1. Planning a Global Content Strategy
Chip Gettinger
VP, Global Solutions Consulting, SDL
@cgettinger

2. Agenda Global content strategy model Why develop? Starting your own
Benefits and customer stories
Questions and answers

3. Global content strategy model
Provides both customer experience and company efficiency benefits
Alignment of content creation and localization processes
Still emerging in many organizations
Achievable lower costs, increased efficiency and faster time to global markets
“Brand Consistency Is The Top Benefit Of A Global Content Operating Model”
Global content operating models are not yet the norm. Six out of 10 enterprises currently organize websites by country/region (39%) or business unit (20%). Only 19% reported using a centralized operating model to organize and operate their sites, and the remaining either use a mix of organizational models or organize some other way. The study showed that regardless of the number of languages that need to be supported, companies see value in a global content operating model.
A global content operating model provides both customer experience and efficiency benefits. The most realized or anticipated benefit of implementing a global content operating model is better brand consistency (see Figure 7). In addition, a third of enterprises expect a global content operating model to improve customer experience, and 24% anticipate faster experience improvements. Qualitative interviews supported this finding, as one respondent stated, “The end goal is to provide a great customer experience.”

4. “The reason people hire a content strategist is that people can’t find anything.”
Rahel Anne Bailie Intentional Design

5. Evolution and challenge of global content
Poor user content, can’t find relevant information
Available in English only
Localized by different regional stakeholders
Inconsistent and outdated information and model
Lack of centralized translation management
Higher costs, delays and confused customers

6. Why develop a global content strategy?

7. Global content strategy: who benefits?
Make it Better for Your Company
Scalability
Content agility
Ease of deployment
Search Engine Optimization
Eliminate Redundancy
Security improvements
Analytics
Make it Better for Customers
Fast results!
Consistency and current
Available in their language
Retrievability
Single point of truth
Understanding their needs
…In that we were totally selfish! A majority of our requirement were internally focused. “Me, me, me.”
What about the customer? Why was the customer not at the forefront of our thinking?
At VMware, that might be because we are a development-driven organization and not a customer-driven organization. We are comfortable taking internally produced specifications and documenting them. We need to improve the way that we learn about business goals, anticipate customer behavior, and achieve customer satisfaction.
This was a wake up call for us to reexamine our mission and the way that we deliver information.

8. Characteristics of a customer-focused organization
Development Focused
Customer Focused
Content Strategy
Document product specification
Document business scenarios and customer needs
Content
Focus on product tasks
Focus on answers and real-world solutions
Responsiveness
Respond to development demands
Relevant to customer usage and feedback
Freshness
Publish on product cycles
Frequent updates to deliver timely information
Once we had a clear mission and a focus around serving customer, we needed to shift our thinking from being accountable to product developers to being accountable to customers.
Accountability
Accountable to product teams
Accountable to customers

9. Enterprise global content operating model
Nineteen Percent Of Enterprises Have A Global Content Operating Model; 48% Are Moving Toward This Within 24 Months

10. Starting your global content strategy
Recommendations and best practices

11. Key recommendations
Involve key stakeholders with your global content strategy.
Standardize and centralize your content tools.
Plan flexible content governance.
Standardize and centralize your web and content tools. To remove technical barriers to success, it’s important to begin consolidating your toolkit for web experiences and content operations, including the web content management system and language translation tools. This will also compel the right discussion about where budgets, staff, and process responsibility lies as localization professionals work to up-level their role and responsibility in the organization.
Ensure a global content strategy before localizing. Successful digital content owners tell us that before they start translating, they take a step back to establish the strategy. Determine your international fallback language — often English with as few idioms as possible — and then create language classes as they relate to the business value of the region or audience.
Plan flexible content-ops governance. Successful brand strategists tell us they accept the fact that they don’t know everything about local preferences. With this admission, these leaders bake flexibility into their global content operations, which provides local marketers and agencies with the appropriate controls to add value and local relevance.

12. Key recommendations
Standardize the integration to streamline localization processes.
Iterate toward simplicity, but recognize you may never get there.
Embrace a portfolio of localization approaches.
Embrace a portfolio of localization solutions. Translation can be expensive. At global scale, these costs can metastasize. Smart digital leaders tell us they focus top-tier human translation efforts on high-value or sensitive content, whereas lower-value content or less strategic regions receive machine translation support. Nuanced content of mixed value or sensitivity commonly receives a mix or machine translation first, with human linguist quality controls. All of these models combine to form a healthy mix of cost- and time-effective localization, especially as machine translation gains intelligence and capability, taking on more labor-intensive activity.
Standardize the integration to streamline localization processes. The best laid plans of many organizations go awry due to project-level implementation shortcuts. The most successful global organizations instead up-level these projects to a product-centric focus that drives repeatability and reuse. Translation memory and translation management systems allow for a flexible “middleware” layer to act as the buffer between legacy content repositories and a myriad of language services.
Iterate toward simplicity, but recognize you may never get there. Most organizations are in a perpetual state of cost-cutting by streamlining the number of language service providers they work with. Unfortunately, translation initiatives sprout like mushrooms in the dark. Mature organizations proactively source relationships with translation specialists and establish flexible technologies, so the business is protected by guardrails but enabled with tools that can jumpstart their initiatives.

13. What you can do today Evaluate your focus
Examine customer goals – missing metrics?
Content lifecycle analysis
Content optimization and minimization
Move to content components, migrate from documents
Findability and optimize search
Metadata and taxonomy sharing
Translation and terminology centralization

14. Benefits of a global content strategy
Customer success stories

15. Hach

16. VMware – Complete new content design
Consider bringing in a graphic or UI designer. First impressions matter. The way customer perceive your information could matter more than the actual information you provide.

17. Content strategy benefits for users
How much time do you spend each day looking for information?
Survey before and after implementing a content strategy.
“How much time are you spending each day looking for information”
In legacy system nearly 65% of those surveyed were spending more than an hour each day trying to find answers. – the blue bar on the far right
With a content strategy, the same users surveyed responded that nearly 50% were only spending a few minutes each day trying to find answers. – the red bar on the left
That’s gave their users back at least 45 minutes a day in productivity for hundreds of employees.
US Insurance Company Service and Claims Support Desk

18. Average Time to Complete Tasks
ACI Worldwide Results
Average time to complete tasks reduced by more than one minute
Percent of tasks completed successfully increased by 13%
Average Time to Complete Tasks
Old help
Uplifted help

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20. Thank you!
Questions & Answers