Welcome to the blog post where we’ll be discussing the difference between UX writing and content strategy. Both terms are commonly used in the digital world, and while they may seem similar, they have distinct differences.
UX writing is focused on creating content that enhances the user experience within a product or service. It involves crafting microcopy, such as button labels, error messages, and notifications, that guides users through a task, provides helpful information, and instills trust in the brand.
On the other hand, content strategy involves planning, creating, distributing, and managing content across multiple platforms to achieve specific business goals. It encompasses everything from the creation of long-form blog posts to social media updates and email newsletters.
While UX writing and content strategy may seem like two sides of the same coin, they require different skill sets and approaches. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the distinctions between the two and explore how they work together to create a seamless digital experience for users.
Difference Between UX Writing and Content Strategy at a Glance!
| UX Writing | Content Strategy | |
| Purpose | To help users use a digital product (website, app, etc.) quickly and easily. | To control content production, distribution, and administration in order to achieve business goals |
| Use areas | UI sections include, among other things, menus, error messages, landing pages, emails, speech and conversational user interfaces for digital products, notifications, settings, and tooltips. | White papers, research, podcasts, tweets, social media posts, chatbots, emails with promotional content, and blog articles |
| Content Creators | UX writers | Copywriters, content strategists |
| Orientation | Product | Business goals |
| Collaboration | UX writers need to collaborate with the product teams in order to fully comprehend the product. | Content strategists alone may execute and oversee the plan. |
UX Writing and Content Strategy: How Do These Concepts Relate?
Content writing is the process of creating all written contents related to a product.
Content strategy is a kind of glue that holds all parts of a project together. If it does not have a clear direction or is completely absent, the likelihood that you will suffer a commercial failure is almost one hundred percent.
If it is applied in the right place at the right time, then you will have a direct path to achieving the desired results.
UX writing is one of the component parts of the content strategy.
The task of UX texts is to help the user achieve his goals through the language. This is the realization of one of the principles of Google, according to which it is necessary to focus on the user, and all the other components of the mosaic of successful product promotion will take their places by themselves.
Few Important Points About Content Strategy
From a practical point of view, content strategy is a plan of action to create, distribute, manage content and analyze its effectiveness. The finished content strategy gives answers to a variety of questions:
- What to write in a blog, on a site, in social networks?
- Where else besides the site and social networks, there is an opportunity to talk about our company? What is interesting to our readers?
- What are their problems that our product solves?
- How often to publish articles?
- What can we write besides the usual articles?
- Who will create the content?
- How many articles, videos, press releases are needed?
- How best to talk about our product?
- What to do with old materials?
- What style should we follow?
- How to measure the audience response to our content?
Content strategy is a concept from the scope of user experience. It means a systematic approach to creating and disseminating information that the product offers to its real and potential buyers.
Content strategy implies that a potential client will perceive all the texts of the brand as one unit.
That is, the information on the website, on the product packaging, in the press release, on advertising and inside the product (for example, if this is a mobile application) must be consistent and talk about the same thing.
In any case, the content strategy has the following objectives:
- The growth of traffic on the site.
- Increasing brand awareness.
- Increasing user trust and loyalty.
- Creating an expert reputation.
Content managed by the content strategy is created and improved by various departments of the enterprise. It goes through several processing steps at all levels, before becoming useful and practical for the consumer.
The content development and management departments focus primarily on content for customers that are directly related to products or services.
For example, Trust My Paper, being an essay writing service, write about the content writing trends as well in their blog. In turn, designers and companies pay attention to the internal content of the product, and ease of use (for example, the presence of clear tips when making insurance online).
As a result of the success of all these departments, the company receives a positive customer experience.
Thus, being a complex phenomenon, content strategy
- Helps to understand what content your customers need and create it.
- Preserves the unity of the content and helps it to work towards the achievement of common goals.
- Reduces costs by eliminating inactive or inappropriate content channels.
- Increases the efficiency of already used channels
- Helps to assess the time and effort required to generate expert, useful, interesting content.
- Evenly distributes the efforts of the whole team.
As we have already said, UX writing is a part of the content strategy so now we will analyze its specifics as well.
Definition, Specifics, and Goals of UX Writing
A well-designed user interface plays a crucial role in digital marketing.
The convenience of using the site or application attracts new visitors, and this, in turn, leads to an increase in revenue.
But only one site with an excellent interface is not enough, because you need to remember not only about the UI, but also about UX (user experience), and understand what the difference between them is.
It is extremely important to determine what goals visitors should achieve, and your company along with them.
The purpose of visitors may be different – to get the necessary information, download an e-book, purchase a product, and the purpose of a business is completely different, for example, to simplify filling out forms or navigating the site.
In the end, it all comes down to finding a balance and creating a win-win situation where users and businesses achieve their goals. UX writing was supposedly created specifically for this purpose.
UX writing involves the creation of texts and micro-texts within an interface, which aim to improve the ease of user interaction with a website or application. T
hese can include page titles, section headings, menu items, button labels, instructions, contextual prompts for data entry fields, error notifications, and calls to action.
In addition to these tasks, UX writers may also be responsible for writing privacy policies, other legal texts, and notifications. The overall goal of UX writing is to ensure that the user experience is seamless and intuitive, while also maintaining the brand voice and tone.
What Does a UX Writer Do?
The mission of UX writer is to use the text to make the interface of the site intuitive to the user. UX texts should be as useful and concise as possible. Here the literary syllable is not important – the UX writer concentrates on helping the user.
This does not mean that UX texts can be illiterate.
On the contrary, spelling and punctuation errors, even in micro-texts, will make your user strongly doubt your product. This is the correct statement that you have only one chance to make a first impression.
It also does not mean that UX texts should be dry and heartless – the interface can and should be user-friendly. User interaction with the site should be a pleasant dialogue.
UX Text Objectives
Here are the main goals that are realized by UX writing:
- It brings the user closer to his goal
- It guides the user within the product and provides instructional component and feedback. all this is done in conjunction with the visual part of the product.
- Influence the mood of the user.
- UX texts transfer corporate values. Depending on the specifics of the product, you can allow yourself this or that style of communication.
UX Writing and Copywriting: What Is the Relationship Between Them?
So, let’s understand the difference between a UX writer and a copywriter. Copywriting is a creative process of creating unique textual material of an advertising, presentation, propaganda, and commercial nature.
These can be advertising and informational and presentation texts, articles for mass media, corporate publications, etc.
The purpose of copywriting is the creation of “selling” texts that will allow a large number of readers, visitors to be interested and draw their attention to the service or product.
Thus, a copywriter is the creator of advertising content and a specialist with knowledge of marketing, methods of persuasion and the needs of a potential client.
He not only creates advertising, but also is its creator, and also participates in the implementation of marketing strategies.
In turn, UX-writers write to keep users – their goal is to create the most positive and seamless user experience. And all this with the help of words. Let’s look at an example of how this works even in seemingly hopeless situations.
Error 404 is one of the worst experiences that can happen to users on almost any site. A page that does not exist has a poor user experience. Fortunately, even this experience can be slightly corrected – you just need to find the right words. With a couple of words and a picture, Pixar turns a bad experience into a ridiculous one and eliminates the negative impression of a 404 page hit. This is how UX writing works.
Future of UX Writing and Content Strategy
UX writing, in my opinion, will become an even more vital part of the content strategy as organizations increasingly prioritize the creation of user-centered experiences. UX writers will be responsible for creating material that is easy to understand and follow, leading users on a smooth and natural path.
Another trend I foresee, fueled by advances in AI and ML, is the rise of personalized content. In order to do this, user data will need to be analyzed so that relevant, audience-specific content may be produced.
Content strategy’s will develop further as companies work to harmonize their content with their overarching brand message and commercial objectives. To do so, they’ll need to learn more about the customer’s perspective and concentrate on producing content that encourages purchases and fosters loyalty.
In general, the future of UX writing and content strategy will center on the development of experiences that are not only pleasant for users but also tailored to each individual’s interests and needs and in line with organizational objectives.
Summary
The whole concept of user experience is to understand the target users, their needs, values, abilities, and limitations. The best practices of UX in the context of providing useful content work towards improving the quality of user interaction with the site and improving the perception of the product and its associated services.
To achieve this, you need to manage the actions of users for more smooth use of the website or application. On the one hand, this can be achieved with the help of professional UX writing and providing high-quality information content, on the other.
Both of these tasks have a common goal – improving user experience, increasing loyalty, increasing traffic and increasing conversions.
The well-thought-out UX in combination with the right design and useful content improves the user experience and allows you to achieve your goals faster.
