Content Strategy Karate
Defend yourself with killer content.
This blog post is part of the Trailhead content creator series. Follow The Trailblazer publication to read the entire series.
Have you heard about “content strategy”? Like “Agile,” it’s a trendy term bouncing around the cubicles of Silicon Valley and now the rest of the world. If you say in a crowded meeting, “We really need to nail down our content strategy,” heads nod and perhaps someone will bang a fist against a table and reply, “Absolutely!” But ask everyone in the room, “What is content strategy?” and you’re likely to hear crickets chirp or 20 people give 20 different definitions that all make sense in their own way.
So, What Is Content Strategy?
In their great book The Language of Content Strategy, Scott Abel and Rahel Anne Bailie define content strategy as something that:
Provides context, so that the organization’s vision can be implemented in an integrated way, to meet business goals and project objectives.
In other words, all content created by an organization should reflect its purpose and help it sell or support its products or services. To do that, a business or nonprofit must align its many content creators (writers, designers, illustrators, filmmakers, juggling clowns, and so on) to deliver consistent customer experiences. And that’s hard. That’s probably where confusion creeps in. Aligning people in different roles across a company to do anything together requires a lot of meetings, information, meetings, decisions, meetings, customer feedback, meetings, executive sponsorship, meetings. You get the idea: It’s exhausting just thinking about it!
Why Care About Content Strategy?
Since so many people have different ideas about what content strategy is and what’s the best content for their business, it’s easier to just avoid it by hiding under a desk. But avoid it at your own risk. Your business has competitors. And those competitors throw jabs and punches at you every day. Unless your business sharpens its self-defense skills, it might become a bruised and battered victim of a bullying marketplace.
But if you look at content strategy as a kind of karate to help fend off your business from bullies, you’re more likely to survive, even thrive.
Salesforce’s Content Karate
A few years ago, Salesforce’s content took a jab. Our online help, developer guides, user interface text, and the like was considered extremely useful by customers, but we heard a recurring theme: “Make it engaging.” Make technical content engaging? How do you do that?!
We could’ve ignored the feedback. We have plenty of desks to hide under. But it’s hard to claim that you’re in the business of customer success if you don’t give your customers what they want. You asked for more graphics. You asked for more videos. You asked for more interactive content like walkthroughs. We needed to sharpen our skills to give you more of the types of content you requested. We needed some content karate.
At the time, our Technology team was developing what’s now known as Lightning Experience, and our Documentation team was encouraged to experiment with new content types. We kept asking ourselves, “How do we make our content as engaging as the new customer experience?” Through trial and error, and exhaustive customer feedback (more surveys anyone?), a new content type evolved. That content type is Trailhead. It gave us our black belt.
Salesforce’s Content Strategy in Action
A black belt in karate represents the highest level of skill for a martial artist. Our Documentation team pushed and prodded itself to learn new skills and craft a strategy to give you the technical content you wanted. What’s the strategy? Simple:
Prioritize “fun-gaging” content over traditional forms of content to give customers the types of information they want to succeed.
Trailhead is fun and engaging: fun-gaging! But that doesn’t mean we ignore traditional forms of content. Online help, release notes, developer guides, and the like are critical to customer success. They exist for a reason: They work.
Traditional content provides a different business value than Trailhead. If you need to troubleshoot something in Salesforce, you probably want a short snippet of online help with a direct answer, not an interactive learning path that guides you through many aspects of a feature. When you need an answer, you need it now. Online help is like the ninja to the rescue.
Trailhead, on the other hand, is like the wise and funny friend who tells you stories about karate lessons over lunch — and lets you pick the stories you want to hear. Trailhead lets you learn about Salesforce at your own pace. It uses a mix of the engaging content you asked for to put you on your own trail of success with Salesforce.
Why did we prioritize Trailhead? Because you asked for more. When you saw our first attempts at Trailhead, you said, “Wow, that’s rad! More, pretty please!” And when a business gives customers what they want, the business usually succeeds. Based on the enthusiastic Trailhead community that popped up overnight, and the 1 million Trailhead badges earned to date, our content strategy became less of a defensive maneuver and more of a skill for killer success.
Salesforce As Sensei
A Sensei is a skilled teacher in martial arts. He or she is a practitioner who learned from experience to make karate easier for you to learn. Learn from Salesforce’s content strategy. Save yourself from meetings, decisions, meetings, customer feedback, meetings, executive sponsorship, and, yes … meetings. So you can save the most valuable thing of all: time.
Learn from Salesforce’s experience and customer feedback. Learn from our smashing success with Trailhead.
Ask yourself what types of engaging content you can create for your customers to help them thrive, and even love you.
You don’t have to have a black belt in content to give customers what they want. But if you don’t practice a little content strategy karate, don’t expect any kudos from your customers either.
Interested in learning more? Come to our session at Dreamforce and learn how to write the Trailhead way.
How to Write the Trailhead Way
- Tuesday, October 4; 2:30–2:50pm PT
- Moscone West, Admin Meadow Theater
Can’t make it in-person? The session won’t be streamed, but we’ll be posting the materials afterward on the Success Community in the Trailhead group.
