Improve Your Content Creation Strategy: Powering Efficient, Accurate and Collaborative Content 

What is content strategy and why is it important?

When organizations create business content, they need the input and participation of many stakeholders across the organization. That’s particularly true when it comes to creating technical documentation, content that contains detailed product information, or that requires deep subject matter expertise. And while having the right people involved in the process is crucial, the reality is that this type of editorial collaboration has historically been highly inefficient and prone to errors.

Today’s companies need a better way to create content — one that allows them to engage all the relevant stakeholders more efficiently, while making sure that they’re creating the highest quality content in a way that’s easy to reuse, delivering measurable content impact. Below we take a closer look at the problems with traditional approaches to collaborative content creation and how Acrolinx and Fonto are addressing them by bringing innovative technology solutions to the content authoring process.

The challenge with traditional approaches to content creation strategy

Without the right tools, content collaboration can be problematic. That’s because many of the participants in the content creation process aren’t actually writers. Not only does that mean that whatever changes they make need to be carefully vetted, they also probably lack the knowledge and training necessary to use technical XML-based writing tools that are essential for enabling content reuse.

As a result, those non-writers can’t make their changes directly in the source system. Instead, they have to rely on technical writers to make them on their behalf. That leaves technical writers with the unenviable task of having to email out drafts in Word documents or editable PDFs, manually chase down all of the relevant edits, and then transcribe them into the source system.

Not only is this a cumbersome and inefficient process, it’s also prone to errors. With multiple stakeholders reviewing and making changes to a piece of content, it’s easy for mistakes to creep in. Sometimes those mistakes can be factual in nature, such as using the wrong term or transposing a number. Other times, they could be linguistic in nature, such a grammar mistake or not getting your company’s tone of voice right. Either way, errors are costly and can have a very real impact on a company’s reputation and bottom line.   

What are the important elements of content creation strategy?

1. Audience research
   • Understanding your target audience is foundational. This includes identifying their pain points, preferences, demographics, and behavior.
   • Use tools like customer surveys, interviews, and analytics to gather insights about your audience’s needs.
     
2. Content goals and objectives
   • Clearly define what you want to achieve with your content, such as driving website traffic, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or engaging your audience.
   • Use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals to measure success.
     
3. Content planning and ideation
   • Develop a content calendar to plan out when and where content will be published. This ensures consistency in delivery.
   • Use audience research to create content that addresses key questions, solves problems, or provides value.
     
4. Content types and formats
   • Choose the right formats based on your audience’s preferences and how they consume content. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, whitepapers, podcasts, or webinars.
   • Mix evergreen content (long-term value) with timely content to stay relevant and provide lasting value.
     
5. SEO and discoverability
   • Optimize your content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta tags, and structured data.
   • Consider user intent and focus on creating content that answers their queries effectively.
     
6. Content distribution
   • Decide on the channels you will use to distribute your content, such as your website, email newsletters, social media platforms, or third-party platforms.
   • Use tailored strategies for each platform, considering where your audience is most active.
     
7. Content governance
   • Content governance ensures consistency, quality, and compliance across all published content. This involves defining roles, workflows, and standards for content creation.
   • Content governance also ensures that content adheres to legal and regulatory requirements, including accessibility and inclusivity standards.
     
8. Content personalization
   • Tailor your content to different segments of your audience. Use data and insights to offer personalized recommendations, articles, or product suggestions based on user behavior or preferences.
     
9. Content performance and analytics
   • Measure how well your content is performing through key metrics like traffic, engagement, conversions, and shares.
   • Use tools like Google Analytics or specific content performance software to track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
   • Use Acrolinx to correlate performance metrics with content quality
     
10. Brand voice and consistency
    • Maintain a consistent tone, style, and voice that aligns with your brand’s personality. This helps build trust and recognition over time.
    • Content governance helps ensure consistency, as mentioned earlier, by providing guidelines for tone, voice, and language use.

Improve content creation workflows with Acrolinx and Fonto

To get around these issues, Acrolinx, a content governance solution, and Fonto, are working together to help make the writing process easier and more accurate, while optimizing it for content reuse.

Fonto is an easy-to-use browser-based editor that everyone can work in. It allows for synchronized commenting and threaded conversations, thus enabling unified collaboration. It also gives reviewers a simplified view where they can access all of the content projects they’re working on from a single interface, while viewing advanced change tracking and workflow and review status tracking for information governance.

Within the editor, authors also benefit from Acrolinx’s powerful content governance engine, which uses artificial intelligence to capture companies’ writing guidelines and ensure that all of the content they create adheres to them. In the process, Acrolinx increases content consistency, while also helping to make it more clear and concise. In addition, Acrolinx helps ensure that a company’s content always adopts the right tone of voice, and that it uses terminology correctly. All of this helps to raise content quality and alignment, resulting in a better end product.

“We’re looking to democratize the process of knowledge creation by making it easier for organizations to author and govern structured content,” notes Taeke Kuyvenhoven, CCO of Fonto. “Fonto opens new possibilities for subject matter experts and occasional contributors across an organization to collaborate and share knowledge in a well-controlled, streamlined way, eliminating the need to work directly with the underlying XML. With the addition of the Acrolinx, organizations can improve the quality and effectiveness of their enterprise content as part of the iterative content creation process.”

The joint solution is very effective at centralizing company-wide knowledge creation and reviews, while simplifying and streamlining collaborative content creation processes. At the same time, organizations that use it benefit from better content quality and consistency, while having their content in the modular format necessary to support its automatic reuse.

“For us, this partnership is yet another opportunity to bring the power of Acrolinx to the content creation process,” said Daniel Nutburn, Vice President, Global Partners and Alliances, Acrolinx. “Using AI, we’re able to help organizations create higher quality and more effective enterprise content. This leads to better overall customer experiences and better business outcomes.”

If you’d like to learn more about Fonto and Acrolinx, watch this short video to see how it works.