Define content, content experience, and content strategy, and recognize the common content challenges organizations face
Build a content vision: identify and interview stakeholders, align them, and define measurable objectives
Use audience research to ground content decisions in customer needs
Conduct a content inventory and audit with objective and subjective criteria
Create a content map, prioritize content needs, and document a strategy with a brief and backlog
Recognize content strategy as business analysis applied to content, and spot where it fits Salesforce projects
Section 1
Why Content Strategy Is a BA Elective
Here is the secret this module tells quietly and…
Here is the secret this module tells quietly and this introduction tells loudly: content strategy is business analysis pointed at content. Stakeholder interviews, discovery workshops, journey maps, audits, gap analysis, prioritization, backlogs: every tool in it is one you already own from earlier modules, applied to a new domain. That makes this elective a low-effort, high-value expansion of your range, and a differentiator: few BAs can speak it, and every organization with a website, help center, or knowledge base (which is all of them) needs it.
It also shows up inside Salesforce work more than…
It also shows up inside Salesforce work more than you would guess: Experience Cloud portals (Module 2) live or die on their content; Service Cloud deflection depends on knowledge articles customers can actually find; training and enablement (Module 13) is a content product; and every org's report and dashboard sprawl (Module 9) is a content-audit problem wearing analytics clothes.
Throughout, we follow the source material's case study: Ursa…
Throughout, we follow the source material's case study: Ursa Major Solar, the fictional solar-equipment company, has hired Grace Chung as its first director of customer experience, with a mandate to deliver a connected experience across the entire customer journey. Content is central to that transformation, and Ursa Major has serious content headaches.
Section 2
What Content Is (Bigger Than You Think)
Ask people what "content" means and they point at a blog post, a video, a help article. Right, and radically incomplete. Content is also:
A product requiring research, design, development, delivery, and iteration
A system connecting people, processes, and technologies
A set of data that must be structured and modeled
A business asset tied to objectives, metrics, and results
And ultimately, content is an experience: the comprehensive experience customers have when interacting with your content throughout their journey. An effective content experience asks: Who is the audience, and what are their needs, problems, expectations, and goals? How, when, and where do they interact with the content? How do they feel when engaging with it? Is it easy to find? How is it presented and delivered?
The metaphor that anchors everything: if customers are on a journey (Module 19), content is their compass: it is what they navigate by, and they expect it to point the right way at every step, seamlessly and personally.
When the Compass Breaks
Too often content is not a compass but an obstacle. The recurring failure patterns:
Customers cannot find answers, or do not know where to look
The right information is buried under an avalanche of irrelevant or outdated content
Content is inconsistent or not useful
It is too general, too basic, or full of jargon
It is disjointed and fragmented: customers cannot connect the dots
It lacks real-world examples, solutions, and best practices
It ignores skill levels, serving neither beginners nor experts
The consequences are commercial, not cosmetic: damaged brand, higher support costs, lower satisfaction and retention. If you have ever rage-quit a help center, you have felt this list from the inside.
What Content Strategy Is
Content strategy is the practice that fixes this: getting the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time, deliberately. Two properties matter. It is a series of tough decisions that focus the organization's limited time and resources (strategy means saying no). And it takes a village: content is created by marketing, sales, product, documentation, support, and training, so strategy must span them or it is just another silo. Strategy also operates at multiple levels: one initiative can start with a pilot while the long-term vision matures.
Section 3
Step 1: Craft the Content Vision
The path to a content strategy begins, unexpectedly, in the imagination: rethinking what content is and dreaming about what it could do for the organization. But vision alone is not enough: the organization needs the capacity to execute and sustain it. That capacity is its content maturity, and honest assessment of it belongs at the start (a pilot-first approach, below, respects a modest maturity level).
Identify the Stakeholders
Grace begins by identifying who has the most to gain or lose from a company-wide content strategy, involving them early: buy-in is impossible if the strategy ignores their objectives. Her selection criteria (compare your Module 16 toolkit):
Representation: every content-creating group: marketing, sales, product, documentation, user experience, support, training. Include content leadership from each so there are no surprises and objections later.
Strategy: colleagues who provide high-level input: business objectives, priorities, challenges: unit VPs, the head of product, executives who think strategically.
Expertise: content experts of many varieties, from thought leaders to those who manage technical implementations.
Interview Them
Grace schedules one-on-one interviews rather than group sessions, so each stakeholder's unique concerns get the floor. Her core questions: What are you trying to achieve? Your top short- and long-term goals? How might content help you achieve them? How do you define and measure success? What are your concerns, expectations, and priorities for this project? What are your team's content challenges, pain points, needs, and constraints?
(Notice: this is Module 3 elicitation, verbatim. You already know how to do this.)
Align on a Unified Vision
Interviews reveal insight and misalignment. Ursa Major's VP of Marketing sees content as a brand-awareness and search-growth engine; the VP of Product sees personalized content as a product differentiator and satisfaction driver. Neither is wrong, and until they align, nothing moves. Grace's tool: a vision workshop where stakeholders explore high-level content objectives together: the skeptics get inspired by the believers, dialogue starts, and momentum builds toward a shared, company-wide vision (your Module 20 facilitation craft, employed exactly as designed).
Narrow the Focus, Define Objectives
Dreams are broad; strategy is narrow. The vision gets focused on a specific business problem, then expressed as measurable objectives: the SMART discipline from Module 16 applies in full. "Improve the content experience" is a wish; "reduce support cases about installation by 20 percent within two quarters by fixing the top-audited installation content" is an objective a team can execute and a leader can fund.
Section 4
Step 2: Understand the Audience
Content strategy's promise (right content, right people, right place, right time) requires anticipating customer needs, and the method is not sorcery: talk to your customers: through user research, the set of tools and methods for investigating the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the people who interact with your content.
Key practices:
Start from hypotheses. Ursa Major had done little research; its content decisions rested on informal assumptions, and every team had accumulated different assumptions. That is a fine starting point: run a discovery workshop with stakeholders to surface the assumptions as explicit hypotheses, then test them. (An undeveloped instant photo, gradually revealed by research: that is your hypothesis becoming knowledge.)
Balance quantitative and qualitative. Most companies over-rely on quantitative research (surveys, web analytics). Numbers tell you what is happening; they fail at why. Supplement with qualitative methods: interviews and observation: to learn behaviors, thoughts, and feelings at specific journey stages (Module 20's empathetic research, again).
Cheap compared to the alternative. Some companies think research is too costly. The truth runs the other way: research saves time and money by preventing the far larger waste of building content nobody needs.
The outputs: research deliverables shared with stakeholders and content teams, a customer journey map (Module 19's artifact, feeding content decisions), and a clear picture of customer needs at each journey stage: which is exactly what the next two steps consume.
Section 5
Step 3: Inventory and Audit the Existing Content
The web is an endless publishing platform, which creates an endless problem: most organizations churn out masses of content, and no one knows how much exists, where it is, what it says, whether it is useful, or why it was created. Before deciding what content you need, discover what you have.
The Content Inventory
Finding it all comes first:
List every content repository the organization owns or manages: main website, microsites, knowledge base, help documentation, video library, and so on
Using an audit template (a structured spreadsheet), inventory the assets from each source
Record factual data per asset: title, URL or location
Click every hyperlink you find: following the breadcrumb trails reveals hidden, forgotten, and abandoned content sources (there are always some)
Automated web-scraping tools and content-system exports can accelerate the inventory considerably: use them where available.
The Content Audit
An inventory catalogs; an audit evaluates. The questions an audit answers: Who are the audiences of the existing content, and how are they currently prioritized? Does content support every stage of every audience's journey, and does it actually meet their needs? Where are the biggest gaps? Can customers find it, and by what paths? What is its quality: on-brand, editorially sound, up to date? Are types, tags, and navigation consistent or confusing? Which assets align with business objectives?
Audit criteria combine two kinds of fields:
Objective criteria (facts): audience; journey stage; calls to action; content type; keywords and tags; content owner (if known); attached files and media; connected content (links to related information); engagement and performance metrics
Subjective criteria (judgments): the customer need it serves; business impact; accuracy; findability; usability (clear, useful, readable, relevant, consistent); and the recommendation: keep, improve, delete, or merge
Scope the audit sensibly. A full audit covers everything: thorough and expensive. A targeted audit covers one section or audience: fast and focused. A representative audit samples across the estate: the pragmatic middle when volumes are huge. Choose based on your objectives and content maturity: a first-ever audit rarely needs to be a full one.
If audit work sounds familiar, it should: it is Module 3's document analysis running at fleet scale, with Module 5's keep/improve/delete instincts (green, yellow, red) making the recommendations.
Section 6
Step 4: Assemble the Strategy
Grace now holds business objectives, researched customer needs, and an evaluated content estate. Assembly time.
The Content Map
To find exactly how, when, and where the content experience fails customers, combine the journey maps with the audit results into a new artifact: the content map: existing content plotted against the stages of the customer journey, visualizing the end-to-end content experience.
The process:
Pick a persona (or role, or whatever audience segmentation makes sense)
Open the spreadsheet plotting the stages of their journey
List the existing content assets that address the customer's needs at each stage, with notes on how, when, and where the customer is likely to engage each
Note the gaps, redundancies, challenges, and improvement areas
Repeat per audience type
Like journey mapping, content mapping works beautifully as a group exercise: the conversation about the current state is half the value. The empty cells are your gap analysis (Module 3's current-versus-future discipline): stages where a persona has needs and the organization has nothing, or nothing findable, or six redundant somethings.
Prioritize
Content strategy is tough decisions, and here they arrive:
Prioritize audiences. From the research's full list of audiences, decide with stakeholders which matter most to the business. The others are not neglected: constraints are being set so better decisions can be made.
Prioritize needs. For each chosen audience, rank needs by value to the customer against value to the business: plot them on a two-axis graph with sticky notes as a group activity (Module 5's impact-versus-effort thinking, re-axed).
What prioritization accomplishes: it aligns customer needs with business objectives and establishes a guiding star for all content initiatives: which is the very definition of content strategy.
Document: Brief and Backlog
Capture the strategy so everyone moves in the same direction. Two deliverables:
The content strategy brief: a high-level document containing the content vision and roadmap, business objectives and metrics, the prioritized list of audiences and their needs, and links to the content backlog, content maps, and supporting research.
The content backlog: the prioritized working list of content to create, improve, merge, or retire, each item traceable to an audience need and a business objective. Yes: a backlog, exactly as in Module 4 and Module 10. Content items are user stories of a particular species ("As a new solar customer, I want a plain-language installation checklist, so that I can prepare without calling support"), and they are groomed, prioritized, and delivered the same way.
Pilot the Strategy
Rather than transforming everything at once, test the strategy with a pilot: a scoped initiative against the highest-priority audience and need, with the metrics from the brief watching. The pilot proves the approach, surfaces what the strategy got wrong while it is still cheap to fix, and (Kotter, Module 15) manufactures the short-term win that funds the longer campaign. Results in hand, evaluate honestly, adjust, and expand: continuous improvement (Module 14) in content clothing.
Section 7
The BA's Content Strategy Cheat Sheet
When content problems surface on your projects (and they will: "nobody uses the knowledge base" is a discovery-session perennial), run the sequence:
Vision: interview the content stakeholders; align them in a workshop; define SMART objectives against a specific business problem
Audience: hypothesize in a discovery workshop; verify with mixed qualitative and quantitative research; map needs to journey stages
Evidence: inventory the repositories; audit with objective and subjective criteria; recommend keep, improve, delete, or merge
Strategy: build the content map; find the gaps; prioritize audiences and needs; document the brief; seed the backlog
Prove: pilot, measure, adjust, expand
Every step is a renamed BA skill. That is the point, and that is your advantage.
Recap
Key Takeaways
Content is a product, a system, data, and a business asset, experienced by customers as the compass they navigate their journey with: and broken compasses cost brand, satisfaction, and support budget.
Content strategy delivers the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time, through deliberately focused decisions spanning every content-creating team.
Vision comes first: stakeholders identified (representation, strategy, expertise), interviewed one-on-one, aligned in a workshop, and pointed at measurable objectives within a narrowed business problem: sized to the organization's content maturity.
Audience understanding comes from user research: hypotheses from discovery workshops, tested with qualitative and quantitative methods: cheaper than building unwanted content.
The inventory finds everything (follow the hyperlink breadcrumbs); the audit evaluates it against objective and subjective criteria, ending in keep, improve, delete, or merge: scoped as full, targeted, or representative.
The content map crosses journey stages with existing assets to expose gaps; prioritization crosses customer value with business value; the brief and backlog document it all; and a measured pilot proves it before scale.
Content strategy is business analysis applied to content: every technique is one you already own, which makes this the easiest differentiator you will ever add.
📝
Knowledge Check
8 questions. Answer at your own pace, then check the explanation for each.
Question 1 of 8
Which statement best captures this module's definition of content?
Correct answer: B. Product, system, data, asset: experienced as the customer's compass.
Question 2 of 8
Content strategy is best defined as:
Correct answer: B. Right content, right people, right place, right time: by deliberate, focused decisions.
Question 3 of 8
Why did Grace conduct one-on-one stakeholder interviews rather than group interviews?
Correct answer: B. One-on-one focus surfaces what each stakeholder actually needs: group settings flatten it.
Question 4 of 8
Ursa Major's VPs of Marketing and Product held conflicting views of content's purpose. The module's recommended tool for resolving this was:
Correct answer: B. The vision workshop aligns believers and skeptics around shared objectives: facilitation, not authority.
Question 5 of 8
In a content audit, "findability," "accuracy," and "recommendation (keep, improve, delete, merge)" are examples of:
Correct answer: B. Judgments are subjective criteria; titles, URLs, tags, and metrics are objective.
Question 6 of 8
A content map crosses:
Correct answer: B. Journey stages by audience, crossed with existing assets: the gap analysis of content.
Question 7 of 8
When prioritizing content needs, the two axes recommended are:
Correct answer: B. Customer value against business value: alignment of needs with objectives is the strategy.
Question 8 of 8
True or False: The recommended way to launch a newly documented content strategy is a full, organization-wide rollout, since pilots waste time.
Correct answer: False. Pilot first: prove the approach, fix it cheaply, bank the win, then expand.
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Module 21 complete
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