MEGAComm
MEGAComm is a conference for technical communicators, marcom professionals, and content managers. Bill Swallow will present The evolution of smarter content at 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, February 10th.
Personalization—the delivery of custom, curated information tailored to an individual user’s needs—is becoming an important part of content strategies. Approaches to personalization vary depending on the type of content being served. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models, for example, will have very different requirements. Within an organization, you’ll also see marcom and techcomm groups personalize their content in their own ways.
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:
MEGAComm is a conference for technical communicators, marcom professionals, and content managers. Bill Swallow will present The evolution of smarter content at 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, February 10th.
Sarah O’Keefe talks about why your technical communication needs to become part of your marketing strategy.
“Technical content is being read before the sale. Buyers are not limiting themselves to what they can find in your marketing content, they’re looking for what matters to them and what they’re trying to do.”
—Sarah O’Keefe
“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.
As 2019 comes to a close, let’s take a look at some of the most popular posts and podcasts from the year.
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.
In episode 53 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow discuss rebranding as a business case for smart content. How can you make sweeping branding changes as quickly and as painlessly as possible?
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!
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.