5 things that will make you a great content designer
Your teachers probably told you: don’t spread yourself too thin. But in 2015, a broad set of skills is the way to get a job. Here’s how I learned to stop worrying and love what I do.
I’m 27 and I’ve been working as a content designer and strategist for a couple of years now. I design all sorts of stuff for social media engagement, increasing web traffic, lead generation and sales.
Back in high school I wanted to be a lot of things: a journalist, a photographer, a social scientist (after that I majored in social psychology and nearly ended up embarking on a PhD course). But in mid 2000s most of these professions became ridiculously difficult to get into. I would have had to focus on only one of them and arm myself with lots of perseverance just to take off.
But I didn’t want to give up any of them, so I started to carve my way through a path which I knew would not be easy — to do a lot of things at once and achive a reasonable level of proficiency. And of course to find someone willing to pay for my work.
Last year I realised that all the risk I’ve taken was the bargaining chip on every job interview I went to, although at the time the jobs were just entry-level marketing or public relations positions. I found that somewhere between marketing, social media and media management there’s plenty of room for me. There’s people who want someone to be able to talk with both programmers and art directors, be actually liked, not hated, and be able to do one’s own stuff without bothering the rest too much.
After all that time I came up with 5 things that made it possible for me, and which also indicate my future development goals:
1. Tech literacy
Tech literacy, software fluency and being practically native in virtual environments. It’s not that you can use your Mac or iPhone. You are your machine. You know every bit of it, you deal easily with both software and hardware issues. If you write with a pencil maybe it’s not necessary to know the physics of graphite getting onto paper, but in case of your computer, you just need to know the basics of what’s going inside. Use hotkeys, learn to customize. Try the command line, maybe switch for a time to linux. Learn to code (which is currently on the top of my list).
2. Strategic thinking
System thinking as well. Being a designer (not only for marketing purposes) always implies knowing, and often drawing from scratch, the strategy for applying your design. Whether it’s a blog post with an infographic or an AdWords campaign — you need to divide your job into the core part and ways to make it work in different channels or with different users. Are they online or offline? Do you need microcontent for facebook posts, tweets, snaps, instagrams? Do you have a landing page to direct to from the ads, press packs for a conference and a summary for email campaign? You need to ask yourself these questions and know the answers. All this, moving successfully from analysis to synthesis, with a lot of attention to detail.
3. Creativity
It’s not so much about finding inspiration in your morning coffee. It’s about developing ideas into applicable concepts. Establishing priorities, finding patterns, filling gaps and defining the best practices in your creative process. It takes lots of logical thinking and discipline to translate products of your creativity into your company’s business objectives. To put it simply, if you write a copy, sticking only to your philology major won’t do.
Creative designers — copywriters, graphic designers, animators, developers — they all need to communicate efficiently, understand their creative needs and, at the same time, see the big picture.
4. Management and workflow
It takes a skilled project manager to make everyone in your office happy. But it doesn’t mean that he or she will do everything for you. Establish your own workflow. I use reminders, Evernote and Google Apps, so that I can check the schedule anytime on every device I use. I make several core content pieces a week, with stacks of auxiliary materials on the side. I have to know instantly where they are and what to do with them.
Management techniques are also a part of teamwork. I often work with people who have completely different approaches. Getting information from a journalist requires knowing when it’s his or her time for field work, and when it’s time for writing articles. If you work on an e-commerce campaign with a programmer, you might want to know agile techniques and how to squeeze everything of a daily stand-up meeting. In fact you might want to organize work the same way yourself.
5. Methodology
Back at university I thought that the most important thing I have learned is methodology of scientific research and statistics. I don’t work in research now, but still I couldn’t agree more. Frequently, in order to produce a valuable piece of content, I need to go through lots of data tables, analyses, reports on topics like finance, investments, economy, labor market. I also need to assess which data is useful for my project, how to adjust it to the target audience and leave the sense and meaning unaltered. In order to select the right methods of data visualisation for infographics, you must know the difference between correlation and regression, statistical significance and distribution, percentage and percentage points.
It also has the upper hand in evaluating your campaigns. Get to those testing manuals, learn how to interpret Facebook insights, adjust the content to particular conversion goals or for A/B tests. You might have an analyst by your side to set Google Analytics for you, but you won’t do the right thing without knowing the mechanisms. Likewise, you won’t be able to draw conclusions to improve your performance.
I sometimes say that I wouldn’t hire myself for the job because I still haven’t mastered all of the above. But that’s not the point. I’m inclined towards creation and marketing strategy and these fields are my strongest asset, so of course I won’t be a perfect data analyst or a front-end developer. But the key is to know the proportions and know all your weaknesses. That’s how you find the right team for you, and that’s where the magic happens.
