Bridging technical and marketing content (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe interviewed special guest Alyssa Fox, Senior VP of Marketing at The CapStreet Group. Discover critical enterprise content strategy insights that Alyssa has gathered throughout her journey from technical writer to marketing executive.

In this webinar, viewers learn:

• The broader picture of enterprise content operations
• Strategies for integrating technical and marketing content
• Best practices for using technical content as a marketing asset

Resources discussed during the webinar

• The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey, mentioned by Alyssa Fox
• Content Strategy: Connecting the Dots Between Business, Brand, and Benefits by Rahel Anne Bailie and Noz Urbina, mentioned by Alyssa Fox
• Study: 81% research online before making big purchases by Chain Store Age, statistic mentioned by Sarah O’Keefe

Other resource links

• Transform your marketing with an enterprise content strategy
• Content paradox: Standardization = personalization
• Our book, Content Transformation, 3rd Edition
• The CapStreet Group
• Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series on YouTube

LinkedIn

• Host: Sarah O’Keefe
• Guest: Alyssa Fox

Transcript: 

Christine Cuellar: Hey there, and welcome to the next episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series hosted by Sarah O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Scriptorium. Today’s topic is bridging the gap between technical and marketing content, and our special guest today is Alyssa Fox, who’s the senior VP of marketing at The Capstreet Group. So without further ado, Sarah, I’m going to pass it over to you, and we’re going to get this talk about content operations started.

Sarah O’Keefe: Thanks, Christine. And Alyssa, welcome, it’s great to see you. Alyssa and I have had a history of running into each other at various kinds of conference events over the years, which infamously included beignet in New Orleans, and as I recall, a pretty hefty shopping expedition in Bangalore. So it’s great to see you. I mean, let’s talk a little bit about where you came from, because of course we had a ton of overlap over the years because you had some roles in techcomm. And then we’ll talk about where you’ve landed now, but tell us a little bit about where you came from and where you are now.

Alyssa Fox: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Sarah. It’s great to be here, everybody. So my background started in techcomm. I started out of school as a technical writer for a software company. I did techcomm for a number of years and started as an individual contributor and moved up through management ranks, led a couple of teams, led some teams around the world, and then I kind of decided I wanted to find a way to get closer to the customers. One of the things that I ran into at a previous company was that the people on the marketing side of the house, we’re not talking to the people on the technical content side of the house, we’re not talking to anybody else producing content in the company, and I saw that as an opportunity for me to get closer to customers, to improve the experience for customers. And after a number of techcomm leadership roles, I moved over to a marketing team at a software company and as the leader of enterprise content strategy. So once I got into marketing and started showing them how content strategy could work for them, most of the people I worked with had never heard the term content strategy, I started being more and more exposed to the rest of the marketing world and how that works. Marketing is really an art and a science, where I see techcomm is a little bit of that too, I see that as just a little more scientific, and we’ll go into why, but moving over into marketing through content strategy really afforded me the opportunity to see how content across an enterprise, across an organization impacts the customer and buyer experience. So did a number of roles in marketing. I’ve worked in a 12-million person company, or-

SO: $12 million revenue?

AF: No, large … Yeah, yeah, something like that. Sorry, it’s early here. I’ve worked in a very small startup. I’ve worked in between. One of the things that’s common in all of those is really getting your hands around content and understanding the content strategy, content operations, and all that. So it’s a really interesting challenge. Now I’m working for a private equity firm, which is really a different type of role for me. I’m on the operating team, and what we do, the operating team is, we are tasked with creating value in the companies that my private equity firm buys. So we go in there and help them with all of their various functional areas, obviously marketing is my specialty, to grow that company in the way that the private equity deal teams would like to see it grown. So a totally different kind of thing than what I’ve been doing, but it applies all of my communication skills, my content strategy skills, my cross-functional leadership skills, and it’s really been a fun ride so far.

SO: Yeah. I think amongst all of that, amongst this ridiculous resume that you have, it’s probably also worth noting that at one point you were the president of the STC, the Society for Technical Communication.

AF: Yes.

SO: Looking at our poll here, it looks as though we’ve got about an 80-20 split between technical writing and marketing. So we can take that on as what our audience looks like today, and thank you to all of you for responding to that. So when you did this, I mean when you shifted over from techcomm, tech management over into marketing, what was the biggest surprise? What was the thing that you didn’t expect that happened or that you saw?

AF: Well, the very first thing that I didn’t expect was understanding that the coworkers that I had, there’s a very similar setup in the way technical communicators are treated or handled by, for example, developers that you’re working with and the way marketing people are handled by sales teams. By that, I mean it’s one of those roles that everybody seems to think that they can do, but then when you start getting into the nitty-gritty and really showing them all of the stuff that goes behind the scenes in marketing, in techcomm, there’s a big similarity there. And I was kind of laughing, I was like, “Why do I keep picking careers?” And everybody’s like, “Oh, I can do that. Let me tell you how to do it,” because it’s just frustrating and annoying. Right?

But in both of those careers, there are things that you can show people, whether it’s your coworkers, your partners, your customers, whatever, that really show that the skills that it takes to do either of those roles are somewhat specialized and do have a focus and are data driven in a lot of ways, especially in marketing. There’s so much data. So that was a big surprise to me as well aside from the similarities in how the roles and the functions are perceived.

SO: Having been I guess on the outside now for a couple of years, what would you tell people, all these folks that are still inside techcomm or that are inside techcomm as a career? I’m not saying they’re trying to get out. But what’s the advice that you have having gained I think sort of that outsider perspective, but having also uniquely sat inside techcomm? What would you tell people?

AF: Yeah. So I would bring some of my not only marketing experience in here, but also my experience in working for this PE fund that I’m working for and seeing how companies are evaluated by their owners. It’s something I’ve actually been saying for years, and anybody that’s ever heard me speak at an STC conference or LavaCon or anything is probably sick of me saying this, but understanding how your role … company and the business strategy is absolutely imperative. It’s very, very important. Now I work almost exclusively with execs and management teams, C-suites because I’m working with those executives to grow that company. When I see what they’re looking at and talking about every day, it is not going to be what piece of content are you writing today? Or what user manual? Or how did you create that how-to video? That’s not what they’re looking at. They’re looking at how did what you did today apply to what we’re trying to do with our top-level OKRs, objectives and key results? How are you either helping us with our top line or our bottom line? How can you directly show that what you do impacts customer experience, buyer experience? So they’re thinking at a level up here and you may work at a level here, and we got to close that gap. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve seen and continue to hammer on, ad nauseam probably, but it is so important.

SO: Yeah. I’m afraid we’re all singing from the same hymnal/preaching to the choir on that one. From your perch in marketing and/or PE, what are you seeing in terms of techcomm being relevant to the business? Is it still relevant as you’re doing some of these marketing things?

AF: Yeah, that’s a great question. So my PE firm invests across three areas: software, industrial companies, and tech-enabled services. I would say probably more focused on software and tech-enabled services. Do I see where techcomm and tech content comes into play? Industrial too, a little bit more, but industrial is a little bit further behind when it comes to adopting technology, digital transformation, that sort of thing. So in the companies that are actually talking to each other and trying to incorporate that strategy across a business, and bringing in that technical content and incorporating it into some level of your messaging for your company or your product positioning. Product positioning is really kind of a marketing type of content, but there are opportunities to build a hierarchy and bring that technical content in to support what you’re saying to potential buyers, actual buyers, current customers that you’re trying to retain. And I’ve noticed that when we get it in there early, because we invest in lower middle market companies, which is anywhere from, our companies range from 10 million to 200 million, anywhere in there, getting that stuff in early and having a good structure and framework for the way that you are looking at and operationalizing your enterprise content can make a really big difference in scalability down the road.

SO: So we’ve got another poll that’s open, and we’re asking about that sort of intersection of the content groups and how they align. I guess it’s discouraging to see that only about 10% are saying they’re aligned and they share content in the same system, in the same content management system. 10, 15%, we threw in this there the enemy, we don’t talk option, and we do have a few people going there, which is unfortunate. But the vast majority, the 80%, are either some alignment on messaging or some alignment on terminology and taxonomy. But just a very, very small number with alignment in CMS and a very, very small number that are saying, “No, we don’t talk, and they’re the enemy. We don’t want any part of this.” So do we need to bring these worlds together? And what does that look like?

AF: Yeah, that’s a great question, and that’s something I’ve actually been pushing for a long time too. I do believe we should bring these worlds together, but there’s a certain way to approach it. We could go and throw a bunch of content in a CMS or a CCMS and call us aligned, but that is not the way to go about it. I think a lot of times where we need to start is with the company strategy and the business strategy that we talked about, because if technical content and technical communication is not having a seat at the table with regards to how are we talking about who we are, what we do, how we help our customers, what content can we provide in any form to actually support that, all of that needs to be thought about first, which is why you have a content strategy. Kind of a key point there. But not having a content strategy where these two worlds do come together gets to where you have the silos. And oftentimes what I see is, even if you have content and marketing and content on the technical communication side, one will be more sophisticated than the other, one will be further down the path of really understanding what that content strategy is versus just chucking a lot of content out there and hoping something sticks when you put it out there and hoping people read this. There is a very strategic component to this. We’ve been doing content strategy in techcomm in a way that is a little bit more structured I think, just because it’s kind of our nature. We’ve built these frameworks, but until you actually sit down and think about all the different content creators across your organization, the types of content they’re creating, where does that fit into the big picture? What does that strategy? How are you going to build a framework around it? Then we’ve got no business putting the content in the CCMS. It’s a tool. Right? If you don’t have the process and the structure and the people aligned behind the tool and really are changing that mindset at your organization, the tool’s not going to help you any. It’s just going to make things messier. So yes, I do firmly believe that we should all be in there together, but you’ve got to build that foundation first of the strategy and the sort of agreement of how we’re going to tackle this content problem. That is really pervasive. Whether you have a small company or a large company, content abounds. Right? So that’s the first step.

SO: So I’m afraid we’ve now closed this poll, and the final answer is, only about 4% are saying they’re fully aligned and share content in the same CMS. There’s still 70, 75% in that, some alignment in those two buckets. And 18% came back with they’re the enemy, we don’t talk.

AF: Ooh.

SO: So that’s not good. Right?

AF: Yeah.

SO: In fact, we already have a question here, how can we do this? How can we better create content that could be shared? So I’ll throw this question in as we’re going along. So the participants said, as a gross overgeneralization, marcom seems focused on getting people to make the purchase while techcomm seems focused on helping a user after the product is already purchased. So what’s your answer to that?

AF: So I definitely understand that misconception, and I think marketing in a lot of ways has done that to themselves. Another thing I harp on a lot is how to market to your current customer, because it is so much more expensive to go out and acquire new customers than it is to keep the ones you have and grow their usage and consumption of your software, for example, or buy more products if you’re a product company, or buy more services. I have seen so many companies, time and time again, just don’t understand, first of all, why their churn is so high and their customer churn is so high, but they’re doing nothing about it. Sending a renewal email if you’re a SaaS software company, for example, a month before it’s time to renew and going, “It’s time to renew,” but not talking to those customers the rest of the year. I mean, how likely would you keep that software when you’ve got somebody else that’s like going, “Hey, we see that you’re using this feature, let’s give you some tips and tricks for that?” That sort of thing. So the customer marketing aspect of that is really important. Marketing is meant to be a cycle. For a long time, people talked about sales and marketing funnel, and while that still applies in some cases, more and more organizations are thinking of it as a flywheel. So you’ve got to have that. You get the customer, yes, but you’ve got to keep that customer and you’ve got to grow that customer, and then there’ll be advocates for you with other new customers. So that part where the techcomm comes into play and the technical content and how do you use our products and services to maximize your cost savings, your speed of delivery, et cetera, et cetera, all the values that might come to a customer, is super important that you bring that value and you show that value repeatedly throughout the year so that you don’t just focus on trying to get customers, because frankly, that’s a lot harder and a lot more expensive.

SO: Yeah, that’s really interesting, because I think that’s the first time I’ve heard anybody say that we need to think about marketing as a post-sales activity. Additionally to that, we need to think about techcomm as a pre-sales activity. I mean, the premise of techcomm content is, post-sales is not actually correct in this day and age. There’s studies that have been done, I think there was one from PWC, that says that something like 80% of people when they’re researching, buying some sort of a consumer electronics, some sort of a tech product, they’re reading technical documentation content to make their buying decision. So they’re doing all this research upfront, looking at all the tech specs and all the really techie stuff long before or aside from just reading the product description, reading the things that are formally tagged as marketing content.

AF: Absolutely.

SO: They’re going much deeper than that and making their decision well before they ever are on the radar of the sales group.

AF: Yes, a hundred percent. If you think about where you can insert the technical communication in the marketing materials, marketing collateral, webpages, whatever, it definitely aligns with what you’re saying, Sarah, because so many of us do that. I mean, think about in your own life, just if you’re researching a technical thing. A lot of times it’s not necessarily to know all the technical ins and outs. Sure, the geeky ones of us like to go see all the technical ins and outs, but also the ones that may be less experienced with something or worried that they won’t know how to work something and that sort of thing, we’ll go into the same documentation that’s out there, assuming it’s available, and look at, okay, can I even figure this thing out? Because if this is too hard for me, I’m going somewhere else, I’m going to go get something easier. But that is such a big part of the research cycle, and not just with products, services as well, how does this work? What does my relationship with this company look like if I do purchase from them? What does the post-sale implementation take? How long does it take? What does it involve? How often do I do these certain things in the product? All of that stuff informs them way sooner, and I really feel like having no technical content in there or no what has traditionally been known as a post-sale content really hampers your ability to market, honestly.

SO: So what does it look like to start thinking about bringing these groups together? Where does that go? And what kind of a tech stack are we looking at?

AF: Yeah, great question. So I think, again, it starts with the content strategy. You need to be thinking about, if you’re looking at … Let’s say you’re just starting with marketing and techcomm, let’s keep it simple, and not incorporating any other content across the company. Where do you build … Well, marketing needs to understand what their messaging hierarchy is, and how are they building their messaging, and what kind of story are they trying to tell, and how are they delving into the next topic down and the next topic down. Marketing can be just as guilty as techcomm of just throwing stuff out there and hoping it all works together and that the user or the buyer understands what you’re trying to say. Right? It has to have a strategic foundation to be able to know what content you’re putting out there, what you’re trying to get from that content, and what behavior you’re trying to affect. And then understanding that and building in the various pieces of content along the way is how to go about it. So the way I’ve done it in the past is I typically start with company messaging. What is this company about? Why do we exist? Who is our audience? What are we trying to do for this audience? And understanding why we’re here for them. Yes, businesses are around to make money. We all know that, right? But let’s pretend it’s not just to make money. Let’s pretend we’re actually trying to solve a problem for our customer or a potential customer. So that’s kind of your company level messaging. Then you get down into product positioning. Still in the marketing realm, still thinking about, okay, how do I position my product or service against all of my competitors or potential competitors? What are our differentiators? How do we do something better than competitor A, competitor B, competitor C? Do we have proof that extra data and where technical content can start to come in a little bit? Because when you’re talking about product positioning, it’s not about the features. It is not about “My product is so cool, let me show you all the features.” It’s about, how is my product better than all the other ones out there? And then the layer below that is, if we’re claiming that we’re better in these three ways, then the technical content can come in and explain how we do something. This is where some of the features might come in of the product, for example, if you’re software. If you’re an industrial company, I’ve been working with industrial companies in our portfolio a lot, how do we talk our products might be the same as 17 other people out there, but our customer service is amazing, and we can get stuff to you the next day. Those might be differentiators. And then the technical content comes in as proof points and additional explanation for that. So it’s almost like a third level of the hierarchy, a little bit into the product positioning, but a third level of the hierarchy. Because I always tell our CEOs and marketing leaders when I’m working with them on messaging, if you can’t have proof points behind something, it’s not a differentiator. You just hope it’s a differentiator. You would like for it to be a differentiator. But I really feel like technical content has a big part to play in helping support those claims that you’re making as differentiators, as well as provide that additional information for those people that are doing 80% of their research online before they ever want to talk to somebody.

SO: So let’s say we have an organization and they’re looking at maybe taking some baby steps in this direction, where would you want them to start? What’s the first step? You talked a little bit about messaging hierarchy. What do you do with that? How do you make that actionable? And how do you take it in a direction of making some progress inside the organization?

AF: Yeah. I think I would probably start with a content audit, because if you do an audit and you start looking at the content you actually have, you might start seeing some overlaps. In your marketing collateral or your webpages, you might be talking about a certain thing that is also in the techcomm documentation or how-to videos or whatever. So I was doing a content audit, see what you got on both sides, see what’s still usable or could be updated or whatever to be used, and then start looking for those overlaps. I can tell you my personal story starts with a product description. So I was looking for a product description to put in a manual for a software product I was working on. So I went to Mark, I was like, “I’m not going to go write my …” Everybody wants to take the easiest route. I was like, “I’m not going to go write a product description of this. Marketing talks about this product all the time. I’ll just go get the official product description from them.” So I went to the VP of product marketing and I said, “Hey, where can I find the official approved product descriptions?” And I was expecting him to point me to an internet page or a Word document or something, and he just like deer in headlights. I was like, “Don’t we have this somewhere? I mean, what do y’all use in all your marketing collateral? Because you’re putting this in multiple places. You’re putting it on the website, you’re putting it in booth messaging for trade shows, you’re putting it in one-pagers and collateral,” that he is like, “To be honest, we don’t really have a place for that.” And I was like, “Oh, what?” Turns out we had 17 versions of the same product description on different people’s laptops. One was on our website, a different one was on our one pager. It was embarrassing. I’m like, “So if you have a customer that reads more than one piece of content about this product and there’s any discrepancy, I mean, yeah, a couple words here and there, that’s one thing, but it’s described differently by one person in this document than it is from this person in this document, isn’t that confusing to the customer?” And it was like, it had never occurred to marketing. So that’s what started our content strategy conversation. We started with the content audit and started looking at, okay, how many versions of each of these things that we have agreed are the top 20 pieces of content that we need to make sure are accurate and used by multiple people the most across the organization? So that’s where we started, was with that content audit, started looking for those overlaps. And then we started building that messaging hierarchy and content strategy, and pulling in the bits that we could, that we already had, and started looking for the gaps. And that’s when we started building the content plan based off of that to fill in those gaps.

SO: Yeah. I think there’s a question here related to that about the messaging. Shouldn’t the messaging be personalized by the various personas of the buying group? What you express to a CIO would be different than what you express to a COO? So this person is asking whether you would do the persona work before the messaging framework.

AF: Absolutely. That is a really good point. Yes, you absolutely want to have personalized messaging and tailored messaging for your personas. However, that doesn’t necessarily change your top level company messaging. You have to start somewhere. So I always start with the base company messaging, usually starting even with a vision and a mission. Why are we here? Our vision is to do X. Our mission is, we are doing this now towards that super goal of X. But yes, you do need the persona messaging. Really, that’s how your technical documentation is done. A lot of times you have a user guide, you have an admin guide, you have … It’s based on personas, and marketing works in personas as well, and ideal customer profiles. What is our ideal customer profile? So when you’re writing that top level messaging, you’re writing to your ideal customer profile, and then you can get into the tailored messaging. Just like in techcomm, you would branch off and have, if you’re doing X task, go this direction and here’s the information you need for that. If you’re doing Y task, go over here. Marketing is the same way. It’s sub messaging for that high level ICP (Ideal customer profile) messaging, and that you then break down into your different personas. And then, off of that, you can run campaigns and targeted, segmented, different email campaigns and all of that kind of stuff. And it breaks down detail by detail by detail. But that all has to roll up to something. It’s got to start somewhere. And I always tell people, “If you’re in the elevator with my grandma, everybody’s heard of the elevator pitch, I want you to tell me what your company does and how it helps me as an ICP in a way that your grandmother can understand.” And that is really hard for people, because they want to be at a level that is either so detailed down to a persona or so vague that you don’t stand out from any other company that you really can’t put across who you are and what you do and why.

SO: So one of the things that we often recommend from the slide that we’re coming from, speaking of words that people don’t understand, is to start with taxonomy and terminology. Can you talk a little bit about how a classification system for your content, the taxonomy and then the terminology, A, what those are, and B, how they affect these sort of overarching content strategy or content operations issues?

AF: Yeah, that’s a really good question because I think a lot of times marketing gets a bad rap for trying to use eight different words for one word to be creative.

SO: It’s okay. Techcomm does that too.

AF: And techcomm is very much like you have to use the same word because it’ll confuse people, and of course there’s translation that comes into play here too, right? So having consistent terminology at a high level is super important if you’re going to bring varying content creation groups together. Because the way that marketing creates content and the way they think about it, it’s very different from the way technical communicators create content and think about it. It’s way more structured in techcomm. Not as structured in marketing, though I push it a lot of different structured way. You can still be creative within a structure. The structure is there for scalability, repeatability, accuracy, lack of confusion around customer experience, that sort of thing. I’m going to start with terminology then I’ll talk about taxonomy. So terminology, getting those consistent terms and consistent usage of terms across all of your various content creation groups is really important. Now, marketing might use various other words for that, but there’s got to be a starting point. There’s got to be kind of a single source that, think of it as like a root, and then things branch out from that. So it’s okay for marketing to use different terms for things that a technical communicator might not, but when you’re communicating with each other, you need to make sure you’re on the same page. So having a style guide that talks about what are our core terms, I think is a really good idea, so that everybody has something to refer back to and they’re not constantly using different terms and confusing themselves and potential buyers and current customers. Taxonomy, just shooting out from the terminology, is also really important because if you’re trying to get into a CMS or a CCMS and you’re trying to put marketing and techcomm in there together, having a consistent taxonomy and that you can pull to create the types of content that we’re trying to create. I mean, marketing creates way more different types of content than techcomm does, and there’s nothing good or bad inherently about that. It’s just the way it is. So being able to have that structure inside a taxonomy that is inside or is being brought into a CMS or CCMS is really important because it saves time, which saves money. If you’re constantly scrambling around, trying to figure out, “Okay, how do we use this piece of content? Or do we actually have something called product intro that we use across all of our technical communication and marketing communication? Or is it just kind of a free for all?” then anytime that you have that sort of, “Wait, what do I do here?” first, you’re taking yourself out of the creation process, and second of all, you’re having to scrounge around, which is error-prone because you might not find the true and official source, if there is one, or somebody has to create it. So that structure is really important there, and that’s something that I’ve tried to impress upon marketers who don’t really understand yet what a strategy is. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve talked about marketing strategy versus a marketing plan. You could have a plan to do the crappiest content in the world. It’s still a plan. But if you don’t have a strategy behind what you’re doing, why you’re doing, and the ability to create that at scale, like I think about my companies that I’m working with in my PE fund right now. Most of them are one-person marketing departments with an agency. So there’s not only the fact that they don’t have enough people, but there’s that extra level of trying to communicate to an agency who doesn’t understand your business that’s trying to execute very good marketing email campaigns. Messaging on a website that brings people in that want to buy is hugely important. If you don’t have that taxonomy and terminology built in there, then it just adds to the chaos and confusion.

SO: I’ve got a couple of questions related to this that people are dropping into the comments. I mean, I would say first that from our point of view, we can do taxonomy and terminology with fragmented content development. So the techcomm group can be in their component content management system, scary, scary, structured content, whatever. And the marketing group can be in their web CMS that is optimized for the kinds of things that they’re trying to do, but we can provide for overarching taxonomy and terminology that are in alignment even if the content systems aren’t in alignment. And to that point, we asked about, in this last poll, what initiatives people are looking at, and nearly half said enterprise-wide terminology or taxonomy, about a third said a shared platform for content, about 3% said a shared localization platform. Now, I suspect that’s so low because that one’s been done already. And 15% said, “No, thank you. We are not doing initiatives.”

AF: They’ve run screaming for the hills.

SO: Yes, hard pass, which is totally fair. But there’s a question in here about the totality of content. Now this is clearly coming from the tech perspective. How do you interest marketing in participating in developing, maintaining, and measuring content experience across the customer experience lifecycle when their focus is solely on the marketing funnel and they take post-sales content as something that has little to no impact on their mission? Who steps up and what should motivate them to do so? And there’s also a call here for I think a chief content officer or a customer success C-suite person that cares. Is that the direction this needs to go?

AF: Wow, there’s a lot of nuances in that question. So first of all, being on the marketing side now, I do think it varies depending on your organization, depending on the mindset of your organization, depending on the goals of your organization. It’s going to vary what your experience is with marketing just not caring about technical content or the impact that it can have. First of all, I think earlier in the poll, we said something about, when we were talking about the alignment between techcomm and marketing, a lot of them don’t even talk to each other, much less collaborate together in their work. So I think there’s an opportunity here for … I mean if it’s on the techcomm side, that’s fine. Start the conversation. Just start talking about normal stuff, say hello in the hallway. Just get to know your marketing buddies.

SO: What?

AF: Yeah, I know. Be social. I don’t know. Just wave if you don’t want to say anything. But just like any business relationship or working relationship, collaboration is so much easier if you’ve built some sort of foundation first, right? Gotten to know a person, gotten to know a team, understanding what they’ve done. Maybe you could do cross-functional lunch and learns to just talk about what do you do every day. Because I know when I was in techcomm, I thought marketing people did websites and built one-pager PDFs. Holy cow, do they do way more than that. Especially now, it is so data-driven. Like if you’re not good at math, I’m sorry, I know a lot of people in techcomm aren’t, you can’t be a good marketer, period. You just can’t. You got to know, and being able to analyze data and data science and all this stuff that comes into it. And I think when I was in techcomm, I certainly didn’t understand all this stuff that was going on in marketing. And marketing is the same way with techcomm, right? They don’t understand … They know you write manuals maybe, or you’re building out an awesome library of how-to videos or help with the knowledge base, help your support team with the knowledge base, but really understanding what all goes into that and the way that you have to work with developers and UI and UX people and product managers, product marketers even. There’s a lot to that that people don’t always understand. So first, I just say start the conversation. After you get going down that path, again, if you go back to the flywheel I was talking about or the circle of a marketing versus the funnel, it is increasingly obvious to marketing and executives in these companies that have marketing, which is a lot of them, that retaining those customers is so, so important. I can tell you, going through a buying to growing to selling cycle with companies at my PE firm, people are looking at things like the churn. How many customers have you lost in the last year? How much revenue have you lost in the last year? What were the causes? Are you showing your value frequently? And all of that. And that is a big part where techcomm can play. Now, if we don’t step up as technical communicators and say, “Hey, I’ve got something to offer here. Have you thought about this?” And you mentioned customer success, Sarah. At my last company, we had an amazing customer success team, and they worked really hard on showing consistent value through the years. They build out these service value reports where we talked about what we had done that year for them. Funny enough, it was a cybersecurity company. So in that particular environment, if they hadn’t heard from us that year, it was a good thing. They didn’t have any breaches or anything like that. But what we ended up talking about was like, “Look at all these potential breaches that we stopped. Here’s how we analyzed your system every quarter. Here’s what we put in place new in our product so that this, this, and this wouldn’t happened.” So having those conversations about bringing those in is so hugely important. And then being able to actually incorporate some of that. I didn’t fully answer or I think answer at all the tech stack thing earlier. Just having that kind of content and understanding that content so that both of you can contribute is the starting point. And then you get to the super technical, let’s build it all in here and bring the data out. So I don’t know if I fully answered that question, but hopefully that was somewhat helpful.

SO: We’ll come back to it. There were some others that were kind of related to that. But I wanted to touch on what this looks like specifically for you, specifically living in private equity, which is largely, you said low to mid market, but I would describe them as early stage companies. Because from my point of view, most of the companies that we deal with are in that 250 million and up, which is where, in techcomm land, you start to run into scalability problems, right?

AF: Right.

SO: If you’re under 250 million in revenue, your scalability problems are just beginning.

AF: Yes.

SO: And then we’ve got a lot of bigger companies in that, a couple billion, tens of billions, big companies, that have a lot of technical debt around content and are looking at how to address this. But the question I wanted to ask you was, what does this look like from your point of view? Sitting in private equity, working with a specific type of company, what are the kinds of things that you’re attacking there on the content side? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of that particular slice of the market?

AF: Yeah. So one of the things we emphasize across all of our functional areas, not just marketing, is starting things early. I learned this when I worked at that startup a few jobs ago. The earlier you put something into place that can scale, the better it’s going to be down the road. I have dealt with some of the messiest salesforce implementations ever because it was never appropriately set up. You didn’t have your fields mapped correctly to something you might be doing in marketing. I have dealt with companies that just don’t track their data. And I was actually thinking before I got online to do this today, data is content too. It may not be something we’re producing for the good of our customers, but in the long run it really is, because if we’re not being able to actually collect the data that we need to run the business in a way that we can grow and scale, then we’re not doing our jobs. And I see it over and over and over again. I mean, I will tell you right now that one of the very first things that we have our new companies do when we buy them is put in a CRM and put in an ERP. They don’t have it. Sometimes we switch them to a different one if they’re on a really old version or if they’re on something that’s not as modern, because that data is so, so important. And if we’re not looking at that and not looking at, “Okay, are we actually growing? Are we sitting flat? Are we going backwards?” it impacts what you do and it impacts the business. Venture capital and private equity is a little bit different. So venture capital, those are super early stage, where people are putting in money, but they don’t necessarily expect the return that private equity does. Private equity is actually a little further down the path. They’ve already raised some venture money or it’s a bootstrapped founder-owned company, something like that. We expect a return, and not only do we expect a return, we work very closely in partnership with our management teams, hence my team existing, the operations team, to create value so that we can do that. But I tell you what, it is a heck of a lot easier to create value and more value if you start these things early. So the biggest thing I try to focus on when I’m working with one of these organizations, whether I’m inheriting a company that has a very immature, because it’s very … I have not yet found one of our companies that has a super mature marketing organization. It’s just, that’s the stage that they’re in. They’re typically founder-owned. Some of them haven’t even thought about marketing because they’ve just kind of done word of mouth and focused on the product or the service. So one of the biggest things I try to do is get back to the tech stack, get some of the things in there early that we need. I can’t tell you how many … I’ve probably put HubSpot in four companies now pretty early, because I’m like, “If you do this now and set it up now, it’s way easier to scale down the road versus us trying to continue to use constant contact, for example, for all these marketing email campaigns. We don’t get the same data that we do from HubSpot. We can’t then shape and optimize our campaigns the way we could if we had a better marketing automation platform, et cetera, et cetera.” So it just kind of goes from there. The more you can do upfront and sooner. You may think it’s too big for you. You may think you don’t need something that is sophisticated or whatever, but if you’re thinking down the road about how to grow a company and where we want to be in two years, three years, four years, because that’s how we think now at the PE firm, we don’t think about what we’re doing next quarter, we think about where do we want this company to be in two years, three years, et cetera. So we’re building to that. And that’s the way that we kind of go about it.

SO: I mean, that’s really the big takeaway, is that you have to … It’s one thing if you’re a static company.

AF: Right.

SO: If you’re X size and you’re going to be there forever and you’re going to grow 3% per year, or not, as the case may be, if you have a bad year, then you’re fine. You just build for that universe. But I think from talking to you and some other people about this, it’s that forward-thinking, in three years, we’re going to be twice the size or three times the size or five times the size, and what we are currently doing is not going to work 5X from now. And maybe you get there and maybe you don’t, but if you’re planning to get there, this will be a blocker.

AF: Much more likely. Yeah. Let me give you an example. I remember having a discussion with somebody a few jobs ago about templates. They were custom creating every bit of marketing collateral and every bit of technical content. They didn’t have templates. Smaller company, obviously, as you would imagine. And it was funny, because we had just had a town hall meeting the week before where our CEO was like, “We need to be thinking about where we’re going to be in three years.” So I actually brought that up with our creative director, and I was like, “Look, in three years, we should have enough people, enough products, and enough content that there’s absolutely no way that you can sit there and custom create all of these. We have to have a template that multiple people can fill in. Yeah, sure, maybe you can do a finishing touch on the creative or whatever, but we have to be able to scale.” And it was almost like it was a foreign concept to him. He was so used to doing it a certain way that he couldn’t even come up with what that meant for where we would be in three years if we grew the way we wanted to grow. I just remember that having a really big impact on me because, again, for someone who likes to move fast, I was like, “What are you doing?” Eventually we did move to templates a few months later, but I was like, “This just doesn’t make sense. You got to think about …” Because nobody wants to be stuck doing the same thing every day. And if a company is growing, especially high growth companies, hopefully you’re learning and taking on more products, more services, more people, more teams, more cross-functional collaboration, and you can’t do that doing everything custom.

SO: And putting process in requires you to slow down so that you can then go faster. I’ve said several times, we had a client a while back who said, “I just need to get off the hamster wheel.” The solution is not to run faster on the hamster wheel. The solution is to put in some sort of an industrial strength gear that’s driven by something other than me as a hamster. Okay, there’s some really interesting questions that I want to get to, but before we go there, I have to ask you for your obligatory opinion about AI in content.

AF: I have a very strong opinion about AI. Unless you are a mediocre, do the bare minimum content creator, it’s not going to take your job. AI is a tool, and I think a lot of people who don’t fully understand AI, although none of us really fully understand it, it’s changing so fast and changing every day, but I think people that haven’t really looked into it and actually played around with it don’t realize that it is a tool. It is not the end-all and be-all. You’re not going to go out there and have a million robots doing everything in the next 20 years. There’s so much opportunity for efficiency, productivity, optimization with AI that it just blows my mind. I think sometimes we get stuck. Because we are content creators, we kind of think about AI and how it can create all this content for us. And yes, absolutely, it can create content, but if you’ve done any sort of research or done any playing around with it and actually looked at that content, it’s just like any other content. Right? Even if a human is creating it, you have to revise and edit and make it sound human and make sure you have the right things in there and all of that sort of stuff. So talking purely about AI and content creation, I actually don’t use it to create content. I ask it to help me refine content, evaluate my content. I got a really good idea from somebody at a conference, at the HubSpot conference actually, they were talking about using it to actually evaluate the novelty of their content, which as a marketer I found really interesting because, again, when you start trying to talk about differentiators and how you compare to your competitors and stuff, you want to stand out. And you’re running it through AI, and AI is like, “I’ve seen this a hundred times,” you probably want to change your messaging up a little bit. But there are a zillion ways to use AI in a way that helps you be more efficient, helps you do more in less time. But I think people are overly worried about it taking their job when there’s so much nuance and strategic thinking and human elements that we need.

SO: Yeah. I think I mostly agree with that, except that I will point out that there is a lot of mediocre content out there. So if AI can achieve mediocre at a fraction of the cost, then well, here we are.

AF: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, and that’s why I said unless you’re a mediocre, doesn’t try very hard content creator, it won’t take your job. But yeah, I agree, there’s opportunity and you can put AI-generated content out there without any revision and all that, and it’ll be good enough in a lot of scenarios. But if you really want good content, you’ve got to have the human in there somewhere.

SO: So there’s an interesting comment here, not so much of a question, but somebody said that, “I always think that the quality of the user docs, whether end user or developer docs, reflects the quality of the product and of the customer support.” So this is really using it from a marketing perspective as a branding support thing. Here’s what you get to help you succeed with our product.

AF: Yes.

SO: And they’re putting it out there that way.

AF: I love that. And that gives me a really good opportunity to get on another soapbox of mine, which is, brand is not a logo or a company name. Brand is about someone’s experience with your organization across all touch points. Let’s say you have an amazing website with wonderful differentiators and you have incredible booths at trade shows and a really cool marketing swag and all that, and then you get to really bad user documentation that’s on the website somewhere. Absolutely, because your trust in that brand is broken. So it is really … And that’s yet another reason to talk to marketers, right? If they’re saying one thing and the product doesn’t actually do that or the product does it in a different way, or the tone of the marketing doesn’t line up with the tone of the tech doc and the quality, again, that’s breaking the trust of the customer, which impacts your brand reputation. One of the biggest things in marketing is brand awareness. And if you’re a really small company and nobody knows who you are, how likely are you going to get a bunch of customers when there’s bigger, louder people out there, right? That’s part of brand awareness. The other part of brand awareness is ensuring that you have that consistent experience across all touch points. And it’s something that I think a lot of times we don’t think about enough. Marketing I think might think about a little bit more because we are marketing in so many different channels. Techcomm, not as much, especially if, right now, you can go to one place on the website to get your tech docs, and that’s it. If you don’t have anything built into products, for example, you don’t have how-to videos on your marketing channels or something like that, that’s something that all of us as content creators across all the functions need to think about. All of that impacts the brand.

SO: So there’s an interesting question here about content audits. This is coming from somebody who says they are in a SaaS and vendor-agnostic hardware integration company. The question is, how can we get management to see the value of content strategy when they seem stuck in siloed thinking? And if you don’t have an answer to the second part off the top of your head, we’ll get it into the follow-up email, but what resources do you suggest for learning more about and performing a content audit?

AF: Oh man, I’ve got some resources, and I’ll definitely give those to you, Sarah, to get in that email because there’s a couple of books that really help me with that. So one thing about content audits I just want to say is, it’s not as scary as it sounds. I mean, I remember the first time I heard content, I was like, “Ooh, that sounds big and hairy. Is there some sort of framework I need to use or some template for that?” It’s basically looking at all your content and seeing what you have and seeing what parameters you want to pull to understand what you have across all the content in your organization. A vendor-agnostic hardware integrator is an interesting content challenge because if you’re vendor-agnostic, you’re integrating with a lot of different companies or a lot of different vendors, and you’re pulling them together most likely through API integrations or some sort of custom-built middleware or something like that. So just like any other company, if you have those silos, I would start with customer experience, especially for an integrator. System integrators rely on reputation and customer experience. They’re the ones that are supposed to be the experts to go and take vendor A and vendor B to pull them together for whatever value that the customer’s trying to get. The customer will come to you and say, “I’m trying to do X and here’s Y.” It’s up to the integrator to recommend certain vendors and how to integrate them to make that happen. So I mean that is a hundred percent customer experience. If it’s not, it should be a hefty, hefty, lofty goal of an SI. And that’s where I would start. I would start with that conversation and go, “Look, the customer experience, all we do is things to make the customer achieve their goals.” And for us to be able to do that, we have to provide this end-to-end content solution so that they understand not only how we’re integrating it, but why we’re integrating it this way, what are the gotchas they need to look for and all of this, so that they can make their customers happy as well.

SO: Okay, couple more here. We’re going to try and power through. We talked about personas earlier and there’s now a question about personas. If everything requires … Well, let me back up. The question is actually, are personas dead? At least for existing customers, are personas dead? They were for when we didn’t know who the user is, but now with requiring sign-in everywhere, we have a lot of data that can be used to personalize.

AF: Yeah, absolutely. And you just build that into your persona. I don’t think that takes you away from a persona. I will say that I feel like, especially in marketing, holy cow, we can go down the persona train, like pages and pages about a persona. It’s overkill. You do not need 17 paragraphs about a persona, because what happens is you start trying to get so far down into the details of meeting all of the very, very, very, very, very specific needs of the 17 lines of that persona. That is overkill. I’ve worked with no personas before. I’ve worked with those overkill, super, super long, detailed personas. I try to shoot for six or seven bullets. It doesn’t need to be crazy. Honestly, personal information, I don’t care that so-and-so has a dog named Fluffy. That doesn’t impact how they’re using my content. Now, if so-and-so has to leave at 3:00 every day because they have some commitment, and so they have six hours to do eight hours worth of work, that’s going to impact what I’m trying to do for them. But we get so enamored with these perfect personas, and I think that’s one reason I’ve loved moving more towards the marketing side, which they use personas too, don’t get me wrong. But they really focus on ideal customer profile. When we build out ideal customer profile for companies, again, keyword, ideal, that doesn’t mean that there’s not other buyers, other influencers in the buying process, et cetera, other personas, but who is your ideal person you’re trying to talk to, who 90% of the time is the one that makes a decision here, et cetera. It is very rare that we have more than six bullet points, and we’re talking one line on each bullet, and that’s what we work off of. Then, of course, we build additional personas off of that. But I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in the personas that we don’t think about, if you were limited to four bullet points for a persona, what would be the most important things? Absolutely. It forces you to think and narrow it down little bit more. So that’s what I’d say about personas. I don’t think they’re dead. I absolutely think you should have them. I do think they need to be refined from how they’ve been done over the last 10 years.

SO: Okay. In the last 90 seconds, before we throw it back to Christine, we’ve got a couple of questions here. I’m going to try and sort of merge them and combine them, but ultimately, people are asking about how to start doing this integration between marketing and techcomm. How do you coordinate between marketing and technical writers? Do you form cross-functional teams? And then separately, there was a question about use case documentation and how to balance between technical information and marketing needs. So if you could just tie everything up in a nice shiny bow and wrap up the integration.

AF: Yes. Let me wrap. 10 seconds here.

SO: Yes.

AF: So I think, again, you start with a content strategy. You got to think about why are you even thinking about combining marketing and techcomm, right? What are you trying to get out of it? What is your goal? When I started this down this path, that’s what I did. I’m like, why is it important that we bring this content together? What are we trying to achieve? And then how are we going to get there? And I’ll give these resources to Sarah too as well to put in the email. But there were a couple of books I found super, super useful for helping me think about what I wanted that to look like and then how we would execute and maintain going forward. So I do think that you need somebody focused on this. Especially if you’re starting from scratch, let’s say your marketing techcomm teams don’t talk at all right now, you need somebody that can spearhead all of this and bring those teams together, and somebody that understands both sides a little bit so that you can actually talk in the marketing language, talk in the techcomm language and how you would pull those together. So that’s what I did. I actually moved into a content strategy leadership role. You don’t have to have that necessarily dedicated, but you need somebody that can dedicate some time to this and start to bring those two together and start to think about, as you work through that content strategy, what are the marketing considerations we need? What are the techcomm considerations? How do we pull those together? Starting with that content audit that I mentioned. We did a little six-month pilot project, and I have a whole presentation about this, but basically we picked one of our smaller or mid-sized portfolios out of all the portfolios we had. We did the content audit, we looked at where we could share information, and we started to build a plan from there. And then, of course, you build in your governance and your maintenance and all of that just as you would for techcomm individually or marketing individually. Actually, I want to lead back to a previous question that I didn’t quite get into about understanding the effectiveness of content. If you go to your marketing team and ask them to give you the Google Analytics for your website where your techcomm is so that you can see and gather information about people that are hitting it, how often, balance rate, all of that, and they don’t know how to do that or they can’t, you have a lousy marketing team. So that’s a case of applying those marketing principles to the techcomm pages. And that’s a very easy way for techcomm to start showing, talking with marketing about something that’s really more marketing-oriented, but it’s on the techcomm content. So I would recommend that as well as a starting point. But really starting with that content strategy, building it out, having somebody that can dedicate some time to overseeing this project and bringing these teams together and going down that path. And again, there’s one resource in particular that I’m thinking of that really helped me kind of go through the various steps of that. And I’ll get that to Sarah for the email.

SO: Awesome. Alyssa, thank you so much for all of this. I think a lot of food for thought for people on maybe both sides of the fence. And maybe we can work on, I don’t know, putting a gate in the fence or something.

AF: Yeah, absolutely.

SO: I’m not going to say we’re going to get rid of the fence. That’s too much. So thank you again. And Christine, back to you for a little wrap up.

CC: All right. Well, thank you all so much for being here. If you can go ahead and rate and provide feedback on this webinar, it really helps us know what you found helpful, other topics you’d like to see us talk about, any feedback for the presenters, all that kind of good stuff. We’d really appreciate it. Also, if you want to stay tuned with this series in 2025, be sure to subscribe to our Illuminations newsletter. That is in the attachment section below your viewing screen, so you can go over there. And again, thank you so much for being here. We look forward to seeing you again. Have a great day.