TNT’s ‘Content Factory’ Delivers Delicious Content Snacks

According to Adobe’s white paper, 88% of businesses don’t think their customer experience is as good as it should be. Centralised content production can help change the picture.

According to Adobe’s recent white paper, “Mass Producing Deliciousness,” 84% of businesses recognise that they need to create more content. At the same time, some 88% don’t think their customer experience is as good as it should be, yet less than half, 41%, of those businesses surveyed have a content strategy in place.

What’s holding them back? As we know, good content not only provides value to the viewer, it answers their questions, makes it easy for them to do X, and builds their confidence.

But it’s also expected to be personalised, a good cultural fit, cross-channel, and, above all, consistent. And that requires investment, a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by respondents to the 2016 Adobe Digital Marketing Survey. It revealed that almost 90% of respondents ranked creating a connected experience as a top priority and were focusing on having the right tools to meet customers where they are at any given moment.

Tools are important, but a more solid bet to maximise investment is on the trifecta of people and process enabled by technology. This is what we set out to achieve through our own journey at TNT towards a content centre of excellence—something we refer to as “the content factory”—an investment that has allowed us to generate more content, more quickly, and more consistently.

Content Snacks

Creating content is not cheap, especially when you pay between 15 cents and 20 cents per word per language to translate it. On top of this, there are the internal costs for teams to manage the localisation process.

Without a content strategy in place, content production is harder to prioritise. Instead of trying to inhale a flood of content requests, prioritising on the fly, and investing a lot of resources, take a step back.

Your content strategy should involve taking a more thoughtful look at content, including its purpose, scope, use, and reuse. Remember every content reuse increases the content assets value and, at the same time, decreases the asset creation cost.

So especially if you have budget constraints, you need to get more mileage out of the content you create. Stop thinking of pages as units of content. See tasks as units of content. Andreas Blumauer, product architect at PoolParty, developed a semantic search platform to unlock the meaning of content through graph-based metadata. He said: “People actually do not search for documents, but rather for facts and other chunks of information to bundle them up and provide answers to concrete questions.”

Building a web page based on a page design is like starting from the outside and working in. As Sara Wachter-Boettcher, the author of “Content Everywhere,” states, start with the customer need and the task at hand, and then construct smaller units of content into “meaningful modular chunks that are ready to travel” (as illustrated with our packing examples here).

Laying The Groundwork

As customers jump channels and screens, and data-driven teams start to gather more and more user insights, the need to scale content production will become imperative. You will need to find the most efficient way to solve growing customer needs for answers or information, regardless of the channel where the content-viewer interaction takes place. Why not have a more proactive approach? Invest upfront production effort to create content already ready for any channel.

Being able to actually execute on a snackable content strategy requires a combination of design and architectural and technical knowledge. Based on the inventory of the channels you want to reach, engage the UX team to lay the groundwork for a sound design system—one that is flexible and can underpin cross-channel personalisation. One that appreciates the physical requirements content must meet to “enter” each channel. Like a pattern library that includes how the layout and meaning of a content snack squeeze into different channels. An atomic-style guide can house the different patterns and be used to promote cross-channel consistency and a shared common vocabulary across the teams.

As the content factory adapts to a more complex total content landscape across two brands, I will continue to advocate the benefits of centralised content production on customer experience and insist content be treated as a business asset—ideally, convincing content requesters to break free of imagining a single context where their content needs to live.