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Tag: marcom

Content strategy

Personalization in marcom and techcomm

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. 

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Content strategy

Enterprise content strategy maturity model

“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. 

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Smart content

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. 

 

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