First Digital Transformation, Then Content Transformation

Right now, almost everyone who considers themselves any kind of expert in business is scrambling to turn a brand-centric company into one that pays attention to the people who use its products. Tech vendors refer to this process as digital transformation because that term puts them at the center of some pretty lucrative conversations. But companies won’t fail to transform because they chose the wrong technology or because they implemented it badly. They’ll fail because they didn’t see that transformation is as much about content as it is about technology.

If you have to stop reading right now, then remember one thing: Technology cannot engage users. Only content can do that.

Technology delivers content, but that’s all. It’s like plumbing and water. When you build a house, you want the taps in the right rooms and you want the drains to empty into the sewer system. But if the water that comes out of the taps isn’t potable, then you can’t live in the house. The ROI on your plumbing spend is zero, and the ROI on your new house spend isn’t much better.

You can fail at digital transformation even if your products and services are great. You can fail at content transformation even if you ace your digital transformation. And if you don’t give users the content they want and need—as opposed to the content your product marketers think they should get—then your competition will.

Content strategy is the part of user-centered design that deals with content. A good strategy and an effective set of tactics are a good start. But you need the right mindset to execute them, and that comes from understanding and accepting some truths that are not entirely self-evident:

o  Good content builds relationships. Bad content ends them. Every brand seeks a different relationship with users, so every content project is essentially a custom endeavor in support of that relationship.

o  You’re not in charge. The user’s voice is louder than yours. Has been for years. And people talk to each other where you can’t hear them. The truth about your brand and products will get out. It should come from you, even if it’s not the carefully curated story that a marketing team might want to tell.

o  Content is anything that carries your message to users. A lot of folks think that it’s just copy. It’s not. It’s also images, video, font, color, texture, logos, alt text, metadata, tags, SEO terms, and a bunch of other stuff. And content isn’t just digital—it exists offline, too.

o  Everyone who encounters your brand is a user. Customers, employees, management, clients, journalists, your competition, academics—they’re all users. Some matter more than others at times, but they’re all users. What makes content useful and relevant to them depends on the relationship you seek with them, and the relationship they seek with you. 

o  Content creators must be qualified. Brands are founded to make and sell things, not to create relevant, useful content about themselves. Creating content is a completely different discipline from creating what you sell. Brands get stagnant when they let product experts create and manage content, and stagnant brands die. With the stakes that high, you can’t afford to have untrained content creators in the mix, especially when you need to create content at the scale that content transformation requires.

o  Weak governance kills user engagement faster than anything else. It lets the wrong people call the shots and shields them from accountability for bad decisions. Strong governance holds everyone accountable, not just the content team. It also gives everyone more time to work, which means better content for the brand.

We’re all in the content game now, like it or not. Understanding content’s role in digital transformation is just as important as understanding technology’s role in content transformation. Bad content kills the relationships that brands desperately need to maintain, and bad process burns out your content team members. The way forward is to find ways to create content that don’t destroy your people, and that reduce the time, money, and review cycles required to engage users.

When you think in those terms, you’re way ahead of the people who still think that technology engages users.