Content strategy
"Great products sell themselves" does not necessarily fit today's ultra-competitive open markets.
Customers often have several options, and their decision to purchase one product over another often comes down to the quality and accessibility of information. In those cases, having an effective product content strategy is crucial for improving sales. However, conducting a content inventory and audit of the existing end-user documentation is essential to have an effective content strategy.
Content strategy
In today's digital age, content is crucial for establishing a brand's authority and remaining competitive.
Quality, relevant, engaging content builds long-term relationships and customer loyalty. Good documentation can also lead to satisfaction, clarity, and trust in your product and brand. Therefore, we must plan, create, deliver, and manage our content just like any other deliverable.
A content strategy aims to create a meaningful and consistent experience for the customer. Once you have a content strategy, you can create a content model. At its core, the content strategy should be structured around the reader. Therefore, we must understand our audience and what they want or need to know. The following four W's can help guide this thought process:
- What information do readers want, and what format should we use?
- When will readers need this content?
- Where should content be placed to be most effective?
- Why do readers need this content, and how does it solve their problems?
Answering these questions can help determine what information to include and what format to use. It's important to update and adapt information as users' needs change.
Additionally, understanding user behavior is critical to understanding how users interact with your end-user product documentation. Specifically, you should analyze how much time users spend utilizing the documentation, what they click on the most, and at what point in the user journey they tend to leave. Analyzing user behavior will provide insight and help you continuously refine the product documentation.
Content inventory and audit
A content inventory lists every content you have captured at the page or asset level. It includes specific characteristics of each piece.
A content audit examines, assesses, and evaluates the quality of the content listed in the inventory. Audits uncover content that needs updating, where gaps exist that new content could fill, and if certain pieces of content are ready for removal.
The content inventory and audit aim to assess and evaluate the existing content to identify its strengths and weaknesses. An audit can help achieve several objectives:
Identify content gaps and opportunities: By analyzing existing content, a content audit can help identify areas where new content is needed, removed, or consolidated.
Improve user experience: By removing outdated or irrelevant content and optimizing the remaining content, a content audit can help improve the user experience by ensuring that content is relevant, high-quality, and easy to navigate.
Streamline content creation: By evaluating the effectiveness of existing content, a content audit can help inform future content creation efforts and ensure that we're focusing on high-value content that aligns with business goals.
Overall, it aims to improve the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of the end-user content, leading to better user experiences, increased engagement, and better business outcomes.
Evaluation criteria
Are we aware of the current user experience? What does it look like? For example, are the users clicking through many topics to get to the article or document they need?
Does the search inside the product documentation site give the user clear results? Are they finding what they need quickly?
Is there a duplication of articles? If so, why and is it necessary (unavoidable)?
Do teams spend more time reformatting and redesigning output than creating content and keeping it in sync? Is content trapped in different authoring tools and platforms?
Are there incomplete articles, which may result in more support calls than necessary?
Is there a content development process to help manage and update the content? For example, when does an article get published? What's the current hand-off look like?
Does the content platform have limitations? If so, what are they, and do they hinder content development? Is it scalable? If nothing is wrong, what features or configuration isn't used but could be used?
Inventory attributes
Name or title of the piece of content (not the page title, the actual name or title); if it doesn't have one, give it a clear name or summarize what it is
URL or link to where it lives
Author, owner, or source (who wrote or created it, who owns it, is it user-generated, fed in from somewhere else, etc.)
Subject matter or topic it relates to
Format (article, video, image, web part or component, webpage type, PDF)
Creation or last-modified date
Metadata (page title, meta description, alt text, etc.)
Where raw files reside, internally
Content goals
Because documentation for external developers is a high priority, it shouldn’t befall the same fate as content on internal wikis. In the State of API 2019 report, Smartbear found that “accurate and detailed documentation” ranked third in priority (just below “ease of use” and “responsiveness/performance”) from 15 ranking factors in an API experience. You can’t achieve high content quality without playing a more strategic role with the content and expanding beyond the individual contributor model. Individual contributors are usually focused on docs for a current project only and rarely have the bandwidth to expand their concerns across the developer portal at a broader, more encompassing level.
Customers wish to self-serve for product support; thus, product documentation is vital for product growth and customer satisfaction.
Be future-minded and build in the ability to scale and change.
Information grows and changes over time in response to the users' needs. For the Information Architect/Sr. Technical Writer, this means determining when the amount or types of information no longer fits or when there's a shift in context or users.
Consider content reuse
Reusability is the key to scalability by creating content once and using it everywhere (or in multiple places).
You can achieve this through structured content, which deconstructs content into "blocks" that you use to restructure to create new experiences.
Topics should be:
Individually authorable. Each topic is about one area and can be created on its own.
Always reusable. A single topic can appear in multiple places and across different channels, so it should be free of being locked to specific content or layout and be used anywhere.
Independently understandable. Each topic should be sufficiently complete so that it can be presented alone. In other words, the topic can stand alone without context but can also be used with context.
Examples include notes, cautions, standard steps in a task-oriented or scenario, or goal-based topics like an integration guide. A better example would be the “Configure SCOOBY” section of the integration guides because they all have this section. Therefore, we would only update the reusable topic if these instructions change.
Benefits of content reuse
Assuming ProductA and ProductB are in the same content/document management system, reusing content benefits product documentation in these critical areas:
Increased consistency. Reusing the topic through a content management system helps ensure that the topic is consistent wherever it is used.
Reduced content development and maintenance. A topic is written once and stored in a content management system. As a result, development costs are reduced because a topic can be retrieved for reuse. In addition, changes to a topic can be applied everywhere the topic is used.
Rapid reconfiguration. Using smaller units of information, such as a topic, makes it easier to change the order of the topics, include new topics, and exclude existing topics. Topics can be used to build new articles.
Guidelines for content reuse
Writing for reuse requires writing without context. These guidelines help to make sure that topics are written for reuse in a variety of contexts.
Make few assumptions about reading order because you might not know how users come to the topic. Also, depending on the context, topics within a collection might be organized differently.
Provide contextual cues to help readers understand where information belongs within a large structure. For example, if sequential order is important in a complex task, provide a sense of what comes before and after a topic.
Give the precise location of related information. Avoid the words above or below in the text as much as possible. These indicators have no meaning in a non-linear context. Instead, use next or previous if the information is contained in the same topic (article in our case).