Unlocking your content strategy with user research
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Many of us have a content strategy tucked away in a shared drive somewhere. But often it doesn’t guide our day-to-day choices. It might look great on paper, yet teams still face issues with ownership, sign-offs, backlogs and content that doesn’t quite connect with users.
In our recent GAIN Experience webinar, principal content designer, Lauren Ellis shared how user research can help turn your content strategy from a static document into something alive that truly shapes what you publish, how you work together and the real results you see.
Why so many content strategies quietly fail
When you search for content strategy, much of it focuses on marketing calendars and campaigns. In UX, though, it’s so much more than a posting schedule. It’s a human-centred way to plan, write, publish and manage content across every touchpoint.
Despite this, many strategies don’t work, and the reasons are often predictable. This is because they:
are created far away from the teams who’ll use them and the customers who will interact with them
seem aspirational rather than practical. They’re filled with well-intentioned soundbites, like “we’ll be clear and compassionate”, but don’t show how to make that happen in daily work
don’t account for technical restraints, business requirements and knotty processes. For example, tools, CMS workflows, sign-off paths, skills and capacity
lack of solid metrics or research, so it’s hard to know if they’re making a difference
It ends up feeling like a compass without a map: inspiring words, but no clear path forward.
Common content challenges facing organisations
These challenges will be familiar to many organisations, regardless of size or sector. Polling with attendees during the webinar found:
30% struggled with managing content ownership
23% were unsure of what metrics to track
20% found stakeholder buy-in and sign-off difficult
18% didn’t have enough time to deliver good content
9% felt they didn’t have the right skills to create a strategy.
Their responses are not surprising – most issues the organisations we work with face are less to do with the words themselves, but due to a lack of clarity and consistency in the way they’re produced and managed.
But when content strategies fail, they lead to more than just poor content quality. It results in:
Lost sales due to high drop out rates and abandoned baskets
Rising support costs due to users not being able to self-serve
Poor brand perception from unclear, confusing or contradictory messaging across channels
Wasted time, money and resource through inefficient workflows
Customer churn and lagging loyalty.
Three lenses for a content strategy that actually work
These common pitfalls can be addressed by viewing your content strategy through three lenses: people, processes and systems. Underpinning each focus area with research will ensure not only buying in and long-term adoption, but content that truly resonates with your users.
This approach creates the conditions for creating good content. Not just getting consensus on what good content looks like. And the best part? Each one gets stronger with the right user research.
1. People: external users and internal teams
We always start with people, not pages.
For your external users, research goes beyond “can they do the task?” Instead ask: “How do they feel? Where are they? What else is happening when they encounter our content?”
Methods include:
usability sessions on key journeys, focusing on content: clarity, understanding, tone, emotional resonance, structure, and prioritisation
surveys to learn about behaviours, preferred formats, valued topics and quick questions like ‘Did you find what you needed today?’
emotion-focused interviews to reveal the feelings tied to tasks, especially in sensitive areas like health, justice and bereavement
Your internal people matter too. Stakeholders, policy owners, call-centre teams, developers and admins are all users of your content processes.
Through interviews, focus groups and workshops, you can:
find out how content is really made and approved today
uncover bottlenecks, pain points, and rework spots
set the KPIs and business goals that truly drive decisions
create a RACI chart to bring clarity and accountability to your content
2. Process: audits, workflows and governance
You can’t build a lasting strategy based on guesses about your current content. You need to discover what you have and how it’s working systematically.
Key steps:
content audits and inventories across channels
channel mapping to track where content lives, online and off
analytics reviews and benchmarking for usage, search behaviour and performance before you change anything
These activities often surprise us with legacy or hidden content that confuses users or risks you reputation if it’s accidentally found via search. They show issues aren’t just words, but unclear request, creation, approval and retirement processes.
From this research, we can understand the process we need to create. Such as:
content lifecycle processes and service level agreements (like request lead times and review cycles)
templates and pattern libraries for consistent layout and structure
personas, journey maps and principles linking decisions to user needs
These must be tested and refined, not just shared.
3. Systems: tools, culture and controls
Systems are more than tech; they include culture and ways of working too.
Content designers and UX teams often have to contort themselves to fit imperfect systems. A more sustainable approach is to reshape systems (where possible) to better support good content.
Think about the systems you might put in place to ensure you deliver your strategy. What can you automate? What can you track? How can you embed your content strategy?
Examples include:
content pillars: short, memorable statements that capture who you want to be for users. For example, ‘We minimise cognitive load in moments of stress’. Use these to guide what gets created and what doesn’t
content standards: concrete rules such as ‘every new page has a clear user need and at least one trackable metric’ or ‘a content specialist signs off all public‑facing content’
content working groups: recurring forums where content creators and key stakeholders review requests, plan upcoming work and monitor governance
Technical systems matter too:
CMS permissions and workflows that control who can create, edit and publish
design‑system backed templates that prevent wild variation in structure
integrated feedback mechanisms (page‑level feedback forms, structured complaint logging) that feed directly into a content backlog
Finally, metrics tie everything together. Agree KPIs early, benchmark and track them as standard. Examples include reduced calls to contact centres, improved task completion, lower checkout drop‑off, higher sign‑ups and better net promoter scores.
Using research to de-risk and embed your strategy
In bigger organisations, it’s tempting to treat content strategy as a one-off. Instead, use an ongoing research cycle: set direction, then check your course.
This helps:
prioritise high-value journeys over ‘nice-to-haves'
push back on creep with evidence, not just opinion
know when not to create content
confirm principles, standards, and templates truly help users and teams
How GAIN Experience can support your content strategy
At Gain Experience, we partner with organisations who value UX but need help building capacity, skills or time for a strong content strategy.
There are several ways we can help:
research‑led discovery: user interviews, usability testing, surveys and stakeholder research that uncover real user needs, emotional contexts and internal constraints
audits and analytics: comprehensive content and channel audits, analytics reviews and SEO research to build a solid evidence base
strategy and frameworks: co‑creating content principles, tone of voice and style guides, workflows, governance models and KPIs that are realistic for you
embedding and up-skilling: embedding content designers and UX researchers into your teams, running workshops and delivering training on content design, UX research, accessibility and UX strategy
If you are wrestling with an under‑used content strategy, struggling to govern content across multiple teams, or unsure how to make research and analytics drive your roadmap, talk to us.
Get in touch with the GAIN Experience team to discuss the content and research challenges you are facing and how we can support you in turning your strategy into a measurable and scalable practice.
