In episode 67 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe continue their discussion on measuring content value based on accounting principles.
“Language evolves. Your content actually needs maintenance, just like your house.”
—Sarah O’Keefe
As 2019 comes to a close, let’s take a look at some of the most popular posts and podcasts from the year.
In episode 66 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe discuss measuring content value based on accounting principles.
Do your customers know the right words to search for? Does marketing refer to your product one way while the tech team refers to it another? Inconsistent word use causes confusion within your company and negatively affects customers’ perception of your brand. So what causes the inconsistencies, and how do you fix them?
In episode 65 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow talk about the need for a localization strategy.
“There may be things you’re writing in your source content that you don’t want literally translated. In many cases, there are stark cultural differences between one location and another. Writing something at all may be inappropriate for another audience.”
—Bill Swallow
If done properly, a new content strategy will bring added value to your organization. The transition itself is not always easy, and the success of the projects depends on your stakeholders. Much like trick or treating, you never know what to expect when someone “opens the door” to change:
You have your technical content in DITA, and you are reaping the benefits of reuse. Now it’s time to move your training content over, but it’s a little confusing to figure out how to structure your content with DITA Learning and Training elements. How can you best set it up to facilitate reuse with your existing DITA content?
In episode 60 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Gretyl Kinsey discuss content reuse, how it specifically applies to DITA, and how it can benefit your organization.
“So often we see companies wasting a lot of time copying and pasting. This idea of reuse saves time and money, and then it also helps to maintain that consistency across your organization.”
— Elizabeth Patterson
In episode 59 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Kaitlyn Heath discuss how you can apply the Learning and Training specialization to your content.
I think the conditional processing is a huge benefit as well. You can have a lot more interactivity built in without that human interference.
— Kaitlyn Heath
Smarter marcom content has advantages, but marketers are used to writing and formatting content at the same time. Smart content separates writing and formatting. Although getting used to this separation may take some effort, the benefits are well worth it.
Most content has an implicit structure. For example, a white paper usually starts by stating a problem, then describes a possible solution, and then mentions a product that can help you with that approach. A good marketing writer understands the implicit structure of a typical document, but the structure may not be clearly stated or outlined anywhere. With smart content, you take a document’s implicit structure and spell it out explicitly.
The tags in smart content capture the structure explicitly. Once you have your tagged document, you can process the information in lots of interesting ways (reuse, multichannel publishing, and much more).
Smart content separates formatting and content. In tools like InDesign or Word, you write and format at the same time. In a smart content tool, you typically focus only on the content sequence and not on the formatting. As a marketing writer, I can tell you this is a big adjustment. But there are huge benefits. Once you create smart content, the separation of content and formatting makes it much easier for you and others to reuse content. Reuse improves the consistency of your messaging across the company. Smart marcom content also allows you to spend more time creating the text, videos, and other promotional content rather than spending time focusing on the organizational structure.
As you get started, there will be a learning curve. Having smart, structured marcom content can save your business time and money. Benefits such as simplifying rebranding, search engine optimization, time, and reuse make the switch worth it.
