What does a content strategist do?
A content strategist plans the content before it is made. They take the brand strategy and the business goals and turn them into a content plan: the themes the brand will own, the formats that suit each channel, the cadence it can sustain and the way one piece feeds the next. They write the briefs for the writers, designers and filmmakers, set the standards the content is judged by and read the numbers to decide what to make more of.
The role is distinct from the people who make the content, though the best strategists have been writers or producers first. The strategist's unit of work is the system: the calendar, the pillars, the governance, the measurement. The copywriter's unit of work is the sentence.
Why it matters
Why a content strategist matters
Most brands do not have a content problem; they have a content pile. Years of posts, articles, videos and emails made one at a time, each for a reason that nobody remembers. A strategist turns the pile into a body of work. The audience starts to recognize what the brand is about, the team stops reinventing the format every week and the budget goes into fewer, better pieces that get used for longer. Strategy is also what makes content measurable, because you cannot judge a post against a goal that was never written down.
In practice
How a content strategist works in practice
- 01
The strategist begins with an audit of what exists and how it performed, then research into what the audience actually wants to know and where they look for it. From that they define pillars, the three or four themes every piece must ladder up to, and a format map that says what a pillar looks like as a film, a post, a page or an email. The calendar comes last, built around launches, seasons and the team's real capacity.
- 02
In production the strategist writes briefs, reviews drafts against the plan and keeps the governance honest: who approves, how fast, in what tool. Each month they report on what worked, kill what did not and adjust the plan. The calendar is a hypothesis, not a contract.
At RIOT
Content strategists at RIOT
The clearest version of this job in our work is a run, not a one-off. For Gantri we produced two months of social product films, which only works if someone has decided what the series is, how each film differs and what the audience should feel by the end. The Meta ad engine we ran for Homebase from February to April 2025 was the same discipline applied to paid: a plan for what to make next, informed by what had just run.
Watch out
What people get wrong about content strategists
Mistaking a content calendar for a content strategy. A calendar is a schedule; a strategy is the reason the schedule looks the way it does. The other mistake is planning for volume. A brand that posts every day with nothing to say trains its audience to scroll past. A strategist who recommends posting less, and means it, is usually the one worth listening to.
