Digital transformation touches on every aspect of business operations. At Scriptorium, our focus is on high-value content, so our definition of digital transformation is also content-centric:
“Digital transformation is the use of technology to enrich information delivery.”
“Enriched” information is usually divided into two major categories:
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:
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.
When you want to put new content development processes in place, proving the return on investment (ROI) of your strategy is one of the most effective ways to get buy-in from managers or executives.
You can calculate ROI by showing how much money you’re currently spending creating content, and comparing it to how much money you will save over time with a more efficient workflow. But what if there are roadblocks preventing you from gathering the metrics you need to get those numbers?
Because of a merger or a change in company direction, you’ve got snazzy new branding to roll out across your marketing content: updated logos, corporate colors, fonts, and more.
And then you realize you’ll have to adjust hundreds (if not thousands!) of InDesign, Microsoft Word, and other files to reflect the new branding. Ouch!
So you’ve decided to move your content to DITA. You want all the benefits of reuse and less expensive translation, and you’ve completed your content model. But now the question is, “What do we do with our existing content?”
Smart content offers huge benefits to marketing groups. Although using tags and metadata to author content adds an extra step to the process, it’s important to look at the overall value that the step can add.
Bill Swallow: 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.
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 48, we discuss the importance of using open content formats in your digital transformation.
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 41 we discuss the stakeholders for content strategy projects. Who are the stakeholders? Why and how should you talk to them?
In an agile environment, a company develops its products in continuous iterations with incremental deliveries called sprints. This approach allows the company to test the success of each small change to the product and adapt the development process accordingly. So what does that mean for content?
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.
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi, everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe. For episode 40, we’re thinking about food. Although, I should clarify that we think about food a lot here at Scriptorium. It’s an important part of our daily life and our holiday potluck is an opportunity to show off our culinary skills in cooking and, I think, most especially eating. So it occurred to me that a great potluck has a lot in common with content strategy, and in this episode, we’re going to talk about our favorite topic, food, and how we can apply a potluck planning, which is hard to say, to content strategy.
Kaitlyn Heath: 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 38, we focus on the beginning stages of adapting your content strategy. What are the first steps in analyzing the current methods, what are the primary issues, and what improvements need to be made?
Content strategy is no stranger to change. A strategy must be ever-evolving to meet new business requirements. But how do you determine whether a requirement is real or fake?
When you ask management to fund your content strategy initiative, you need to show them the money.
Nested content is one of the biggest differences between structured and unstructured content.
Bill Swallow: 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 33, we continue our occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. Our focus today is content migration. What are some common pitfalls you may encounter during content migration and how might the intrepid content strategists avoid or handle them?
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 32 we discuss risk management as part of our occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the risks involved when putting a new content strategy in place, and what can you do to minimize them?
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?
Implementing a content strategy is tricky. Technical issues bubble up to the surface as challenges, but those issues usually have direct solutions. The real elephant in the room isn’t technology; it’s human nature.
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.
AP: In episode 28 we discuss our approach to content strategy, which draws heavily on management consulting principles.
I usually sleep quite well, but every once in a while, sleep eludes me for no apparent reason. So there I am at 2 a.m., awake. Here are some of the things that keep my mind spinning:
A proof-of-concept phase is often the key to unlocking the budget for an entire content strategy project. When defining the scope and goals for a proof of concept, don’t forget your team will still need training.
Content strategy—or should I say, #contentstrategy—has been picking up steam over the years on social media. Twitter is especially saturated with the #contentstrategy tag. But what exactly is being positioned as content strategy?
