Content lifecycle challenges
“When you share content across the company in ways you haven’t before, everyone has to shift to a culture of collaboration.”
Content pitfalls
Before you begin a content project
Undertaking a project to improve your organization’s content creation process is overwhelming. It is not easy to move into structured content, create a new taxonomy, or develop a new content delivery platform, for example. Here is a list of things to do before you start any content project.
Standardizing company terminology
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?
Smarter marcom content
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.
Full transcript of Content strategy failure podcast
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 37, we talk about failure, how can you guarantee your content strategy will fail? How can you invite disaster for your content processes?
Full transcript of Content strategy pitfalls podcast: change management
Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 29, we continue our occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. Our focus today is change management. What are some common change management pitfalls and how might the intrepid content strategist avoid or handle them?
Full transcript of content strategy pitfalls: silos podcast
Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way.
In episode 26, we continue our series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the dangers that the intrepid content strategist must avoid as she navigates a complex project. In this episode, we’ll focus on the issue of silos.
Full transcript of content strategy pitfalls: tools podcast
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 25 we begin an occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the traps, snares and dangers that the intrepid content strategist will encounter? What’s the best way to avoid danger, injury and even project death? In this episode we’ll focus on software and tool problems.
Content strategy contingency plans
When winter weather makes commuting to Scriptorium’s NC office difficult, we work from home. We have set up a cloud-based infrastructure to support remote employees (hello, Bill Swallow!), and it works well for the rest of us during weather events and business travel.
Tools are not a content strategy
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Content creators love their tools. So much, in fact, they sometimes mistake selecting tools for developing a content strategy.
Classic content strategy mistake: re-creating old formatting with new tools
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
A common content strategy mistake is duplicating the look-and-feel of existing content when you’re implementing new tools and processes.
Top 10 signs that your documentation is craptacular, 2017 edition
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Way back in 2011, I published the first edition of this list. It’s interesting to see how much has changed since then.
Warning signs: localization strategy needed
Without centralized localization processes, you will pay more for translated content, provide inconsistent translations, and possibly expose your company to significant legal liability. Here are warning signs your company needs a better localization strategy:
Easy ways to undermine marketing with content strategy
Does your content deliver on your marketing promises?
Content strategy after mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions often result in a new content strategy. In a typical scenario, the merged company needs to align disparate content organizations. Before the merger, the companies had different tools, technologies, workflows, deliverables, and content culture. A goal of the merger is to unify company products, and therefore, the merged organization must also unify content development.
Is your content overhead or a customer delight?
Delight is the difference between what you and your team cost, and the revenue you directly (or indirectly) produce (or protect). This concept is as important to charities as hedge funds.
You may not think that “delighting” customers is part of your content creation responsibilities. But when customer delight is defined in terms of revenue and costs, it suddenly becomes a critical part of your job.
Content strategy patterns in the enterprise
What factors affect content strategy decisions? Every client has a different combination of requirements, and of course there are always outliers. But based on our consulting experience, here are some factors that affect content strategy decisions.
Brand credibility
Business case/ROI
Case studies
Content pitfalls
Content silos
Structured content
White papers
Creating a unified customer experience with a content fabric
Coauthored by Anna Schlegel (Senior Director, Globalization and Information Engineering, NetApp) and Sarah O’Keefe (President, Scriptorium Publishing)
The interest in customer experience presents an opportunity for enterprise content strategists. You can use the customer experience angle to finally get content proposals and issues into the discussion. Ultimately, the challenge is in execution—once you raise awareness of the importance of content synchronization, you are expected to deliver on your promises. You must figure out how to deliver information that fits smoothly into the entire customer experience. At a minimum, that requires combining information from multiple departmental silos.
Do I need a content strategy consultant?
Do you need a content strategy consultant? If the following signs are uncomfortably familiar to you, the answer is yes:
- You have contradictory content across departments. Customers get frustrated when the specifications in product literature don’t match what’s in the sales content they read earlier. They then call support to clear up the contradictions. It’s much more efficient to create the content once and reuse it across departments. Increased consistency and accuracy follow.
When strategy meets the storm
Perfect weather for flying! (image via Flickr: estudiante)
Just before the blizzard that crippled a significant portion of the East Coast, I was returning from a business trip. I did eventually make it home, but the return flight included a bonus three-day layover in Charlotte, NC.
I’ll spare you many of the details, but a few key events and situations really stand out from that trip. The lessons learned are applicable to any corporate strategy, content or not.
Content should not be an obvious tourist
When you travel, do people ask you for directions and address you as if you live in the area? I’ve had that happen a few times, and friends and colleagues have shared similar experiences.
You may not stand out as an obvious tourist on your travels. But does the content you distribute fit in as well across different environs?
Lean content strategy
Lean manufacturing begat lean software development which in turn begat lean content strategy.
What does lean content strategy look like?
Webcast: Risky business: the challenge of content silos
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content silos make it difficult to deliver a consistent, excellent customer experience. After all the hard work that goes into landing a customer, too many organizations destroy the customer’s initial goodwill with mediocre installation instructions and terrible customer support.
Do you have a unified customer experience? Do you know what your various content creators are producing? Join us for this thought-provoking webcast.
Moving past content strategy roadblocks (premium)
Keeping a content strategy implementation moving forward is important, but it isn’t always easy. You may have to deal with an extremely slow-moving project or unexpected delay. You may even have to put a project completely on hold. Here are some common obstacles that get in the way of progress, and some ways you can work to overcome them.
