The Difference Between UX Writing and Content Strategy

Digital experience is evolving, and you need to keep learning to stay on top of the competition. One of the latest trends is the popularization of the term UX writing. As a practice, UX writing was out there for decades, but it’s now being well-formulated and is growing into a separate industry.

What’s UX writing and how it’s different from content strategy? Hop on, and you’ll learn the essential differences between the two.

Strategy vs tactics

Both content strategy and UX writing operate with a few key datasets. If you want to be able to do either of them, you need to know everything about your company’s clients, research your competitors, and know the unique selling points of your product. But the way you use this data is quite distinct in both cases.

The main difference between content strategy and UX writing is the scope of the operation. Content strategy oversees all the strategic points of rolling out content for marketing. It identifies the type of content your audience is interested in, finds strategic locations for placing that content, and channels of distributing it.

UX writing has a more tactical approach. It is a part of your company’s overall marketing strategy. A person who does UX writing already knows a wider strategy that should play into and only have to create a tactical solution for that strategy.

The key fact about UX writing solutions is that they’re internal rather than external.

Internal vs external

This distinction is probably the main difference between the two. Content strategy is an inbound marketing strategy. The goal for the person who creates it is increasing traffic to the website and generating leads.

To do this, they have to find external platforms to distribute content. While some of the content the team creates for the content marketing campaign may be published on your website, the main scope is on external platforms.

The team that executes the content strategy may do this by distributing the content on social media, writing guest posts on high-authority websites, and distributing the freshly published viral content to websites that may be interested in republishing it.

The team that does UX writing has an internal rather than external focus. Their goal is increasing conversions rather than generating traffic. To achieve their goals, the team uses data on the company’s clients to align page copy with their values and expectations.

Ultimately, content strategy and UX writing deal with different stages of the sales funnel.

Top vs bottom of the sales funnel

Content strategists oversee the very top of the sales funnel. The whole idea behind content marketing is that sharing expertise with the customers is a sure way to gain their trust. A good content strategy exposes the brand to millions of people and paints a positive image of this brand in the media.

The content strategy covers the awareness and interest stages of the sales funnel. When it comes to intent and evaluation, UX writing is king.

UX writers write website copy in a way that helps leads understand the product and see it from a more positive perspective. They highlight the USPs of the product and work with possible objections on the page before the sales team even has a lead’s contacts.

Projecting expertise vs explaining the product

In a nutshell, content strategy is all about projecting expertise of the company into the web. UX writing is about explaining the product to the website visitors.

Here’s what you’d do if you were doing both of these things for an Ivory Research that specializes in proofreading and editing content.

For content strategy, you’d have to figure out who are the main customers and what websites do they frequent. Once you have a basis of 50-100 websites that have audiences similar to yours, you could either write guest posts for those websites or create one piece of viral content and distribute it on all websites.

For UX writing, you’d study why people buy your services and what stops them from buying. You’d use this information to write website copy that doesn’t just talk vaguely about how great your services are but addresses these key issues directly.

 

IMAGE CREDIT: Sofy Dubinska 

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