The session will be held online on Wednesday, September 17 from 9:00am – 10:00 AM PST. For more information and to register, visit here.

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Taylor Swift’s strategy of repurposing content, while unique for a singer, is very common from a business perspective. 94% of marketers repurpose content, indicating that reusing content is not a new concept… and yet, are you exploring the multi-facet reuse of your content? 

Since July 2020, Taylor Swift has released five original studio albums, four studio album re-recordings (“Taylor’s Version” produced before Taylor was able to buy back her original catalog of recordings), presentation variants, deluxe editions, and live albums totaling 36 albums to date, with 20 million+ units sold. Swift has had a stratospheric few years of breaking records—including becoming the first musician ranked as a Forbes billionaire primarily from songs and performances— partially due to her intelligent “content” reuse. What can we learn from this? Read on to find out.

Results

Before delving into the ways you can reuse content, what results can you expect when you put in the foundational work to enable intelligent reuse?

Broaden Your Target Audience

Statistically speaking, if you increase the amount of content you produce, you are more likely to reach a wider audience. With the development of the Eras Tour (where each era represents one of her 11 studio albums, spanning several different genres), many Taylor Swift fans began to classify themselves by their preferred “era”, or the album that made them a fan of Swift. With each album and re-recording, she’s endeared more fans to her, based on their preferred genre. 

The same can be said for reusing and repurposing content. By using Structured Content Management and effective content reuse, you decrease the overhead associated with creating and managing content. This effectively enables more systematic ways to reuse content and frees up time for content producers to create new and interesting types of content. This results in both an increase in content and the opportunity to broaden your audience. Moreover, content reuse frees up content producers’ and content marketers’ time, paving the way for two vital capabilities: personalization and experimentation.

Increase Customer Engagement with Personalization

In this day and age, most marketers use personalized content to reach their customers, but 74% say they struggle with scaling that personalization. While structured content alone can enable personalization of content in a more systematic way, when you combine structured content with the power of a knowledge graph, you also pave the way for effective personalization at scale. Using a combination of metadata applied to content components, data known about customers, and a knowledge graph, dynamic content can be created and scaled to reach more segments of customers. By giving customers relevant and personalized content for their needs, you are more likely to increase customer engagement and satisfaction.

Increase Conversion Rates with Experimentation

As a final highlighted benefit, deploying Structured Content Management enables your organization to run experiments on content, fail quickly, and adjust the content strategy as needed. While page variants and A/B testing can be deployed with traditional content management, it is not the same as being able to test an individual content component and run many different experiments quickly. This could be presentation experiments—does a CTA perform better on the side rail or above the fold embedded in the body content—but could also be which content performs best when presented in the “related content” section, an infographic or a blog? What ultimately comes from experimentation is an invaluable feedback loop that enables your organization to develop high-value, high-performing content that increases engagement metrics such as improving conversion rates.

Types of Reuse

Now that we’ve covered the benefits, let’s turn our attention to the types of reuse that are possible. Swift’s 36 record-shattering albums have three core reuse strategies: visual change, audience change, and assembly change. While there are certainly more than this, we’ll look at the same three methods in this blog: a new presentation, a new lens, and a new assembly. When it comes to your organization’s essential content, how can you reuse your content in the same ways without it becoming stale?

Change the Presentation of Content

Visually, many of the albums Swift has released in the last 5 years have thematic visual ties with the album art. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) was released in three different shades and hues of purple: Orchid Marbled, Violet Marbled, and Lilac Marble. It’s not uncommon to see people create “Franken Variants,” where they’ve taken an LP from each version and put them together. The parallel to content strategy is the presentation changes made when employing multi-channel marketing. You may have written a long-form blog, but you’ll send it out in an email, on a social post, etc. Social posts can vary depending on the site, and many digital asset management systems (DAMs) support the ability to create automatic derivatives that fit the particular parameters of a social media channel (e.g. Instagram is 1080 x 1080 pixels, while LinkedIn is 1350 x 440 pixels) without creating an entirely new copy of this content. 

What are other ways you could create a new presentation of the content, though? When we design Content Models at EK, we emphasize decoupling content from presentation to enable this kind of reuse. When you create a model for a content type, the focus should be on what information is being communicated rather than how it is presented. An example of this could be a social proof component. Perhaps when writing up a use case of your product by a customer in long-form content, you have quotes from customers. Within the body of the long-form content it may have a particular styling, but you also reuse the quote on landing pages as social proof, and on these pages it uses more of a card style. If you decouple the customer quote from the styling needed in different channels, you can automatically populate the different styles without keeping multiple copies.

This not only saves time from creating all new components every time they are reused, but also decreases the risk of mistakes that can be introduced through manually copying the content. We saw this recently with a client who used social proof throughout their marketing website on many different pages, but through a content audit, it was discovered that one of the quotes was misattributed to another customer in an entirely different industry. The customer then had to go through the entire website (10,000 pages!) and scrub the quote. If they had already implemented Structured Content Management, they could have changed all instances with a single content update.

Update the Tone or Perspective of the Content

For Record Store Day in 2023, Swift released a version of her Folklore album that had only been seen in a Disney+ special, The Long Pond Studio Sessions (LPSS). This record was an acoustic version of the pandemic release Folklore, recorded at Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studios. While many may wonder why you would buy another version of an album you already have, many fans prefer the LPSS version because Swift sounds more raw than the studio version. While it is infamously difficult to get the right tone on the internet (e.g. if I don’t use exclamation points or emojis, I’m worried you’ll think I’m cold), tone of voice can still be incorporated in content and be consistent with your organization’s branding. In the same way, when you’re communicating information with a group of stakeholders, you may shift tone depending on the make-up of those stakeholders. You’ll communicate information differently to a group of executives compared to a group of individual contributors, or a group from IT vs. a group from HR. How can you use this with your customer-facing content? 

Perhaps your company writes a lot of thought leadership, and a customer can browse this thought leadership via an abstract or summary of the content. While you may have originally written the abstracts very technically, you may have since realized that your audience base is predominantly newer professionals who do not know all of your industry’s lingo. Using this insight into your customers, you could then update the abstracts to be more beginner-friendly to prompt more engagement with posts. While this could be a manual change, there’s also the possibility of using generative AI to adjust the tone or comprehension level of the abstracts to speed up rewriting and repurposing. Additionally, this paves the way for personalization by having variations of components tagged with different audiences. When a certain customer is identified as belonging to a certain group, content could be dynamically updated via a graph to be more appealing to the customer. This increases engagement and customer satisfaction. 

Use a New Assembly of Content

On many levels, music is an assembly. A song is an assembly of notes and phrases, an album is an assembly of songs that tell a story, a playlist is an assembly of songs curated in a chosen order to mimic an event or a feeling. One of the things Swift did during the Eras Tour was include a “Surprise Song” section in which she would play one song from her discography on guitar and one on piano. While at the beginning of the tour, she was playing single songs on each instrument, by the end of the tour, she was making “mashups” of songs where she would seamlessly mix multiple songs together for a new creation. I Hate It Here x the lakes, The Manuscript x Long Live, I Think He Knows x Gorgeous—over the course of several months, Swift created many new songs that were assemblies of parts of other songs.

When talking about Structured Content Management, we frequently compare content components or modular content to Legos. By creating reusable “legos” of content, you enable many different assemblies of those legos. This could take many forms—marketing landing pages or generation of proposals—but one of the easiest examples to understand is learning content. Internal trainings are ubiquitous in many organizations and often a sore spot because they can be irrelevant to an employee’s position. For example, perhaps you have a training on harassment that employees are required to take, but because the course is packaged as a single unit rather than broken up by the lessons within, all employees end up learning about topics that are more relevant to people managers. This could mean that the employee “checks out” when consuming that lesson and is more likely to disengage from the rest of the training. By creating smaller blocks of content, you could then have a personalized assembly of topics tagged with individual contributors and a personalized assembly of topics tagged with people managers without having to create multiple copies of the same course. 

Conclusion

While certainly not the first (or the only! or the last!) artist to develop methods of reuse, love her or hate her, it’s clear that Taylor Swift is a mastermind when it comes to engaging and expanding her fanbase. You can use these same techniques with your organization to expand your customer base. When you employ a clear content strategy and leverage methodical content engineering and content operations, your organization’s content has the potential to develop into a true business asset. If this has sparked your interest and you’re ready to get serious about bringing your content to its highest potential, give us a call.

The post Content Mastermind (Taylor’s Version): What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About The Benefits of Repurposing Content appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) will have a significant presence, both presenting and sponsoring, at the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management, which takes place October 27-30 in Portland, OR.

The theme of this year’s event is Content as a Business Asset: Reducing Costs, Generating Revenue, and Improving the Customer Experience Through Better Content.

Four of EK’s experts will be presenting a main conference session and a pre-conference webinar. EK’s experts will share thought leadership that highlights EK services at the intersection of: 

• Content strategy and operations, including AI-enabled content analysis, and
• The semantic layer, part of EK’s solution for dynamic content assembly and content personalization.

Guillermo Galdamez, Principal Consultant, and Nina Spoelker, Senior Analyst, will jointly present Out of Many, One: Building a Semantic Layer to Tear Down Silos. Galdamez and Spoelker will provide practical, proven guidance on how to break down knowledge silos using a semantic layer and streamline the delivery of content. 

Paula Land, Principal Consultant for Advanced Content, and Elliott Risch, Semantic AI Consultant, will present a pre-conference webinar on the topic of AI-assisted content analysis titled Getting Control of Your Content: AI Solutions to Streamline and Optimize Your Digital Assets. The webinar will take place Tuesday, September 24, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.

In addition to speaking roles, EK will be a sponsor of the event with an exhibit booth, where you can meet the EK speakers and register to win signed copies of Land’s book, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis, 2nd Edition. Find us at Booth 14 in the exhibit area.

Visit the conference site for more information and to register for the conference. 

The post Enterprise Knowledge Sponsoring and Speaking at LavaCon 2024 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Paula Land, Principal Consultant for Content Strategy and Operations and Elliott Risch, Semantic AI Consultant, will present a pre-conference webinar on the topic of AI-assisted content analysis titled Getting Control of Your Content: AI Solutions to Streamline and Optimize Your Digital Assets. 

Land and Risch will delve into how LLM-powered solutions can be harnessed to overcome the challenges of content overload and duplication. They will explore how GenAI technologies can be leveraged to automatically identify and eliminate duplicate or near-duplicate content, enabling organizations to streamline their repositories and retain only the most relevant and valuable materials. 

The talk will include real-world examples from Enterprise Knowledge, illustrating how GenAI has been successfully deployed to help our clients analyze and act on insights about the current state of their content. 

The webinar will take place Tuesday, September 24, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. The event is free but registration is required.

Register for the webinar

The post Paula Land and Elliott Risch Presenting Webinar for LavaCon 2024 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Paula Land, Principal Consultant for Content Strategy and Operations at Enterprise Knowledge, and Elliott Risch, Semantic AI Consultant, will be delivering a presentation on Forging a Next Generation Content Lifecycle at the ConVEx IDEAS virtual conference. Land and Risch will explore GenAI’s transformative potential to enhance the content lifecycle: from planning and creation to publishing and optimization.  

They will highlight how content professionals can achieve greater efficiencies and enhance their content operations using GenAI’s capabilities at each phase of the content lifecycle.

Tuesday, September 10, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT

Register for the event

The post Paula Land and Elliott Risch to Present on Forging a Next Generation Content Lifecycle at ConVEx IDEAS Conference appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

This presentation explored the basics of reusable learning content, including the types of reuse and the key benefits of reuse such as improved content maintenance efficiency, reduced organizational risk, and scalable differentiated instruction & personalization. After this primer on reuse, Crockett laid out the basic steps to start building reusable learning content alongside a real-life example and the technology stack needed to support dynamic content. Key objectives included: 

• Be able to explain the difference between reusable learning content and duplicate content; 
• Explore how a well-designed learning content model can reduce duplicate content and improve your team’s efficiency; and
• Identify key tasks and steps in creating a learning content model.

Participants learned how thoughtful content strategy for reusable learning content improves content operations efficiency. 

The post Improving Learning Content Efficiency with Reusable Learning Content appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) partnered with the company for an end-to-end content strategy and engineering engagement. EK worked closely with client stakeholders across sales, marketing, and IT departments and conducted multiple focus groups, interviews, and system demos to understand the current state of the organization’s GTM content and content technology. EK then co-designed an updated content strategy which leveraged structured product content to optimize content operations, enabling multi-channel publication of GTM content and sales collateral.

EK’s team collaborated with key project stakeholders to design a product content model. EK’s consultants defined the structure of products, the relationship between product components, and the taxonomy necessary to traverse those relationships. The product content model now enables the intelligent assembly of sales collateral, as well as multi-channel publishing to multiple user experiences including sales enablement portals, marketing websites, mobile applications, and social media.

In addition to delivering the content strategy and product content model, EK provided the architecture and development of an enterprise content ecosystem. Expert solution architects collaboratively documented a comprehensive list of requirements and analyzed the organization’s current content tech stack. EK leveraged content strategy insights from related workstreams to identify cross-departmental touchpoints that would benefit from specific systems and illustrate where necessary taxonomy and content management system integrations would enhance content operation processes. The target solution enabled digital asset management, complex workflows, content reuse, dynamic content assembly, and multi-channel publishing.

EK delivered a solution for enterprise management of GTM content and sales collateral that leveraged prior work and analyses to create a fully customized, iterative, and immediately actionable roadmap and recommendation report for this client’s GTM content strategy. The roadmap and recommendation report included guidance for continuing the iterative development of a scalable enterprise content solution. This roadmap will help the organization sustain long-term GTM content strategy and outline short-term wins that can be implemented on a shorter timeline, including clear descriptions of how each task or workstream will benefit the organization’s business outcomes.

The EK Difference

EK’s advanced expertise in content engineering and enterprise content solutions enabled the company to optimize marketing operations and improve sales enablement outcomes. As part of our human-centered solution design methodology, EK’s team collaborated with key project stakeholders during our iterative design and development process. Our team also worked directly with system end users to ensure our understanding of their needs and concerns was accurate when designing a solution and delivering our final recommendations. EK’s Knowledge Management (KM) expertise allowed for secure multi-channel publishing to both an internal channel for sales enablement and external marketing channels while keeping product information secure and consistent.

The Results

This content engineering engagement supplied the company with a holistic product content model that unified cross-departmental product information and supporting metadata to streamline marketing operations. A centrally managed and consistently applied product taxonomy improves sales consistency and centrally managed structured product content reduces the time to publish GTM content and sales collateral.

In addition to improved marketing operations, sellers in the organization are able to find all product information and relevant sales collateral in one place instead of 10 distinct content repositories. This dynamic Sales Enablement Portal improves sales conversion and win rates, and supports more holistic conversions–facilitating cross-selling and up-selling when sellers are able to more quickly find reliable product information.

 

Download Flyer

 

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In this webinar, Crockett and DeWolfe will dive deep into these common obstacles and unveil a potent synergy between Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Knowledge Management (KM), strengthened by FedRAMP certification. Additionally, they will introduce a comprehensive 360-degree approach to optimizing your organization’s content strategy, delivering exceptional experiences at scale, and tailoring your initiatives to meet the specific needs of your organization and public servants.

View event details and register here.

Wednesday, November 15th 

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST

(8:00 AM – 8:30 AM PST)

The post Emily Crockett Speaking at Upcoming Webinar “Mission-Critical Content Strategy: Navigating Compliance & Personalization for Government” appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

What are CCMSs?

Fundamentally, CCMSs are content management systems that manage content at a component level as opposed to a document level. To break that down further, let’s first define how traditional content management systems (CMS) store content. Traditional CMSs store and tag content by document, even if it consists of many different elements or topics within it. A CCMS, on the other hand, stores content as components that can be combined to build documents dynamically. These components can be thought of as the smaller chunks of content that make up a larger document. For example, a proposal writing team might leverage components to reuse elements of proposals and prevent the need to write from scratch during each effort. The company description, pricing, and legal section might all be separate components that can be selected and reused in as many proposals as needed. This granular level of management creates opportunities to leverage and reuse content in new and valuable ways. Teams no longer have to spend time either searching for and then copy-pasting content from one document to another or simply writing new content. With a CCMS, content teams know they have pre-written and approved sets of content components they can rely on when composing and publishing new content. 

Signs a CCMS is Right for Your Org

Below are a few factors that you can use to assess if a CCMS is right for your organization.

1. Your users need to find pieces of information quickly. Search experience can be improved immensely with a CCMS. For example, users in a call center or help desk environment need to quickly and authoritatively respond to customer questions and requests. If they have to make multiple clicks and scrolls to get to the information they need and then have to spend time assessing whether they’ve found the correct information, this consumes precious time during customer interaction. A CCMS can serve specific, scannable information to users based on their search terms so that they more quickly arrive at the answer they’re looking for. This is especially powerful when users have to navigate through numerous versions of similar information, like product-specific guides or State by State laws/policies. 
2. Users have to “Ctrl-F” to find what they need within documents. If your users frequently access documents that require performing a search within the document itself to drill down on a topic, a componentized content strategy, and consequently a CCMS, can revolutionize the way they interact with this content. Similar to the previous use case in which users can find small pieces of information more quickly through enterprise search, large documents can be componentized in order to save users time and clicks finding information.  
3. Content frequently needs to be updated in multiple places. Research, laws, best practices, and other information related to specific knowledge domains are constantly evolving. The impetus is on content teams to maintain and update their organization’s content when new information becomes available. A CCMS allows users to edit components in one place and then push the update to all of the content it appears in their systems. This saves time and ensures that components are uniformly and accurately updated across all of the content it is a part of. 
4. You are looking to implement a Knowledge Graph or advanced search application. A CCMS provides an excellent head start to implementing cutting-edge content management and search functionality. Content components can be used to assemble intuitive, specific search results and even underpin functionality like a knowledge panel. Check out one of the ways EK paired a CCMS with a knowledge graph to produce a flexible, adaptive, and customized content experience for a financial solutions provider.
5. You are looking to implement more personalization. Customers have come to expect that the content they receive is contextualized for their specific needs. Audience groups would rather receive specific pieces of content relevant to their interests than longer documents that they need to spend time combing through to find the right information for them. A CCMS lets content teams compose personalized content by making it easy to assemble content using only components relevant to different audience groups. To dig into this further, read about how a CCMS paired with a Knowledge Graph can take personalization to the next level.  

CCMSs have value beyond the use cases listed here, but this should get you thinking about how a CCMS might fit into your content ecosystem. You can read another example of how EK partnered with an organization to implement a CCMS here. If you are ready to explore CCMSs, EK has experts ready to advise on and implement a strategy that is best for you. 

The post What is a CCMS and Why Do I Need One? appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

EK facilitated a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups with subject matter experts, content creators, and technical partners to define the current and target state of the retailer’s Content Management maturity using EK’s proprietary 50-factor Content Management Benchmark. EK then partnered with the learning team to define a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM Platform design to help the learning team improve their Content Management maturity over a multi-year period using a phased approach. The KM Platform design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies, including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. These technical recommendations have resulted in the creation of a digital library that is currently helping the retailer to more effectively and efficiently manage the sheer scale of content in their learning ecosystem, increase the organization’s speed in creating learning content, and decrease the time it takes associates to find and discover lessons.

The EK Difference

EK leveraged its unique, 50-factor benchmark to develop a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s Content Management maturity and define a future state for the retailer to work towards. EK also utilized its thorough understanding of the client’s culture and processes to produce a Content Management Strategy and Roadmap for implementation using an iterative, Agile approach, and leveraged in-house technical expertise to recommend a unique set of technological solutions aimed at alleviating the inefficiencies the client was experiencing. 

The EK team was uniquely positioned to deliver expertise in learning solutions because of our extensive experience delivering KM training sessions, workshops, and materials to a variety of clients as well as our in-house team of instructional designers and learning technology experts. We have conducted dozens of similar efforts with organizations like this one, and the EK team was equipped to deliver both hands-on training and in-depth technical support. This enabled us to holistically understand this organization’s needs and develop a strategy to help the learning team find the learning content and training materials they needed to support the organization’s employees. The EK team also demonstrated effective knowledge transfer techniques that the learning team could then utilize within their own training efforts. 

EK is also skilled in bridging the gaps between strategy, design, and implementation, as this effort fused personal interaction with stakeholders to develop a content management strategy with targeted, technical recommendations to plan and implement a KM Platform design. Rather than evaluating just the current state of the organization and developing a strategy to address current challenges, the EK team worked with stakeholders to determine the organization’s long-term goals and recommended various technologies that would help the organization update and maintain its learning content in the future.   

The Results

The retailer and EK’s long-standing partnership allowed them to successfully design, develop, and deploy three major releases for the digital library into the retailer’s production environment, resulting in increased time savings and reduced costs related to developing learning content, as well as a workforce with the necessary skills and expertise to do their jobs effectively and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The retailer was able to gain an improved visibility into each associate’s capabilities and an enhanced ability to identify gaps in their learning content, resulting in more targeted learning experiences to upskill employees and guide their professional development. Additionally, the renewed consistency, reuse, and findability of learning materials allowed the retailer to mitigate any repercussions associated with on-site store safety, diversity and inclusion, and employee and customer health and wellbeing.

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