Sarah O’Keefe will present Content Strategy, Content Operations, & Content Design: What path equips you best for your future? on June 10th at 8:00 a.m. ET.
In episode 113 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dawn Stevens of Comtech discuss trends that are of interest to techcomm managers.
“We have an aging technical communicator community. We’re not necessarily attracting the younger generation. UX designer sounds more modern and interesting.”
– Dawn Stevens
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.
In episode 46 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson shares some highlights from LearningDITA Live 2019, a web conference focused on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML standard. This is part 1 of a 2 part series.
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 45, we discover the unexpected places where organizations are using smart, structured content. Structured content isn’t just for (bleep)… Don’t make me laugh anymore. Okay. Structured content isn’t just for technical communication anymore. Hi everyone, I’m Alan Pringle, and today I have with me Sarah O’Keefe.
In episode 45 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle, Sarah O’Keefe, and Bill Swallow discover the unexpected places where organizations are using smart, structured content.
