Unlock the Power of Content Reuse in Your Technical Documentation
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Organizations create a lot of content to support customers, employees, and partners. This content could be product documentation, training material, standard operating procedures, or other technical documentation. If you look closely, you’ll notice that a lot of the same information is used across this documentation. Instead of creating each piece of content separately, what if you applied a content reuse strategy? What does that mean, and why would you want to do it? That’s the topic of this blog, so read on.
What is Content Reuse, and Why Would You Need It
The simplest definition of content reuse is:
“Content reuse is the practice of using the same content in multiple places. For example, using the same topic in different user guides, the same warning message in several different topics. By reusing your content, you can save time and create more consistent technical publications.”
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is thinking of content, especially technical content, as books instead of collections of content that can be used in different ways.
Content reuse is the practice of understanding what content is the same across documentation and designing it for reuse instead of being recreated or copied. The benefits to organizations are many and boil down to improving productivity and efficiency in documentation teams, as well as reducing the costs associated with creating and managing documentation.
The Essential Guide to Effective Technical Documentation
Following the best practices of technical documentation provides developers, end users, and customers with clear guides for products and services.
6 Advantages Content Reuse Offers Organizations
There are many reasons to implement a content reuse strategy. We’ll look at six you can present to your manager to demonstrate its advantages.
Consistency
Customers interact with your company in different ways. They visit your website, customer support portal, or knowledgebase, download your product guides, and so on. They expect the information they receive in each of these channels to be accurate and consistent. Consistency reinforces brand identity and builds trust with customers.
A content reuse strategy enables consistency because you use the same content in each channel and publication. Without a reuse strategy, you risk writing different content for each channel, and even subtly different content can confuse customers.
For example, the steps to create a new user in a system might be written one way in the user guide and another in the administration guide. The differences might be subtle, such as what a new user is called or how permissions are defined, or it might be a missing step or several steps combined. This inconsistency can confuse and frustrate your customers.
Time and Cost Efficient
You have a budget for your content development, and content reuse is the best way to ensure your budget is used efficiently. Think about the documentation required to launch a new product. You need a user guide, implementation or installation guide, troubleshooting guide, administrator guide, knowledgebase articles, etc.
Now, think about the time it takes to write, edit, and design that content. You could assign writers to create each of these documents separately, but there’s a lot of the same content in each guide. You are also probably creating multiple versions of screenshots and other digital assets.
Without content reuse, you’re spending time and money creating multiple versions of your content and updating it. Every time that content changes, you must go to each piece of content and make the required changes. This also means you need some way to track where that content is used to ensure you keep it up to date. If you aren’t tracking it (or keeping that list up to date), you will spend more time and money trying to find it.
You have translation costs to consider if your documentation is translated into multiple languages. Think about the potential inconsistencies in how each piece of content is translated. With a content reuse strategy, the content is only translated once, so you don’t have to worry about inconsistent information. Plus, you will see reduced costs because there is less content to translate.
Cradlepoint applies content reuse to its tech docs. For example, it creates Quick Start Guides for customers and produces carrier-specific versions of the Quick Start Guides. Reusing topics among guides has also helped the company reduce translation costs.
Quality Control
Imagine a situation where auditors have access to constantly updated and well-organized financial information, allowing them to do audits with incredible accuracy and speed. In this scenario, CPAs effortlessly guide through the complex maze of compliance, guaranteeing that financial statements are not only precise but also submitted promptly. Tax managers benefit from having a single source of tax-related content, while tax consultants collaborate seamlessly, providing strategic advice backed by a wealth of up-to-date information.
Faster Time to Market
Whether it’s a brand-new product or an update to an existing product, your documentation must be ready when it’s time to go to market. You can’t go to market with inadequate or missing documentation in regulated industries, but the same is true for non-regulated industries. Customers need documentation to use your product, whether it’s a piece of machinery, a software application, or something else.
Implementing a content reuse strategy that reduces the time and effort required to create, edit, and approve your documentation will help you have the necessary content ready faster.
Let’s look at this from another angle – customer support and self-service. Your customers expect your customer support and service teams to have the information they need to use your products, and in some cases, they want access to the information via self-service tools. Launching without the right information available for your support teams and self-service channels will frustrate your customers (and your employees), driving higher support costs and lower NPS (net promoter scores).
Improved Collaboration
Most companies have a technical documentation team to manage technical documentation, but this team doesn’t work in a vacuum. Collaboration from other teams, including product and customer support, is necessary to ensure the right content is created and that it contains accurate information.
Content reuse aids in improved collaboration in several ways. First, content reuse requires all content to reside in a central repository – in this case, a component content management system. The CCMS provides collaboration tools that enable the documentation team to allow subject matter experts and other teams to review the content as it’s developed and provide feedback. The external reviewers only have to review the content once, speeding up review time. No one has the time or wants to review multiple versions of content).
Can you collaborate on content without content reuse and a CCMS? Sure, but it’s a manual process that likely includes sharing documents via email and then trying to pull all the edits and feedback together to finalize the content.
Sustainability
If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, content reuse can help. Creating digital content reduces the need for paper copies of technical documentation and the storage and processing power needed to create and manage it. Will it be a huge amount? Maybe not, but every little bit helps the environment, and we should all do our part.
6 Challenges of Using and Applying Content Reuse
Implementing a content reuse strategy has challenges; you should understand them and how to mitigate them. Here are six.
Dealing With Content Fragmentation
One big challenge with implementing a reuse strategy is that you likely have more than one team creating the documentation to which you want to apply your strategy. Customer support creates knowledge base articles; the tech docs team creates your guides; product marketing creates blogs and guides for end users, and so on.
It’s likely that each team uses a different set of processes and tools to create and manage their content, and that means the content is stored in silos within each department. A CCMS that everyone can use to create and manage their content eliminates the content silos and gives teams the right tools for content creation, editing, publishing, and – of course – reuse. Show your content teams the value a CCMS and single-sourcing bring to the company and get their buy-in early on.
Managing Versions
Technical documentation changes over time as products evolve, and managing versions of your documentation is often a challenge, even with a content reuse strategy. When multiple contributors work on a piece of documentation, how do you determine the most recent version? And who determines that?
Which leads to…
Identifying Content Ownership
How do you determine who owns the content in a content reuse strategy? Who has the right to change that content? And how are people notified about content changes?
This is where roles and permissions play an important role. You must bring together all your teams to identify roles and permissions for the content you create, especially the content you will reuse. Some teams will be happy to relinquish their responsibilities for managing content as it allows them to focus on other work, while others will be more protective. The key is to strike the right balance and clarify roles, responsibilities, and content management permissions.
Once you have defined the roles and responsibilities, create the roles and permissions in your CCMS and apply them to the content as it’s added. The CCMS should also have auditing features that track who creates and changes content so you can always tell who has done what.
Implementing Quality Control
Ensuring your content maintains a high level of quality and relevance across different uses and contexts is another challenge when you apply a content reuse strategy. You will need to define a process that regularly reviews the documentation and how/where it’s used. Part of this process should entail checking how the content is published in each channel to see if it works correctly. Your CCMS tracks the publications where content is reused, so you always know where that content is published. Plan to track the performance of your content in each channel regularly. We’ll get a bit deeper into performance monitoring later, so for now, know that you should monitor the performance of your content in each channel to determine whether customers are using it and finding it helpful.
Supporting Regional Differences
Another big challenge when you reuse content – managing the regional differences that typically occur. These differences might be in how you name or refer to your product, how it’s used, or how certain words or phrases are written.
You can manage these differences in a CCMS using the variables and filtering/profiling mentioned above.
Encouraging Adoption
Teams get used to their processes and tools, and change can be difficult. Getting adoption for a content reuse strategy and using a new tool will take careful planning and communication. The best way to win teams over to a new process and technology is by showing them how it will increase productivity, efficiency, and costs. Conduct a pilot or small project that employs content reuse to show your teams how it works and the benefits it provides.
When you are ready, implement your strategy slowly. You might start with the most used content, content related to an upcoming product release, or content generated by one team. Remember that slow and steady is better than fast and confusing.
A Step-by-Step Guide
Develop a comprehensive understanding of product knowledge documentation.
Best Practices for Content Reuse
Let’s talk about best practices for content reuse for a few minutes. There is no one right way to apply a reuse strategy, but there are important guidelines and tactics you need to put in place for a successful strategy.
- Plan your content carefully. When you look at all the content you create across the organization, you will see that some content is better suited for reuse than others. You will also identify opportunities to get started with reuse slowly. As you bring more content into your CCMS and see where reuse can happen, you can establish an ongoing content reuse strategy that won’t overwhelm your content teams.
- Part of planning is to create a content map that evolves as you work with each content team to understand what content they create and how their content development processes work, including where they publish it.
- Create a set of standardized formats, styles, and templates to help your writers create content more easily.
- Develop a taxonomy, including metadata and tags that you apply to your content to support reuse, and teach your teams to use them.
- Train your content teams, writers, and editors on how to create content that supports reuse. They must think of content not as publications but as collections of related content that need to be developed. You will also need to train reviewers on how content reuse works and what to consider when they review and approve content.
- Create a governance framework that outlines how content reuse works. Define the roles and responsibilities for your reuse strategy, including who determines what content can be reused, how to structure your CCMS content maps, who owns content, and what permissions different teams or roles have in creating, editing, and updating content.
- Create a set of policies and guidelines that ensure consistent and compliant content reuse and create a training program that shows how to put these into practice.
Measuring and Optimizing Content Reuse
We’ll wrap up this piece with a look at how you can track the performance of your content reuse strategies.
There are a few ways to measure the effectiveness of your content reuse strategy. The first set of metrics relates to how much time and cost you save. In this case, the goal is to know how much time it takes to create a piece of content without reuse and compare that to how much time it takes after you have implemented your reuse plan. The difference is your time savings. You can also start calculating cost savings by looking at how much you pay your writers and editors and your translation costs. You may need to estimate or do cost averages, but it can tell if your reuse strategy saves you money. Keep in mind the cost savings are for creating documentation; they are not related to reducing the tech docs team.
Other metrics you can look at include customer support metrics, such as the time it takes to resolve support questions, an increase in self-service use, and reduced calls/emails to support service. These metrics relate to the improved accuracy and consistency of technical information due to content reuse.
Establishing feedback loops is also important. Listening to your tech docs teams and others responsible for developing documentation and other content is very important. You want to create an environment that works for them, and continuously improving your content reuse practices requires their input.
Wrapping It Up
A content reuse strategy is critical for technical documentation teams. There is a lot of similar content across guides, knowledge base and support articles, customer portals, and support sites, and the ability to reuse content across this documentation drives efficiency in terms of time spent creating documentation and the overall costs associated with each publication. Equally important, it ensures you deliver accurate, consistent information to customers.
Implementing content reuse has many benefits, but it also comes with challenges that you need to consider and have a plan to address. Make sure you plan carefully and understand what’s involved.
We’ve covered a lot of information in this piece, so if you have questions, make sure you drop us a note, and we’ll do our best to help. And if you’d like to see content reuse in practice, request a demo of Paligo CCMS. Our team is standing by.
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