Enterprise content strategy means including all customer-facing content in your planning. Our enterprise content strategy maturity model provides requirements for that strategy. This article focuses on content integration. How do you unify content across disparate content teams and technology stacks?
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:
First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.
Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.
Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.
As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.
Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.
Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.
You’ve started developing a content strategy and are getting a better grasp on the content lifecycle. But what do you do about older content? It’s not as relevant as your most recent content, but there are still times when it proves useful. Your archiving approach is an important part of your content strategy and is often overlooked.
If you are moving from one content environment to another, you only want to convert what’s necessary. Archiving and organizing your content will help you decide what legacy content you want to convert. Here are some things to keep in mind when putting a plan in place for archiving content.
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
Does your content strategy include a plan for publishing consistent content? Technical content is written to inform the user. Marketing content is written to persuade the user to buy your product or service. The line between those two types of content is starting to blur.
When we look at structured content, the first priorities are usually efficiency and cost savings. These savings are gained through intelligent content reuse and automated content delivery. The implicit promise of structured authoring is consistency; use structure, get consistent content. But this isn’t always the case, nor should it be.
As 2020 comes to an interesting close, let’s take a look at some of our most popular posts and podcasts from the year.
Are your content development processes manual, inconsistent, or unable to scale up to meet larger demands? If so, you may be ready to look into a smart content solution. Smart content — or content that’s semantically structured, modular, and flexible — can help increase efficiency in content production.
With the holidays coming up, people start thinking about food and planning meals. The approach you take when preparing a holiday meal has a lot of similarities to a content strategy project.
In a content strategy project, it’s important to be aware of the monsters lurking in the shadows and waiting to pounce on your project. Here are the gruesome details:
Implementing a content strategy in a single department is a great way to get your feet wet, but doesn’t mean you solve all of your content problems. All customer-facing content needs to be findable and usable. Your clients and prospects expect a seamless user experience across all of your content. If you aren’t delivering on that expectation, it may be time to implement an enterprise content strategy by expanding your current content strategy across your entire organization.
Your digital transformation is underway! You have a plan for new content, new delivery, and new content experiences. But what do you do with all of that existing content? You may have a plan for actively maintained content, but you also have much older legacy content. What does your conversion strategy look like when you have very old documents and must continue to provide them, even if they are not changing?
You’ve deployed a successful content strategy for one department at your organization. How do you know you’re ready to take that strategy to the next level and expand it across the organization? Here are some common indicators that it’s time to develop an enterprise content strategy.
“Whether you like it or not, your prospects already use technical content.”
In the paper age, it cost money to distribute information. That gave big organizations some control over information flow. A prospect interested in purchasing a product would get “pre-sales” information–marketing materials, sales pitches, and perhaps a data sheet. Only after buying the product could the prospect access “post-sales” information, such as technical content. (Buyers could and did request technical information from their sales representative, but the decision whether or not to provide the information rested with the organization.)
But in the digital age, information distribution is free, and that makes it difficult or impossible to control what information people receive. As a result, the distinction between pre-sales and post-sales content is blurring. If you are in the market for a new desk, and you’re considering “some assembly required” options, you might take a look at the assembly guide. If the build process looks daunting, a not-so-handy person may look elsewhere. If you’re considering a piece of software, you might glance at the user documentation to see whether tasks are explained clearly at a level that makes sense to you.
Migrating to DITA means more than just adding element tags. There are a few common holes in migration strategies that can prevent you from reaping all of the benefits of the converted DITA content. To avoid that mistake, make sure you have a plan in place for:
These should be important factors when migrating your content to DITA, and they will require new workflows and changes in the way you handle the relationships in your content.
When it comes to mobile strategy, the question has shifted from, “Do I need a mobile strategy?” to “Should my strategy be mobile-first?” A mobile-first strategy prioritizes the delivery of mobile content over other options.
Employees are (and should be) hired for their knowledge and skill, not necessarily their multilingual skills. In a global organization with many offices worldwide, the result is a diverse team with content developers and contributors that speak many different languages. Collaborating on content development—especially on the same document—can be difficult if employees do not speak the same language fluently (or at all).
“When you share content across the company in ways you haven’t before, everyone has to shift to a culture of collaboration.”
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.
Looking for ways to save your company time and money? Content reuse allows you to write content once and use it again in multiple places. Do these use cases for reuse apply to your content?
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?
