the reasoning, and what happened to the content afterward, not only the deliverable.

Federal projections

BLS does not count or project content strategists on their own. O*NET's summary for Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, the occupation that lists Content Strategist among its sample of reported job titles, rates projected growth from 2025 to 2035 as much faster than average (7% or higher), with about 82,000 openings a year on average. That figure covers the whole occupation, not strategists alone. In the May 2025 wage survey, BLS counted 899,580 workers in the combined occupation.

Pay by setting

Industry moves the numbers. In the May 2025 survey, the occupation's median wage was $128,200 in software publishers and $101,030 in computer systems design and related services, against $78,760 for the occupation nationally. BLS does not break out content strategists within those industries, so treat the figures as the pay of the broader group in settings where product content, documentation and structured CMS work are common. For context, Public Relations Specialists, the second occupation O*NET files the title under, had a national median of $74,750.

Search and AI are rewriting the brief

Search behavior is part of the brief now. In a qualitative study of 9 participants from North America and the UK, published Aug. 15, 2025, Nielsen Norman Group wrote that AI overviews are even more likely to satisfy information needs without clicks, and called that a serious challenge for all content producers, NN/g included. The same study found generative AI has not replaced traditional search entirely: participants used search and AI chat in tandem.

For a strategist, that shifts the measurement plan and the content model at the same time. A page that answers a quick fact may not earn the visit when a summary answers it first. Pageviews alone make a weaker yardstick when a summary can answer the question on the results page, so a measurement plan can also track tasks completed, sign-ups and support tickets avoided. Clear headings, consistent terminology and accurate metadata also make a page easier for the team to keep current.

Where the work is

Content strategists work in software and technology companies, agencies with UX or content practices, banks and insurers, health systems, universities, publishers and government agencies. The common factor is a large, multi-owner site or product where nobody can see the whole inventory without a deliberate system. Redesigns and CMS migrations, which have a defined start and end, also bring in contract and consulting strategists.

Where the path leads

The ladder runs from content strategist to senior or lead strategist, then to principal strategist, content design manager, head of content or director of content strategy. Some move sideways into information architecture, content operations, product management or UX research. Others go deeper into governance and information management, especially in regulated industries where records retention and review cycles carry legal weight. A strategist who can show that a cleanup cut maintenance work, or that a restructured help center reduced support tickets, has a concrete case to make for the next title.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the Content Strategist position at [Company]. For the past several years I have been the person who asks why a page exists before anyone writes it, and who keeps asking after it launches.

At [Previous Company], a regional health insurer, I inherited a member site built by four departments that had never shared a style guide. Nobody could say how many pages we had or who owned them. I ran a full crawl, built an inventory, and scored every page on accuracy, ownership and purpose with input from the member services team, who knew which pages generated confused phone calls. The audit gave us a short list of pages to keep and a long list to merge, redirect or retire.

I then worked with our developers to rebuild the plan-information section on a structured content model, so benefit details lived in one place and fed every page that needed them. I wrote the governance charter that named an owner and a review cycle for each content type, and I trained twenty contributors on the new style guide and the approval path. The part I am proudest of is the retirement process: pages now come down on schedule instead of lingering for years.

Recently I have written our team's rules for using generative AI tools: what they may draft, what a person must verify, and what never goes out without legal review. I treat those rules the same way I treat any other part of governance, as something people will follow only if they understand the reason behind it.

[Company]'s site and help center look like the kind of large, shared system I do my best work in, and I would welcome the chance to talk about where it is headed.

Sincerely, [Your Name]