It took the Web, where content is the front door to products and services, where reputation is based on reviews, and where it turns out that accuracy and quality of content regularly sways reviewers, to turn the tides on content. The idea that content contributes to the bottom line is no longer a novel idea. I can’t really blame management for their skepticism; after all, what has been rather thin in public discourse about the benefits of content is the actual ROI.

It’s easy to understand that discussing the ROI of content can be a little fuzzy. Content comes in many forms, and affects the bottom line in complex ways. Also, ROI can different things in different industries. In the private sector, the ROI of content may mean its contribution to profitability. In the public sector, the ROI of content likely means efficiency of delivering services. In both cases, content projects may be measured against IRR (Internal Rate of Return) – the amount of savings realized by investing in content processes.

Key Performance Indicators

To understand how to measure content ROI, we need to discuss in a general way what content is intended to do. The common goal of any content is to change behaviour. Here are a few ways that content can accomplish that:

• Persuade consumers to purchase a product, through a description of benefits and explanation of features.
• Persuade constituents to respond to issues in a particular way, by explaining the issues and offering suggested responses.
• Reduce service calls by anticipating queries and ensuring that sufficient and accurate content is available.
• Allow the public to get answers to questions or problems in a self-serve  way, by providing helpful information.
• Increase engagement, whether that is constituent engagement or customer engagement.

In each of these examples, the behavioural change resulted in a benefit to the organization, whether it is to sell more products and reduce service calls, or by helping constituents be better informed or fulfill their civic obligations.

Business Drivers

The most common motivations or business drivers, expressed in very general terms, are:

• Increased revenue. Does the content help generate sales?
• Brand loyalty. Does the content help manage organizational desirability – whether that be to increase corporate trust in the private sector, or public trust  in the public sector.
• Risk management. Can accurate, quality content minimize inadvertent product misuse or minimize risk of lawsuit?
• Extension of market. Does the content allow the organization to extend to new markets?
• Operational efficiencies. Does the content reduce the number of customer support calls or make some operational aspect more efficient?
• Process efficiencies. Does a particular publishing process reduce the cost of content production?

Examples of ROI

How does this play out in terms of hard costs? Measuring ROI can be tricky because there is not always a direct cause-and-effect relationship between publishing information and seeing results, so figuring out how the benefits are manifested takes keen observation and a willingness to look at all types of content and multiple types of benefits. Take a look at some examples that I’ve come across in the last year or so.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was cited by the Content Marketing Institute as reducing costs drastically by changing the way that they presented content to consumers. This organization noticed that an average of 30% of their 4 million annual service calls were about a single problem: customers could not figure out their monthly bills. The average customer service call costs $25 (the range is from $5 to $50), so reducing the number of calls  means reducing 1,200,000 calls. Even after calculating the investment to rework the content, presenting it to customers in a way that increases their comprehension could mean a significant cost savings – a modest estimate would be upward of half-a-million dollars.

A company that creates processing solutions for community banks calculated that a change to their publishing processes, which allowed them to promote collaborative authoring by a number of authors, track content use across multiple products lines, and to re-use content more efficiently, saved them over $100,000 within the first year, and allowed them to significantly increase their production capacity.

A company that manufactures small utility vehicles reported that at least once a year, someone would misuse one of their vehicles in a way that would result in a lawsuit. The average lawsuit was $4 million, with 25% of that automatically involving the manufacturer.  These lawsuits happened no matter what content they produced – there will always be someone who is determined to drive a vehicle recklessly – but because of the quality of their documentation and fanaticism about accuracy, the manufacturer had never lost a lawsuit, for an estimated $1 million savings annually.

When a municipality offers leisure courses, they find themselves competing with the private sector for popular offerings, such as fitness classes, sports sessions, and children’s activities. It reasons, then, that they stand to lose more revenue if they don’t offer up content – descriptions, prices, locations, schedules, and so on – that ranks high in search engines, and allows people to find the leisure activity according to their particular criteria: the course they want, in the location they want, at the time of day they prefer, at the price they find acceptable. The ROI is highly situational here, and depends on a wide range of factors, but the potential for revenue – or loss of revenue – makes a direct link between content and ROI.

The performance that organizations gets from their content continues to be affected by the amount of effort they put into its production. The effort begins with a content strategy; the success is in its implementation.

All Copy All the Time

Copy is all that stuff that we all learned to write in school. Well, actually, no it’s not. What our kindly grade school teacher imparted gave us a foundation for writing, but few of us went on to learn the skills needed to be a professional writer. And to create copy, you need to understand a number of basic elements.

Understanding how to write copy is to understand the key characteristics of major genres and their subgenres. Let’s see how much of this you learned in school.  There are two basic genres used in business:

Persuasive

Persuasive copy is that which convinces you to do a certain thing or think in a certain way. That’s why it’s called persuasive copy. The most common characteristic is the call to action. Any persuasive copy has some built-in message meant to convert a “looker” into a “buyer”. It can be the equivalent of “buy now” text, or a link to click, or an invitation to register for a free account or to receive a white paper or to contact your local politician. The writers who create this type of copy know what the rhythm is for this type of copy. They how much copy readers generally tolerate, and will ensure that they get to the call to action before they lose interest. When presented with an unfocused block of writing, their first question will be “what is the call to action here?” closely followed by “and how do you see the conversion happening?”

Within the larger genre are many subgenres. Among them is the news release. While not the most exciting of genres, I’m going to use it here because it’s been around for a long while, and we’ve all seen them, and may have even written them. Later on, I’ll use this to illustrate the differences between copy and content.

The news release genre is well-defined. It begins with an announcement line, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ,  and is followed by a release date and location. The writing follows the “pyramid” style, where the most important content is contained in the first sentence and the boilerplate – the description of the company and contact information – is at the end. In the middle section is the elaboration of the succinct description in the introduction, and includes the call to action. The call to action is subtle; the news release reports on some upcoming event, product release, or initiative with information on where to buy tickets, when the product will become available, or how to get involved.   It’s all about the editorial, leading to  a  conversion  of some sort.  In the public sector, the conversion is a change in behaviour; in the private sector, the conversion is a buy.

Enabling Content

Enabling content is the  instructive or educational type of copy that helps you complete a process or task. It’s the “how to” – from setting up a piece of equipment to registering for an account, to paying your taxes to ordering a passport. It’s also the text within the software application that tells you about the menu item you choose, and the knowledge base files that demonstrate how something works.

Within this genre, we have many  sub-genres. The most recognizable genre is the procedure. This has a well-defined schema: heading, a contextual introduction, numbered steps, and a conclusion that explains the success state. Each numbered step begins with an active verb, uses the given-new contract technique, and when appropriate, is followed by a feedback statement to demonstrate the expected result. It’s all about the outcome.

The things that writers intuitively understand and build into their copy comes a combination of training, experience, and skill. The difference between amateur writers and trained professionals is apparent because the training is what brings the strong understanding of their craft. But that craft is creating messages. My argument is that this is copy because it pays attention to the message.

 Next post: Turning copy into content

Perhaps it sounds like the editorial side is not as important, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s the combination of the editorial and technical sides that makes content work. In my current work, we coined the acronym RAITES as a way of remembering the qualities that content should have to be considered web-worthy:

• Relevant.  To the point. No blah blah about best in market, world-class, robust. Tell the readers what they want to know, right away.
• Accurate. Be right, of course. Also Be sure that this particular piece of information is what the user expects to see in this particular place.
• Informative. Tell readers as much as they need to know to fulfill their need. Not too much, but not too little, either.
• Timely. Publish the content at the appropriate time; that means giving readers enough time to act on it. Then put the content on a review timetable to be checked periodically.
• Engaging. Make readers care. Give readers a call to action. Avoid boring.
• Standards-based. The content has to be structured and shaped in a way that it is able to integrate, converge, syndicate, meet accessibility standards, and be mobile-optimized.

Tall order? Not really. What separates professional writers from the “doing this off the side of my desk” staff who happen to write as part of their “real” work is the ability to create content that RAITES.

CMS Myth asked if I’d do an interview in advance of the conference, and the result was an interview called Good Content Means Good Business. Enjoy.

This deliverable is The Pitch. It is what makes clients – external or internal – understand why they need it, what it is, how it brings benefit, who will benefit, who will bring the benefit and how, and what the mechanics are of what needs to be done in order bring those benefits.

Marketing communicators turned content strategists are pretty good at the pitch; justifying the benefits of efforts spent is part of the job. For other communicators, this way of thinking may not come naturally. In the technical communication realm, for example, there have traditionally been clear delineations about the work produced: a manual, help files, and perhaps text to the translators.  Making the case for content strategy is entirely new territory. For content strategists with a more technical bent, it’s hard to move away from explaining benefit in tactical terms – “the output will be interoperable with other XML schemas,” for example – and expressing ROI in terms that management will understand.

There have been numerous articles, presentations, and other resources produced on the ROI of content strategy, but it all comes down to the same core thesis. Making the case for content strategy is all about demonstrating the value it will bring, to help organizations meet their business objectives.

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

I would argue that, depsite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself. 

Layers of content on a website

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site, but that’s a whole other story.) They knew what inverters did, and what to look for, and went directly to find what was, to them, the important piece of information.

In effect, the technical specifications were the marketing material; if the inverter had the right oomph to it, that’s what the users wanted to know. And had the content been wrong, had the inverter been used with some disastrous results, then the ensuing fall-out would have become a marketing problem. The artificial siloing of content between organizational departments – marketing, techdocs, training, support, engineering – is reminiscent of the discussions we had about information arhcitecture, some 8-10 years ago. The difference is that for many organizations, these larger silos have become de facto standards in which they bucket their information for consumers. They assume that when a content consumer arrives on their site, they want to see a certain type of content. They try to funnel the user through their site navigation or constrain the path to the cash register. But if you look at the way consumers actually use a site, you can see that they will not be constrained. In this case study, Jakob Neilsen reveals that consumers will breeze past the feel-good content and head right for the techincal information, product reviews, and other information pertinent to their decision-making process.

The content that was sought out by the consumer, in this example, is probably produced by a department that publishes to multiple channels, not just the Web. Their content strategy likely has to take into account single-sourcing for print as well as Web, and other channels such as training materials (possibly print, e-learning, and a Web output), manuals, product data sheets, and other end products. The Web is but a slice of a greater strategy. When we talk about content strategy, then, my contention is that the type of content we include in the definition needs to broaden beyond Web content, as does the recognition that the content, even if just for the Web, includes not only persuasive content, but instructive/informative, user-generated, and even entertainment content.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

Using the music industry as an example of an industry that gets the most from its content, this presentation illustrates ways to make your content be both useful and a delight to your customers.