Content strategy

The best investment for your content

The visualisation

Picture a jigsaw puzzle. Each of the pieces resembles an entity within everything you need to do in the world of technical documentation. A piece could be the tone of voice, or it could be your translation rules, or it could be your images or the different persons connected to the tasks at hand. As in any jigsaw puzzle, only when the various pieces fit neatly together you may have a beautiful picture.

Now imagine the same jigsaw puzzle without the border. If you imagine such a collection of pieces, you would think that the jigsaw puzzle is unfinished.

It is customary to start with a frame assembling all pieces to give yourself control over the size and the entire content in jigsaw puzzles.

The frame is the content strategy. Without a content strategy, you have no control over the pieces in your puzzle.

Let TBRO help you with your Content Strategy.

The pieces

What is, then, the pieces in the puzzle? What is it your content strategy may consist of? There's a list of possible candidates for what a strategy may consist of in no particular order.

You must accept and realize that any change in any piece may affect all other pieces. You cannot "just" define or create anything new unless specified within the strategy. Doing so will make it impossible ever to accomplish finishing the jigsaw puzzle.

Years of experience have proven that if you blindly change any piece, it will come back negatively. Eventually, sometimes small, some times alarmingly big.

A simple example: you change your address and are requested by regulations to change this everywhere. A nightmare in most cases. At least time-consuming. Having foreseen this, thorugh a correct strategy, such a change should take seconds. If your strategy - and all its pieces - are well defined.

Some pieces of a strategy

Acceptance and realization from top management
Defining roles for all types of processes
Making sure people have a relation and mindset which secures the strategy and its elements
Choosing tools that meet short and long term criteria
Incorporate and working together with other departments
If you translate - make sure also to have a strategy on that
For the mere content, single sourcing is a must
Accept that technical communication and documentation is not marketing and design-driven
The language you write has to be concise, minimalistic and simplified
Make sure you use source control to record versioning and history
The graphical design

Relevant documents

Content strategy: A more elaborate piece for you to read offline.

Where to being

There are so many ways to do this. It varies from company to company, from task to task.

Let's meet and work from there. Get to know one another, define the tasks and aim for the only correct starting point and solution to your technical documentation: a Content Strategy.

Benefits

The benefits are undeniable - and empirically proven over many years:

Your processes are lean
Your quality increases
You save a lot of money.

It's that simple.

Total Enterprise

You can choose any of the many areas we offer you. Or you could do them all. A total enterprise.