Did you know that one of the best things you can do for your customers is to create less content?
I know what you’re thinking. “Why is Content Rules, a company that has been creating excellent content for our customers for over 30 years, telling me to create less content?”
I’m glad you asked.
Excess Content Costs Time and Money
Content teams who have not explicitly defined their content models typically end up creating excess content. This excess content costs the business time and money. It makes information hard to find, time-consuming to update, and expensive to translate.
This excess content also adds unwanted friction to the customer experience. It clutters up their search results and provides conflicting answers to their questions.
You’d think AI would solve this. After all, one of the great things about an AI chatbot is that it can process large amounts of content quickly and provide a reasonable answer.
However. With AI, the problems of excess content only get worse. When you train your AI engine with contradictory, redundant, outdated, or inconsistent information, then those problems will be present in the answers it gives. Guaranteed. This means that the AI is creating even more content, based on the content that already exists, with all the issues that we have secretly coasted along with in hopes nobody would notice.
The solution is to create less content so that you can (a) create the right content and (b) do more with it.
READ MORE: Moving to structured content? Don’t make these mistakes!
How Excess Content Happens
Most content development teams operate in a reactive way. A request comes in for a new type of document and the team adds it to their to-do list. Authors create new documents to meet the new demand, often copying and pasting a significant amount of content from other documents.
Tech writers who work on software documentation know the drill. Your team produces system administration manuals and user guides. Then the day comes when you’re asked to create integration guides. Most of the information already exists, but now it needs to be assembled in a different order, connected with new content, and published in a new package.
Unfortunately, this reactive approach, while appearing to be agile and responsive, quickly becomes self-defeating. There are more documents to maintain. More content to search through to find the areas that need updating.
Managing all this content reduces the team’s capacity to respond to new demands, resulting in even more heroic efforts to produce more content with the same resources under tight turnaround times.
The faster way to produce content in response to demand is to have a plan.
WATCH NOW: How structured content can save you time and money
How To Create Less Content
Here’s how it works:
- Create a strategy
- Follow the strategy
- Deliver the content
1. Create a strategy
A content strategy does a number of important things.
- Provides guidance for what content to create, what content to reuse, and what content to deliver
- Defines standards for all five dimensions of your content: output types, components, paragraphs, sentences, and words
- Defines rules and guidelines for content governance – including when to retire content
Everyone who creates content can refer to the strategy to ensure the content they create serves the business. They know what content they can reuse and what content they need to create new. They no longer have to make the same decisions over and over again about what content to include, in what order, and using which words.
2. Follow the strategy
Everyone in the organization must commit to following the strategy.
When everyone follows the standards, every team can create content that is relevant, consistent, and accurate. When content is relevant, consistent, and accurate, you can confidently deliver the right content to the right person in the right format, in their language of choice.
When everyone follows the governance plan, authors (and their AI assistants) no longer have to search through old content to find the content they need. Your organization can much more easily maintain a repository of content that is easy to update, approve, and publish.
3. Deliver the content
After your content is structured, managed in components, and tagged with metadata, you can deliver your content in all the ways your customers want to experience it — including through your AI-powered personalized experience engine. There is no need to create different content for different channels. You can produce web pages, online help system, learning materials, and PDFs all from the same source content, almost simultaneously.
Adopting component-based structured content is a big transformation. During that period of massive change, it’s easy to forget that structured content is a means to an end. Of course, you do reap major benefits all along the journey, from streamlining processes to containing costs to improving content quality.
We love that moment when our customers realize they are ready to design and deliver new content experiences from their existing content. By creating less content, they empower their organizations to provide more business value from each asset.
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