Easy ways to undermine marketing with content strategy
Does your content deliver on your marketing promises?
Does your content deliver on your marketing promises?
This post is the first in a series about the value proposition of localization strategies. You can also see a presentation on this topic at LavaCon this October.
Localization issues are a primary reason companies seek help with a new content strategy. One of the most common questions we hear is, “How do we make our localization process better?”
When we’re asked this question, we turn the question around. What is wrong with your current localization process? What would you like to improve? How do you define “better?”
Earlier in the year, I was chatting with Sharon Burton. As an aside to our knitting-focused discussion, I asked her what new services we should offer.
Now that the 2016 Olympic Games have come to a close, countries are tallying up their final medal counts. Athletes are assessing their performances, celebrating their victories or mourning their losses. After you’ve implemented a content strategy, you should also assess the project to determine how successful it was.
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.
You have a content strategy plan. Management has agreed to fund implementation. Time for the happy dance, right?
A little celebration is in order. But you still have to prove your new strategy will work in the real world. Showing early success with an “easy win” during implementation will give you momentum.
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.
In lean management, a concrete head is someone resistant to change. In my years working on content strategy projects, I have noticed many people are resistant to changing how they develop and distribute content—sometimes without even knowing it.
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.
Translating content for foreign markets can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. While it’s important to keep costs in check, the critical element to watch is quality. The only sure-fire way to ensure quality in translation is to build it into your source.