What does a content strategist do all day, exactly? Quietly’s Strategy team tells all

What does a content strategist do all day, exactly? We hear that question a lot at Quietly—whether it’s a brand looking to hire us or just our moms asking us what we do all day. Content strategists arguably have the most significant role in shaping the success of a brand’s content marketing, yet what they do is often misunderstood.

To answer the golden question, we asked our Strategy team to describe and detail what a typical day at the office entails. The Strategy team at Quietly consists of three key players:

• Carlin Leung is a self-proclaimed data junkie who enjoys playing with analytics software and writing macros in Excel. He’s a big fan of the Canucks and a bigger fan of puns. Find him on Twitter or Instagram: @CarlinLeung.
• Anna Zhao is an avid consumer of anything (and everything) tech, digital marketing, lifestyle, and the occasional cat video. When she’s not strategizing up a storm at Quietly, you can find her working up a sweat at the local dance studio and on social media @annazhao04.
• Daniel Shalinsky likes to keep his intros short and sweet. He is obsessed with all things Tesla. You can find him on Twitter or Instagram: @Shalinsky.

Without further ado, here’s what a typical day in the life of a content strategist looks like.

[Editor’s note: we broke up the day by food because doesn’t food rule us all in some way?] 

A day in the life of a content strategist

Pre-coffee: Daniel and Anna show up to work at 9 a.m. sharp, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Before any meetings or emails, they map out their day through meetings, assignments, calls, or any other task. Carlin, a notorious night owl, is not at the office yet.

First coffee: With the smell of coffee in the air, Carlin rolls in, looking surprisingly well-rested. The whole Strategy team checks emails, follows up on any assignments, and catches up on the latest and greatest in the world of content marketing. (Curious about what we mean? Here’s a list of our favorite industry newsletters).

Breakfast: As Carlin finishes his bowl of Mini-Wheats, the team congregates for scrum. [Editor’s note: scrum is a full team stand-up meeting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday where the team reports updates, high-level goals, blockers, and pain points. They last no more than 20 minutes.]

After scrum, the Strategy team breaks out to do some some work for Quietly’s clients, including revising and editing previous strategies (more on that in a bit) to ensure the strategies are top quality and stay on brand. Each content strategist specializes in certain verticals: Daniel handles B2B and niche clients, Anna handles lifestyle and fashion clients, and Carlin handles cannabis clients and any miscellaneous topics.

Lunch: Food. Yum. On today’s menu, Carlin eats a meal consisting of a box of rice and various leftover meats; Daniel chows down on a grilled chicken breast, and something else that’s happy and healthy; and Anna heats up leftovers and phở.

In between bites, the strategists team up for their weekly meeting. They identify where they can improve their strategy development process and talk through how to translate ambiguous data into clear insights. Together, the team helps each other with formulating insights and ideas for strategies; this could be anything from sharing insights from distribution efforts or sharing useful learnings from other clients. Finally, they grab the product team to further develop software that will support their strategy docs and analytics dashboards. [Editor’s note: the product team consists of Quietly’s software engineers and product managers to develop and deliver Quietly creation and analytics tools.]

Second coffee: After lunch is when the Strategy team rolls up their sleeves to dive deep into strategy research. This is broken up into two parts: keyword research and landscape research (and insights for each).

For keyword research, strategists use tools like Google Trends, Google Adwords, and Bing Ads Intelligence to discover what people are searching for within a client’s vertical. The main objective of keyword research is to look for any significant changes in data since the last strategy and to identify any notable changes or anomalies. According to the team, this can take anywhere from one to three hours, depending on the client.

As for landscape research, it has nothing to do with classic landscape paintings. It is, however, a deep-dive into research on what a client’s competitors are doing in the same space and what the client can learn from them. The strategists examine each competitor’s most popular stories to identify trends and best practices for the client. Then, they detail what competitors are writing about, if it worked, and how it was written. Using tools like Buzzsumo and Sharedcount, the Strategy team guesses this also takes anywhere from one to three hours, depending on the client.

While sipping on their second coffee (or third or fourth, depending on the strategist’s caffeine addiction), the team gets down and dirty synthesizing content insights and actions (aka analyzing the data and creating next steps for clients to utilize that data). This means evaluating each client’s content to identify what works and what doesn’t (as far as metrics go) and to determine what aspects of the content can be improved upon, maintained, and what should be written about next. Of course, to gather insights the strategists have to use a combination of Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Quietly’s analytics.

What’s special about Quietly’s analytics (to very much toot our own horn) is that they allow the strategists to dig deeper than the standard page-level metrics (i.e. they can measure who’s viewing which paragraphs, images, and headings readers are most interested in). This takes anywhere between two and four hours, but the time put in is worth it to let a client learn something they would have never discovered before.

Second lunch/first snack: Deciphering data all day makes a strategist hungry. The team usually grabs another bite of something to eat—anything from a slice of Hot Pie Pizza, Costco hot do,g or snacks from local coffee shops or grocery stores to beat the afternoon slump. Thanks to the extra caloric intake, there is often a break for fitness. Since it’s later in the day, it’s pretty important that the team has the chance to get up and move around. For Anna, it’s planking; for Carlin and Daniel, it’s push-ups. The best part of this competition? Everyone wins.

Oh, and when the team’s done snacking and sweating, they tie up any loose ends and end-of-day deadlines.

First beer: At the end of the day, Quietly often has after-work drinks or community events to attend where the Qrew (the entire Quietly team) unwinds with some beer, art, and more. Otherwise, most of the team head home around now, including Daniel and Anna.

Dinner: Carlin is still in the office, however, finally starting his work day. Just kidding. But Quietly’s “official hours” matter less than getting the work done. Since Carlin is by no means a morning person, he works late to prep for the next day and get a head start.

Midnight snack: Anna is turning down for sleep, Daniel is sending Snapchats of his culinary creations to the Qrew, and Carlin’s wide awake checking off his to-do list.

Next day, pre-coffee: It starts again, with different and exciting new problems arising.

Have any questions about content strategists, Quietly’s Strategy team, and content strategy? Get in touch.

Image: Peshkova/Shutterstock