Why a Content Strategy? Speed, Efficiency & Profit for Starters

I think we can all agree that, easier maintainability and availability of content would contribute greatly to the overall value of your products, services and business — and make for happier customers. But, do you have a strategy in place to manage, update, and make it easily available to all who need it?

If you haven’t thought about this, or the answer is a resounding “No,” then my recent article for Manufacturing Business Technology will help guide you in understanding the importance of a content strategy — no matter what industry in which you find yourself!

With a focus on strategy, the first question we should answer is: Should your content be digital? In this day and age, the answer to that is easy: Yes.

To go further — do you need to move to XML? Again the answer is almost always yes. Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is a standardized format that allows for more flexibility, speed and efficiency when updating documents. XML provides a standard method and set of tools to enable you to support more products, faster and at a lower cost. A prime example:

Cybex International is a leading manufacturer of premium exercise equipment for gyms and private homes. Their product line includes more than 150 unique strength training and cardio training machines and their team faced an urgent need to streamline and modernize the documentation production process. How did they accomplish this? You guessed it — XML.

Cybex’s content conversion strategy was built to achieve very specific goals like accommodating constant updates to its manuals, adding new languages, and providing current information to its suppliers, vendors, sales, and service technicians. Moving to DITA, a specialized version of XML designed to support instruction and technical manuals, allowed their team to double their throughput, increase document count, improve documentation consistency, and add languages — all with existing staff.

If your content isn’t digital or is not standardized to be flexible when making changes internally or externally, then it may be time to develop a strategy to make YOUR business more efficient and even profitable!

Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), is a recognized authority on XML implementation and document conversion. Prior to joining DCL in 1981, Gross was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. He has a B.S. degree in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University. He has also taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of automated conversions to XML and SGML.