Integrating technical and marketing content for maximum impact
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
Why technical communication must be part of your marketing strategy (webcast)
Your marketing content is persuasive and creates awareness about your product. But that’s just the first step. After hearing about your product, prospects need to think about it. “Does it solve my problem? What can this product do? Do the technical specifications meet my requirements?”
If you decide to buy a car, there is a lot to consider. It’s exciting to learn about the features like smart stereo systems, limited edition colors, and extra large sunroofs. But what do you need the car for? Perhaps you have a baby and need to consider space for a car seat. Or maybe you are going to be pulling a travel trailer and need a certain amount of towing capacity. Incorporating technical communication into your marketing strategy means your prospects will be able to find all of the information they are looking for when they need it.
The age of accountability: Unifying marketing and technical content with Adobe Experience Manager
Commissioned by Adobe Systems, Inc. (What does this mean?)
You’ve recognized the importance of unifying your marketing and technical content. So how do you make it happen? Adobe offers a solution that allows for creation of structured technical content (DITA) and less structured marketing content in a single repository.
To ensure that customers get the information they need, you must align technical and marketing content across all dimensions—design, style, terminology, taxonomy, search, and so on. This can be a challenging task. The XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) allows you to manage both marketing and technical content in a single repository, each with its own workflow.
If you’re using or considering AEM, this tight integration makes AEM with the XML Add-on a compelling option to align your marketing and technical content efforts.
Connecting the XML and web CMS mindsets
With a solution in place to integrate marketing and technical content, you now have to find a way for the design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective to co-exist and co-create.
We’ve identified some basic best practices that apply to all of the content groups:
- Omnichannel content efforts require new design perspectives.
- Templates and frameworks are necessary to deliver content at scale.
- Languages are not just another delivery channel. Your localization strategy needs to address content authoring, terminology, and culture and regulatory differences.
If you need help integrating marketing and technical content operations, contact us.