How to Decide Which Content to Transform and What to Do With It

Content transformation is the process of making existing content more versatile and reusable. It’s about liberating content that is locked inside legacy formats and transforming it into a library of modular and dynamic content assets.

In this blog series, we look at each of the four steps of content transformation. For a more detailed resource, including content transformation best practices and an overview of the content transformation toolkit, download our eBook Content Transformation: Breathing New Life into Legacy Content.

Step 2. Decide Which Content to Transform

Now that you know what content you have, it’s time to make some decisions. For each piece of content, you’ll need to decide whether to:

• Convert the content format and split into reusable chunks
• Convert the content format and rewrite the content in reusable chunks according to best practices
• Leave as-is, do not transform

Transformation Criteria

Here’s a list of criteria that you can use to determine whether you should transform content. We recommend prioritizing content that meets three or more of these criteria:

• Still in use / popular
  • Customers search for this information
  • Still in use / popular
  • Customers search for this information
  • Analytics indicate this information is accessed often
  • Customers call support for info

• Updated often
• Highly visible products
• Has high reuse potential
• Areas that we know customers have trouble
• Evergreen content – does not update often, but is always useful or used
  • Glossary
  • Product descriptions
  • Definitions

• Boilerplate content
  • Legal
  • Regulatory and compliance information

You may have other criteria to add to the list. That’s great! Add it and evaluate your content honestly. It’s easy to get attached to content and then waste resources transforming content that does not provide enough ROI to be worth it.

Content to Leave As-Is

Some legacy content is not worth transforming. Don’t convert:

• End of life’d products
• Short-term campaign content
• Event announcements
• Time-dependent content
• If expense of converting is more than the value of the content
• Unpopular content (analysis)
• Poorly written content (better to rewrite it)

Now that you have located your content and decided which content to transform, you’re ready to move on to, you’re ready to move on to Step 3: Determine the Transformation Method.

Content Transformation: Breathing New Life into Legacy Content

Ready to liberate content from legacy formats? Want to transform it into modular, dynamic content assets? This eBook shows you how.