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If your messaging feels inconsistent across your website, emails, and social channels, the issue may not be execution – it may be how you’re approaching content in the first place. Content Strategist Sarah Johnson shares why content should come before design, how “meaning drift” happens inside organizations, and what it takes to create clear, consistent messaging that actually supports growth.
Content First or Design First? Let’s Settle this Website Debate
When we started planning a website redesign for flyte, the first instinct was to talk about look and feel. What’s the visual direction? What’s the vibe? How do we want people to feel when they land on the page?
After nearly 29 years running a web design agency, I know better. And yet there’s still that gravitational pull toward design first, content later.
That’s exactly what Sarah Johnson, author of Content First Design and the forthcoming Meaning at Scale, would call a mistake. And after talking with her, I’m even more convinced she’s right.
What “Content First” Actually Means
The content-first approach isn’t just a preference. It’s a philosophy rooted in how people actually use digital products. As Sarah put it, “a digital product is a conversation with the user.” And you can’t design a conversation if you don’t know how your user thinks, what they’re looking for, or what questions they’re trying to answer.
That means the design should follow the content, not the other way around. When you start with design, you end up filling boxes. When you start with content, you end up building something people can actually use.
The Research That Makes It Work
Before you write a single word, you need to understand your customers, not your assumptions about your customers. Sarah described a few approaches that are genuinely useful, even without a big budget or a dedicated UX team.
One of her favorites: listening to customer support calls. The language people use when they’re frustrated, confused, or looking for help is marketing gold. It tells you exactly how they describe their own problems, which is often very different from how you describe your solutions.
Another: empathy mapping. Walk a customer (or a stand-in) through a digital experience and capture how they talk about it, what they’re thinking, how they feel. It sounds a little soft, but the data you get is hard to argue with.
For smaller operations, Sarah recommends what she calls guerrilla testing: grab someone who isn’t close to the project (a colleague from a different department, a friend, your mom) and watch them navigate your experience. You’ll learn more in twenty minutes than you will from weeks of internal debate.
Team Alignment Is Step Zero
Here’s the step most people skip: before the research, before the wireframes, before a single word gets written, everyone involved needs to agree on the problem you’re trying to solve. Not the solution. The problem.
Sarah runs what she calls a problem statement workshop to get teams there. The goal is simple: make sure every department is talking about the same thing, in the same way. Marketing, product, UX all need to be working from the same understanding.
That sounds obvious until you realize how rarely it actually happens.
Meaning Drift: The Hidden Conversion Killer
Sarah has a term for what goes wrong when teams aren’t aligned: meaning drift. It’s what happens when a message fragments across an organization. Marketing says it one way, product says it another, and the customer is left trying to reconcile three different versions of the same thing.
The result isn’t just inconsistency. It’s confusion. And confused customers don’t buy.
If you’ve got a business where different teams are using different language for the same product, service, or concept, meaning drift is almost certainly a factor. The fix isn’t complicated in theory: pick the language that resonates most with your customers (ask them, surveys work), make a decision, and align around it.
One practical tool Sarah mentioned is a content clarity audit, which essentially maps where your messaging is losing consistency and where customers are likely getting lost. It’s worth doing even if you’re not in the middle of a redesign.
When You’ve Built a Brand Term Nobody Knows
This is where it gets interesting. Sometimes a business wants to brand its own terminology, to own a phrase the way Sarah owns “meaning drift.” That’s a legitimate goal, but it comes with a cost: you have to do the work of educating your audience on what that term means and why they should care.
Sarah herself does this on LinkedIn, regularly framing meaning drift in terms of business impact so her audience understands the concept before they need the solution. It’s a long game, but it builds real equity.
If you’re introducing proprietary language, build that education into your content strategy from the start. Don’t assume the term will land just because it sounds good internally.
Content First Makes AI Actually Useful
One of the more practical points from our conversation was the connection between content-first thinking and AI performance.
If you’re feeding AI tools vague prompts without context, you get generic output. But if you’ve already done the work of defining your brand voice, documenting your lexicon, writing a real style guide, and establishing what you’re trying to communicate, that infrastructure becomes the training material for your AI tools.
Sarah built a custom GPT she calls SagGPT, trained on her brand language and communication style. I’ve done something similar (mine’s called Orby). Neither of us treats the output as finished copy, but as a first-draft machine informed by deep brand context, it’s genuinely useful.
The interesting side effect: building those GPTs forces you to confront inconsistencies you didn’t know existed. It’s like holding a mirror up to your messaging. Suddenly you notice you’ve been describing the same service four different ways, and you have to decide which one actually fits.
Where to Start
If this is resonating and you want to put content-first principles to work, Sarah’s recommendation is straightforward: start with team alignment. Get the people involved in creating your content (across channels, departments, and roles) in a room (virtual counts) and ask: what problem are we trying to solve, and how are we going to talk about it?
From there, do the research. Talk to your customers. Listen to how they describe their experience. Run some guerrilla tests. Build a content priority map that establishes what goes on a page, in what order, and why.
Then, only after all of that, start designing.
It’s not always the way it happens in practice. Clients push for mockups. Timelines get compressed. Decisions get made before the research is done. I’ve been there more times than I can count.
But every time we’ve slowed down and started with the content (the strategy, the language, the customer research) the end result is better. The message is clearer. The site is easier to navigate. The customers actually understand what we’re offering.
Turns out, knowing what you’re going to say before you figure out how it looks isn’t a radical idea. It’s just common sense.
Transcript from Sarah Johnson’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is a content strategist, author, and creator of the trademarked Content First framework. She helps CMOs and product leaders eliminate meaning drift, align teams around shared language, and scale messaging without losing clarity.
Host of the Content First podcast and author of Content First Design, and the forthcoming Meaning at Scale, she works in the intersection of structure, strategy, and execution, turning content into infrastructure that drive speed and growth.
Today we are going to be talking about aligning your content with user experience and business goals with Sarah Johnson. Sarah, welcome to the podcast.
Sarah: Thank you, Rich. Thank you for having me.
Rich: So the intersection of structure, strategy, and execution is an interesting one. What was your journey in getting there?
Sarah: My journey started in user experience where I wrote the book, Content First Design. And as I began to think more and more about it as I progressed with the business, I extrapolated the idea to an organizational level. And I began to see how meaning disintegrates or fragments across the content stream of people, different teams, channels, and materials.
So structure UX, I think that content determines structure. We start there, and in order to create a structure that has meaning, we need to be consistent with meaning across marketing, product, and user experience.
Rich: All right. So would you say that you started from a place of writing, and then that kind of fed into your sense of UX and design?
Sarah: Absolutely. I started as a novelist, and I still do that. And I got into user experience through a friend and fell in love with it. And I love content design and I love thinking about it, and finding ways to improve processes, frameworks, models. And that’s what led me to sort of this meaning at scale concept of how can we maintain meaning and clarity across an organization and across teams and channels, so that we don’t confuse the user, so that we don’t push away customers, so that we don’t lose brand trust.
Rich: All excellent reasons. And I’m really excited to have this conversation because as I mentioned to you offline, we are in the process of redesigning our website. And some of the content’s going to say the same, some of it’s going to change, and I’m writing that now. And after running an agency for nearly 29 years that develops websites, we’ve certainly gone through the gamut of what should come first, content or design. And so I’m super excited to kind of dive into this topic with you.
So when people build websites or digital experiences, they often start with designer layout like we talked about. Why do you believe that content should come first instead?
Sarah: Oh, to me it’s a no brainer. To me, a digital product is a conversation with the user. And how can you have that conversation if you don’t know how they talk, think, feel, or what they’re going to do on a page, what they’re looking for, what their needs are. So researching content and understanding that conversation is going to feed into design.
Saying that doesn’t mean that I think content should run the show. I think it’s a very collaborative process with product, business, UX, and user research, especially, because we’re really digging into who this user is before we create the conversation.
A friend of mine, Melinda Belcher, said that not having the user conversation is like trying to make a movie without a script. How are you going to get people talking? And I think that design, first, we don’t really know what the user’s looking for. We don’t really know how they’re understanding the flow through the conversation of the experience.
Rich: So since research needs to come first, let’s touch on that. What does research look like for you? If you’re working with a client, what kind of research are you doing to better understand the language of the customer and the kind of questions they would ask, and even what their journey might be like?
Sarah: That’s a great question. The research, there’s some wonderful ways to do customer research. One of my favorites is listening into the customer support center, to the call center, to hear what people were calling and complaining about, what their pain points were, and how they spoke about the experience they were having. What their language was, what they understood about how we said things, and what they didn’t understand, what was clear and what was unclear. If I do this action, is it permanent, can it be undone? Things like that.
And also conversation mapping, where we talk to people and play sort of devil’s advocate and look for their pain points, listen to how they talk, think, feel. Which brings us to an empathy map, which is literally how you run a customer through a digital experience and capture how they talk about it, what they think of what they’re doing, how they feel about it, and what they say.
So you’re understanding a lot about who this person is, who these customers are, and gathering a lot of data that’s invaluable. So there are a few examples.
Rich: So we do this research and we feel that we have a pretty good sense of what our customers and prospects are interested in, their pain points, their desires. How does that translate into your Content First model? What are the next steps after that?
Sarah: Sure. The next steps, the Content First model that I use starts with sort of the team alignment. The second step is the research. The third step is doing the design, and that’s working with product UX and content. And content works very closely with user experience design.
And the idea is to first do a content priority map where you establish the hierarchy of content on the page. And you work with a designer to create a really clear, simplified experience for people to navigate and find their way through, and to understand what they need to do, what that means, and why it matters.
Rich: So you mentioned a step that came even before research, and I didn’t realize that. The team alignment. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Sarah: Sure. We need to align on the problem we’re trying to solve for the user. And in my book, I talk about having a problem statement workshop. We don’t want to be given a solution, we want to be given a problem to solve.
So understanding what that problem is across teams is critical. Understanding how we’re going to talk about it is critical. So that alignment is iterative. Like the more we learn, the more we can refine that problem statement and have everybody on board speaking the same language. So that happens in meetings and a variety of communication channels.
Rich: All right, so if you start with the content first, how does that change the way that these teams then think about the user experience?
Sarah: I think that the focus becomes more on the user and more on creating a conversation, and I think it simplifies it. You’re not designing in the dark. You’re not designing for what you think a user might do. It’s not so ‘me’ driven. It’s more who are we serving and how can we best serve them? And finding that sweet spot, which is the biggest thing, is between business requirements and user needs. When you hit that sweet spot, that’s your jackpot.
Rich: Alright. So I’m sure there are a lot of people listening right now who are not in the middle of a website redesign. So how can this content first approach apply to their day-to-day marketing, such as emails, social media, and so on?
Sarah: Sure. I think that the first thing they need is team alignment. How are they talking, especially across channels, about the same thing. Are they using the same language for the same thing, or are they interpreting the same thing differently? So if you call it a dog in an email, you better call it a dog in your social media and not a canine.
Rich: Right. So the language in your mind is very important and to be consistent across these different channels. But at the same time, some of these channels have different vibes. LinkedIn is not the same as X, is not the same as Facebook.
Sarah: Right.
Rich: How much flexibility do you build into this? Or are there core things like if we’re going to call it a dog, then we’re going to call it a dog everywhere. But you can have the flexibility of saying big dog, small dog.
Sarah: Oh, sure, sure. Absolutely. It can be a different kind of dog. If we are talking about, say, stock transactions, there are different kinds of stock transactions. There are different audiences. So much of how you talk depends on your audience. And you’re going to have a different audience for the website, and social media, and a different format in an email, and a different sort of business goal with each of those. So again, it’s looking at the intersection of business and user.
Rich: I’ve definitely, over the years, run into situations with clients where they say, “I don’t know how to write to a blank page. I need to see the designs, and then I can write to them.” What would you say to that client?
Sarah: Do your research. You need to understand your customer. If you don’t understand your customer and who they are and what they’re looking for, how are you going to best serve them?
And I think that you need to start with some words. You don’t have to have the refined language, but at least an articulation that’s enough to create a hierarchy of information and a sense of what the language will be.
Rich: All right. Now, a lot of people listening may not have a dedicated content strategist on their team, or a UX team, for that matter. If we are running a lean operation, how can we apply some of these content first principles with limited resources?
Sarah: Sure. I encourage when doing the customer research, I teach a class at Bentley in which we do customer research amongst teams. I have pods of three or four people, and they do research. I call it ‘gorilla testing’. They do it within their group, they practice conversation mapping with each other. You be the customer, I’ll be the business.
And to find people in your environment who aren’t on the project to test it with. You know, it can be your mother, it can be your friend. It can be someone in the business who isn’t familiar with the project that you’re doing. But to find ways of testing, to get creative with who you’re testing with and how you’re doing it.
Rich: Oh, okay. So one of the things we kind of teased when we were talking about the different social channels and email and how there’s a little bit of variance there. You’ve talked about ‘meaning drift’. Can you define what ‘meaning drift’ is and why it’s so important?
Sarah: Sure. ‘Meaning drift’ is when a message is fragmented across an organization. Meaning Rich says it one way, product says it another, marketing says it another, and UX is left sort of trying to sort through what the message is and how it’s best serving the customer.
And that’s one of the reasons I think the content designers and product need to be more involved in where the message originates, whether it’s in the C-suite in marketing, heads of marketing, but to be involved from the beginning would be an ideal world to really put content first and understand the user and the messaging. Like, what are we trying to accomplish with the words that we’re using?
Rich: So if I’m running a small business, and I notice that marketing is talking about a product in one way and sales is talking about another way, and distribution is talking about it in a third way, what are some of the ways that I can get everybody to be using the same language without necessarily micromanaging them?
How do I decide what are the key messages that we want to get across and make sure that everybody is always using that same vernacular?
Sarah: I think it has to start with marketing, whether it’s a CMO or head of marketing, and work with the marketing team. The marketing team needs to align with product and user experience and have those conversations.
Why this message? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to us? And come to sort of a meeting of the minds of what we’re trying to accomplish with this message, and is it going to succeed.
Rich: There was a time back in the day when I wrote all of flyte’s content and all of Agents of Change content. Those days are long behind , and I have a team now, and we all share in some of those writing responsibilities as well as different people managing different channels.
I’m sure there are some inconsistencies. What are your recommendations about trying to find and fix these inconsistencies, and how much effort should we be putting into some of the older messaging that’s out there?
Sarah: Well, I think putting effort into older messaging that’s out there is really important in terms of keeping things relevant and up to date, I think.
You know, one of the ways I do it as a content clarity audit. I don’t want to promote myself here, but a content clarity audit kind of goes through and analyzes where your content is experiencing meaning drift, where you’re losing consistency, where you need to update content. Are you stating what you do from the beginning and who your typical customer should be, what their next steps are, what you’re selling? Go through that analysis.
Rich: Alright, so there are certain things, and one of the things that I’m thinking about right now is here at flyte. And we talk about measurement, we talk about analytics, we talk about reporting, we talk about measurement marketing. There’s a lot of different phrases that kind of all mean, if not exactly the same thing, very similar things.
How would we determine what the right terminology is? Is this a situation where we might do a survey of some of our clients and say, which of these phrases resonate to you, or do you even know what they mean? And then have that help us decide what the single phrase that we should be using is to avoid that meaning drift.
Sarah: I think that’s a great idea. Because you really, I mean, you read my mind. What you want is what’s going to resonate with customers, and then you want the consistency throughout the experience so they understand what you’re talking about and what you’re doing, what they’re supposed to do.
Rich: And how does that meet up with, you know, sometimes companies want to brand their framework or brand their way of doing things. How do we find the balance between those things?
I’ve heard some people call it “measurement marketing” and then the customer may not know what that actually means, even though they may have a vague sense of it. Is there a point where maybe we try and force our jargon or language on our customer base because we want to brand something? Or is that never really a good idea?
Sarah: That is an interesting question, and you’re making me , which I like. I think those words that you’re introducing are important, and I think it requires a lot of training the user to understand. And you can use those, do that through social media.
I do it on LinkedIn to talk about ‘meaning drift’. Who knows what ‘meaning drift’ is or meaning. So I spend a lot of time sort of educating and talking about it and putting a frame around how this will help a business. And I just started publishing on LinkedIn what you get with an analysis, with a content clarity audit. Like what does this mean? What does this ‘meaning drift’ mean, and what does it look like on a page?
Rich: Yeah. It definitely seems like it’s a challenge. Because on one hand, we want to own that space and we want to define it so that people always think of Sarah Johnson when they hear the phrase ‘meaning drift’. And at the same time, there is a certain amount of work that you need to put in to make that phrase stick in the minds of your absolute audience.
Sarah: Absolutely. That’s sort of what brought me to writing the book Meaning at Scale, is just to explore those concepts with a readership.
Rich: Awesome.
Sarah: Yeah.
Rich: So AI is everywhere, obviously. And it’s playing a bigger role in content creation. How might a content first approach help organizations use AI more effectively, in your opinion?
Sarah: I think it’s huge. I think that content first provides structure, which AI needs. It provides context, tone of voice, style guide, lexicon, vernacular. The structuring context that AI needs has to come first. The language has to come first in setting up how we talk about what we do.
And I spent a lot of time building a ChatGPT called SajGPT, that has that contextualization to think like me. And you feed it a lot of information, and it can create content that sounds like me, but that I have to go over. It’s sort of a first draft machine. And it’s fun.
I think if you do AI correctly, it’s really fun. And I think content first can help you get there to the point where what you’re spitting out isn’t hallucinations, it’s actual usable content.
Rich: I completely agree. We’re in the early processes of building out what we call ‘brand GPTs’ for different clients that are trained up on their ICPs – their ideal client personas – as well as their brand voice, which comes from documents that they have already written.
And I also created, you call yours Saj, I created Orby, which is my optimized self as well, so that I can use it for first drafts and ideation and just to bounce ideas off of. And one of the things that I’ve found through the experience of building these GPTs for clients has been that it’s kind of like holding up a mirror to the brand and it forces you to start saying, do we talk like this? Which is the right kind of phrase that we want to use?
And like you said, it forces this structure upon you, not in a bad way, but in a way where you’re like, oh, I have been using three or four different ways of describing the same product or the same service or output. And for me and for the clients I’ve worked with, it’s actually clarified what their brand voice is and how they engage with their audience.
Sarah: And it’s a fabulous collaborator in that sense. And I look at it, the tool I love collaborating with my AI, it’s my collaboration buddy. But you know, like you said, you can run ideas by it. It’s going to point out to you where you’re adrift and where your messaging is working and why.
And you know, obviously it takes a human eye. I mean, we all have to review what that thing says or who knows what’s going to happen. But I think that it’s a hugely valuable tool in content creation.
Rich: Absolutely. So when you’re building out your GPTs or using AI, what do things like style guides, terminology, and content standards, how does that fit into either building out the GPTs or just in terms of interacting with them?
Sarah: I think building it out, it’s sort of like what you said with the brand. You feed it the brand that the company has already built. I think that you can sort of feed the, the AI and train it with the style guide, the voice of the customer, the tone that you speak in. All those documents, the lexicon, all those documents you’ve been creating for years and iterating on can go right in there. And you’ll see with the output you get where you need refinement. Like you said, it is a mirror for the work.
Rich: Do you think it’s easier for a fairly new company to do this kind of work where they can kind of decide how they’re going to sound, or for a company that’s been established and may have a lot of copy to look back on, but maybe their voice has evolved over time?
Sarah: That’s interesting. One of the things with a small company is it’s easier to pivot to AI. Whereas large companies you get into change management and a lot of hands in the pie and huge expense, and it’s harder to manage change. There’s resistance to change. There’s training that has to happen. There’s money that needs to be spent. So it’s harder for a larger organization to pivot. But they all are trying, you know?
Rich: Absolutely. We’ve talked about content first. We’ve talked about UX and we’ve talked about the customer journey, to a certain degree. When it comes to this content first model, what are some of the things that you’ve heard from other experts or that people generally think about creating content that you’re like, that’s just completely wrong, and you’ve got a very different opinion?
Sarah: I think starting with design is completely wrong. So anyone who tells me they’re a design first organization, I’m just like, please.
Rich: Excellent.
Sarah: This is why that’s not going to work. And you can tell when you look at a site, you know it’s a really groovy, beautiful, funky, and you don’t know what it does or who the customer is or where you’re supposed to start, or what the story is.
Rich: So finding that content first also helps with that clarity of message as well.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.
Rich: If somebody’s listening right now and they’re feeling inspired and they want to improve the way that their business is using content to connect with customers, what’s the very first step you would recommend they take?
Sarah: If they want to use content first to get to their customers, I think getting team alignment on what they’re trying to accomplish and what the problem is they’re trying to solve, and then doing the research into that problem with the customer.
Rich: Awesome. Sarah, this has been really helpful. If people are listening right now and they want to learn more about you, or they think that you can help them fix their issues with meaning drift and some of their content issues, where can we point them?
Sarah: Sure, you can go to contentfirstdesign.com or email me at sarah@contentfirstdesign.com.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Sarah, thank you so much for solving this lifelong debate. And going forward, it’s always going to be content first.
Sarah: Thank you so much, Rich. It’s been a pleasure.
Show Notes:
Sarah Johnson is a content strategist and founder of the Content First framework, helping organizations align messaging across marketing, product, and user experience. Follow her insights through the Content First podcast and her books.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.