Good products deserve good content

Good ProductsDeserveGood Content
© Intentional Design Inc.
www.intentionaldesign.ca
Presented at Confab 2011
May 2011

Content Strategy
Who am I?

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Content is NOT in pre-or post-sales silos. It’s ALL part of marketing.

Product descriptions
Define product content
Instructions for installation
Instructions for use
Training material
Troubleshooting tips
Maintenance
User assistance posts

Why is product content important?
Part of the new marketing paradigm
Part of the customer conversation
Contributes to operational efficiency and savings

Look at the customer lifecycle

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Consumers use all sorts of content to make buying decisions.

Pre vs Post: Tearing down silos
Pre- and post-sales are connected
All content used to make buying decisions
Documentation and training and user assistance are multiple sides of the same die

What we want
Customers want a single source of truth
Credibility
Trust
Organizations want a single source of truth
Brand
Efficiency

Harnessing product content
Moving control upstream
Convergence, integration, syndication
Good quality content
Good structure, good attributes
Meaningful metadata

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
“The company evaluated its call center volume and found that 25 to 35% of the four million calls received a year were from customers who did not understand their monthly bills. Using the rule of thumb that a call center inquiry costs $5 to $50 per call, you can easily calculate the costs associated with this issue.”
Source: http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/04/content-marketing-data/

Software Vendors
“We’re getting our docs in order because we found that people are looking at them before they decide to buy.” (Sales exec, tiny CMS vendor)
“Never mind justifying savings due to process. What is effective with management is seeing how when the content supporting the product isn’t up to snuff, it means lost sales.”
(Practice lead, gigantic multinational technology and consulting firm)

Malaspina Labs
(Founder, Malaspina Labs)

California Consumer Electronics
Returned products due to failure to understand operations: over $1 billion annually (reported a decade ago)
(Bonni Graham Gonzalez, Manual Labour Inc)

Dyson
homeappliance.manualsonline.com

Dyson Air Multiplier

Roomba
Text option
Graphic option
User feedback
Related content
Print option
http://www.irobot.com/uk/support/

Trikke

Maintenance content

User-generated content

Former home page

Strategic question
How do people buy an inverter?

Answer: Search the specs
May 2005

But where are the product specs?

New home page
Novice (educate and browse)
Intermediate(fast browse)
Experienced(search)

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Under-the-hood aspects of content raise its value as an asset.

A world without silos
It’s a governance issue
Sharing content
Playing nicely
Productivity
Customer delight

What about mobile? Plan for new output channels

Under the hood

Connecting @rahelab
http://www.google.com/profiles/rahel.bailie

Good products deserve good content

by Rahel Anne Bailie

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Good products deserve good content Presentation Transcript