Step up your digital and content maturity

David Klement, Michael Andrews

17 minutes

0% complete

Improving content or digital maturity is like a game – you solve one level of problems, acquire new experience, and level up to solve the more complicated problems using the new skill set you have. That gives you more experience, you can level up further, get more mature…In this final lesson, you’ll get tips on how to gain that experience to level up your maturity.

Level up your game

Your role in the maturing process depends on where you are in the organization. If you’re in a team, start piloting a new process in the team. If it works, share your expertise, and it’ll spread throughout the organization. If you’re in a leadership position, go from the top to bottom. Design a new process, document it, train your teams, and teach them why the process is better. If it makes sense to them, they’ll adopt it, and it’ll get standardized and automated. No matter which way you choose, it’s important that everybody in the company uses the same systems. If they don’t, it’s much harder to push the changes that lead to the maturity of your organization. Watch the video below to discover different approaches to improving maturity.

Levels of maturity

As there are dimensions of maturity, there are also levels of maturity. The lowest level means you’re just fixing obvious problems. The higher levels are about creating systematic solutions, automating the solutions, and so on. The highest level is being an innovator and trendsetter in the realm of digital and content operations. Teams in your organization may be on different maturity levels. If that’s your case, try to get your teams to the same level to avoid issues. When some teams are more mature than others, it creates bottlenecks, and the less mature teams pull down the rest of the organization. Watch the video to learn how to level up your teams.

Formulate your content strategy

It’s crucial to have a content strategy defined ideally before you start creating your content. Base your content strategy on the long-term goals of your organization. It’s vital that everyone’s clear on what’s the goal of the content they create. Following a content strategy aligned with your organization’s goals helps you create content that’s in line with what your organization is trying to achieve. It’s also essential to have policies in place that ensure you update existing content and sunset content that’s no longer relevant to your customers. Watch the short presentation about the decision-making process behind creating a content strategy.

Further tips to help you mature

Here are some further tips you can apply based on the issues you’ve identified in your organization.

Use one CMS as a single source of truth (SSoT) instead of multiple mutually incompatible systems.The perks of having a single CMS:

Better collaboration among teams and reusing content
Unified workflow that’s transparent throughout the organization
Onboarding new hires is immensely easier, faster, and cheaper

As we’ve stressed in the section above, it’s vital to have a content strategy. It helps you align your content with your organization’s goals, work more efficiently, and provide your customers with unified up-to-date content.

Involve content teams when you’re crafting your content strategy, as well as your content model. They should have their say in the content strategy and model planning because it impacts their work the most.Involve also developers, but never leave content modeling solely to them. Developers tend to see content modeling as designing database tables, and it usually doesn’t end well.

Create organization-wide content guidelines. Usually, content rules are kept per team and passed by word of mouth. There are a few good reasons to make the guidelines well-documented and unified:

Speak to your customers as one company, using unified terminology, voice, and tone.
Easily link existing pieces of content together.
Make onboarding new hires easier and faster.

Content briefs provide guidance for content creators so that they create what’s expected of them. With content briefs, the content team faces fewer content rewrites and produces more consistent content. Briefs also make collaboration among teams easier, since various non-content teams can use briefs for content suggestions or requests.A content brief should be based on customer needs research, and it should set expectations:

Suggested title, keywords, and length
Topic description
Target persona
Questions that customers ask about the topic
Motivation

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