Signs you’re ready for an enterprise content strategy

You’ve deployed a successful content strategy for one department at your organization. How do you know you’re ready to take that strategy to the next level and expand it across the organization? Here are some common indicators that it’s time to develop an enterprise content strategy.

Departments rely on each other’s content

If one department borrows another department’s content—or needs to, but can’t access it—it’s time to think about a content strategy that spans across the organization. This strategy will not only meet the demands of the departments that need to share content, but will also open the door to other departments bringing their content into alignment. 

Some examples of cross-departmental content sharing include:

• The support team using product content to answer customer questions
• The training team referencing or reusing product content in their instructional materials
• The marketing team including technical specifications in their promotional content
• The technical publications team copying language from legal and regulatory documents in warnings and disclaimers

Creating a content strategy that connects departments will result in more consistent, reusable, and easily searchable content across the enterprise.

Customers struggle to find the content they need

When customers look for product information, they don’t want to navigate all over or perform multiple searches to find marketing and technical product content, reviews, FAQs, how-to information, and videos. They want easy access to it all in one place. If they can’t find the content they need on your site, they’ll look for it in other places, such as Google reviews, third-party blogs, or YouTube. Instead of causing your customers frustration, it’s better to have a strategy where you guide them through the customer journey without your content silos getting in their way.

If you’re getting lots of customer feedback indicating that information is difficult to find, you need a strategy that streamlines search across all of your company’s content. (And if you’re not collecting feedback or metrics on your customers, now is a good time to start.)  

In addition to unified search, more customers are demanding a personalized experience that serves custom content based on a user profile. This profile typically includes criteria such as products purchased, user experience level, location, role, and more. Personalized content delivery requires enterprise-level coordination to compile and serve all needed content.

You need to scale up to meet new demands

When your business grows, content production needs to grow with it. Developing content in departmental silos using inefficient processes can
hinder that growth. If you can’t scale up your content development to address your company’s new business needs, it’s time to overhaul your strategy.

Some indicators of growth for your business might include:

• Offering a new service or product that sells successfully, which requires new content
• Gaining a customer base in a new region, which increases localization demand
• Increased customer demand for digital content, which adds new output and delivery requirements

You’ve merged with another company

Mergers and acquisitions typically require a new approach to content strategy. Each company comes with its own content processes, and it’s important for the new merged company to bring those into alignment.

Rebranding is a major driver for enterprise content strategy after a merger. To rebrand as quickly and efficiently as possible, your company needs to decide which content to keep and evaluate the effort required to update that content to the new look and feel. Automated rebranding is much more effective than the time-wasting process of conducting it manually, which presents an opportunity to upgrade to automated content development across the board.

Creating a company-wide content strategy is challenging due to its scope and scale. If you need help expanding your content strategy across the enterprise, contact us.