At Foleon, we have an opinion on what great content looks like. For us, its main purpose is to support our customers in achieving their goals and shape our view on how to keep improving the software.
Process eats everything else for breakfast
Content effectiveness is driven by process. Your content can be insightful and look incredible, but that’s not enough. To engage today’s audience, you need to provide the right information, package it the right way, and serve it in the right place at the right time. To make this happen in the ever-changing content climate, you need to create it fast. Because the truth is, if you can’t move from identifying a need to executing production quickly enough, someone else (read: your competitor) will.
This is why your content creation process is business-critical. Planning, collecting, and checking information is a complex operation and involves a range of stakeholders. And that’s only a few of the steps in a much longer chain:
Ideation & Planning → Copy → Design → Review → Approval → Publish → Distribute → Analyze → Optimize
This long, complex process is a major challenge for the vast majority of companies.
Content operational excellence
Content is at the core of almost all business activities: product instructional videos, sales pitch decks, thought leadership articles, or event brochures.
With such a massive workload coming from all corners of the business, content should be framed in the same way as any core business process. Aiming to be as lean and as agile as possible, content creation and distribution should also have an operational excellence ambition.
Achieving that means that creation, delivery, and analysis, from start to finish, are streamlined and optimized. Such an ambition rightly recognizes how content is a primary revenue enabler — through employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and pipeline growth.
To be successful, key stakeholders across the company need to properly understand the value of content. And they need to be empowered with whatever they need to succeed — on brand, at scale, and fast enough to achieve their business goals. HR understands the importance of a great handbook in new hire onboarding, sales understand how the quality of their proposal influences their position against their competitor, and customer support understands how their FAQs reduce frustration and decrease agent time on the phone.
Within this, collaboration is absolutely the keyword. Without the ability to work together effectively on these initiatives, the business will ultimately struggle to build what’s required — and underperform as a result.
Excellent at working together
Create, review, and approve. Three opportunities for the process to go off the rails, decrease execution power, and hinder the business in wider execution.
How to speed up, reduce risk and improve delivery?
Content bottlenecks usually happen when one team, e.g., Marketing, is responsible for more content than they have the capacity to create. All content creation is centralized, and the rest of the company is dependent on this core content team to deliver.
Reviewing is a significant part of the content creation process, and iteration rounds can end up taking more time than the creation of the first version itself. Review bottlenecks occur when gathering and processing feedback from contributors, subject matter experts, the legal team, or other stakeholders cause delays.
Multiple versions start flying around via mail while people comment on different PDFs in parallel. It quickly becomes a mess almost without end. Even in Foleon, with a central digital document, our users told us that there were challenges in collecting and executing feedback when the stakeholder map was complex.
Quality control at speed
Achieving operational excellence means that brand and quality governance are strictly adhered to. Content creators need to be empowered to meet brand guidelines, but they also need to quickly confirm all relevant stakeholders agree on the content.
We’ve prioritized helping our customers to simplify and speed this up, unifying creation and collaboration in the platform.
Content collaboration is so important that it will continue to be a major theme in the coming years.
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