Empowering Teams to Create: An Inside Look at Foleon's Latest Updates

By Penny Warnock

Empowering Teams to Create: An Inside Look at Foleon's Latest Updates

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, our goal is to enable you to create content that will drive success across your organization. Recently we launched many new, exciting features to help your whole team collaborate and create content with Foleon in a more scalable way. 

These updates include:

  • The Content Builder (an alternative editing experience) 
  • Our brand-new default templates
  • The Brand Kit

To dive into these updates, we sat down with our Creative Director, Vincent van der Laan, and Product Owner, Rob van Vliet, to discuss the details and the process behind launching these exciting new features.

 

Can you tell us about the new Content Builder?

Rob van Vliet: As we continue to develop our product vision, with the help of some customer feedback, we've noticed that our users now have different needs and goals when using our product, and what we've seen is that the era of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ editor is over

To better enable all the different use cases, we created an alternative editing experience, the Content Builder. With roughly the same capabilities, users don't need to worry about complex design decisions by leveraging our easy-to-use interface and templates to create engaging content faster than ever before.

When you become more familiar with Foleon, the Content Studio allows you to make more advanced creations. From there, you can set guardrails and prepare branded assets, such as custom templates and your Brand Kit, to empower your less experienced coworkers to create content independently.

The Content Builder Foleon

 

How does the Content Builder relate to the Content Studio? 

Rob van Vliet: The primary separator between the two is awareness of the decisions you must make when creating a content piece:

  • Who's your audience, and what is their perception of the subject?
  • How much text or media do you want to use?
  • What layout fits best?
  • How does this appear across the different viewports? 

If you make the wrong decision at any point, you could miss the mark, leaving your audience confused about the story you’re trying to tell. 

The Content Builder aims to help you navigate those decisions. It’s about providing your copy, media, and branding and applying it to one of our templates. Using this with the Content Studio allows teams to create content together

The primary user, usually a designer, cares for the brand's identity, the templates, the layout, or the structure. At the same time, other team members (content creators) can focus solely on creating content based on the materials the designer has prepared for them.

 

What can you tell us about the templates and how they relate to the Content Builder? 

Vincent van der Laan: The creative elements of content creation come down to making many decisions. For designers, that's okay. They can float around in that cloud of possibilities, choosing colors, typeface sizes, spacing, text length, etc. With the Content Builder and its wide range of professionally designed templates, we’ve made all those complex design decisions for you.

We have much experience creating high-quality content, so we built templates with these best practices. Each template (from complete Docs to individual pages or blocks) showcases what structure works best for that type of content. This way, with the Content Builder, you only have to worry about applying your content to that perfect readymade template. 

 


How should a new Foleon user approach using the templates and Content Builder?

Vincent van der Laan: Once you have the text or a rough idea of what you want to say, head into the platform, pick the template that fits your content type, and learn from the template's structure. That should be the first decision in a content creation process because the template is the functional design for your content.

Once you select the appropriate content type with a suitable layout, add or delete pages or blocks from the easy-to-search template library. You can delete anything you want, but with the templates, you still have an overall concept to work towards. 

We've got welcome pages, content pages, pages for engaging reads, long-form layouts, and more technical reads for things like guides. We set the categories up in a way to make it as easy as possible to find what you need based on the content that you have.

 

Do you expect more people to come into Foleon, and if so, how do people ensure content quality?

Rob van Vliet: Yes, for sure! With these new updates, we’re making it easier for anybody to collaborate and create content within Foleon, regardless of skill or experience. 

When companies start to scale their process, typically, the number one problem is releasing control and allowing your teams to create. You can maintain that control with the Content Studio while empowering your teams to execute and create with the Content Builder.

To help provide guardrails while preventing the need for team micromanagement, we’ve also introduced Brand Kit.

The Brand Kit is the number one tool we have to create your brand identity inside our platform. You can use the Brand Kit to ensure that every Doc created starts on-brand. 

 

We've seen customers who use different colors, fonts, formats, and even different types of communication for different groups of users, so we wanted to enable that way of working. To allow this collaboration, the Brand Kit is set up as workspace-depending, meaning you can define brand kits for various workspaces.

Additionally, we've reconfigured our user roles and permissions and reduced the costs to make it easier to grow your team of content creators while staying in control.

 

Foleon's Product Owner Rob van Vliet quote

 

Also, our new plans now include unlimited publishing. We want customers to publish as much content as possible to ensure they always have the most engaging content ready for their audience; if this works for you, you should be able to continue without limitations.

 

Finally, can you share anything about our related projects on the roadmap?

Rob van Vliet: We have more than enough ideas; we have already identified multiple ways to build on these updates. For example, we can extend the Brand Kit with more element types and styles to better facilitate designers. We also see opportunities to improve our template library with the launch of Content Builder. 

We want to make the experience more conversational and present users with what we feel is the best template to start with based on their needs. We're still researching and validating where customers are with their plans, but these are some things we’re currently looking into. Be sure to check out the Foleon roadmap to see what’s cooking!

Read also: On-Brand Excellence: New Features for Seamless Collaboration

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Penny Warnock

Penny Warnock is the Content Marketer extraordinaire here at Foleon. With a background in SaaS, product marketing, journalism, and brand building, Penny is passionate about storytelling and generating engaging content across various digital channels.

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