/ Project
Enterprise Content Development System
Content Strategy
Management
Establishing a process that works for all,
from ideation to maintenance.
Challenge
Organizations create many kinds of content, used for different purposes. In marketing alone, we have create content for different audiences in a variety of media. Each piece requires source content and approval from many stakeholders. Content types include success stories, news posts, brochures, videos, whitepapers, fliers, signage, micro-content, email campaigns, web pages, product/press releases, and more.
Prior to my onboarding, there was no coherent process for creating and maintaining this material. Every piece of content was created in an ad-hoc fashion. This lack of clarity made it impossible to achieve our desired quality or to scale up production.
Two considerations were vital for success of this project. 1) I could not add to the existing time constraints on any of the stakeholders. 2) The organization wanted to use technology already available to the company, rather than investing in a new tech stack.
Solution
I worked closely with our CIO and VP of Operations to develop an enterprise content development process that allows multiple stakeholders (subject matter experts, reviewers, and executives) to easily and fully participate in the marketing material creation.
We designed a robust process that could flexibly scale down in times of resource crunches, while still getting the marketing team the resource access they needed.
To quickly increase understanding and adoption, we echoed existing processes whenever possible.
Process steps included:
- Ideation
- Assignment
- Draft/Review/Reconcile Cycles
- Publish/Distribute
- Index
- Maintain
Value
This project reinforced two fairly new processes to the company:
- Work spearheaded by the CIO to categorize everything in the company according to the same set of criteria.
- A new process by Documentation and Business Development to create large-scale proposals.
Results
The process successfully increased the production of marketing material.
Organization vastly improved as well. The indexing portion of this project allowed for increased discovery by the Sales and Business Development teams. It also allowed Subject Matter Experts to quickly identify which pieces included their knowledge, so they could quickly let us know if something needed updating.