Telling the Right Story: Proving the Business Value of Content

By Alyson Riley | Member, Andrea L. Ames | Fellow, and Eileen Jones

What makes a story true? True stories are provable; they are fact, not fiction. And the best true stories resonate because the facts speak to what matters most. Information professionals tell great stories about their work. We chronicle the ways that we drive excellent information experiences, increase customer satisfaction, reduce noise on the interwebs, boost organizational effectiveness, and support business strategy. Great information professionals enhance their storytelling with proof points—we talk about things like page hits, bounce rates, heuristic evaluations, audits, inventories, efficiency in creating and managing content, and the like. These are great facts, they make our stories true, and they resonate well with user experience and information professionals. We tell great, true stories—but are we telling the right story for the right audience?

We don’t think so. Our community needs to tell a different and better story about content for a business audience—those who hold the purse strings. Many of our great stories are missing that which matters most to executives: a direct tie to the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that drive the broader business. Most of us are working in environments with scarce resources and funding challenges; most of our organizations can no longer afford initiatives perceived as “nice to have.” Web metrics, scorecard results, content reuse metrics, and other kinds of data are important, but if we cannot connect that work to things like revenue streams and successful conversions, ultimately, our work is at risk. Even high-value initiatives risk early retirement if they cannot prove a direct connection to a company’s bottom line.

Spoiler alert! For many information professionals, the core ideas in this article will seem like common sense—they sure seem like common sense to us. When we talk to information professionals, we know that we’re talking to technical communicators across all roles and titles, including content strategists, information developers, technical writers, and information experience designers, among others—information people with a sixth sense about content. The sixth sense that we have about the value of content and the information experience is what makes us exceptional at designing effective content strategy. However, that sixth sense is not one that everyone shares. The point of this article is that we need to move away from our intuition-based mode of operation to a more data-driven model. Although we respect and rely on Web metrics to do content strategy work, we believe that even those Web metrics fundamentally don’t address business KPIs like revenue streams and ROI.

This is a transformation that we’re driving at IBM. Learning to tell the right story about our work—in a language that makes the story true for a business audience—is a tough but crucial transformation for us. And we’re still learning. In this article, we share some of our discoveries, but also throw down an industry-wide call to action. Our industry as a whole is starved for data that prove the business value of content—particularly post-sales technical content—using facts that resonate with our colleagues in business strategy, finance, sales, product management, and marketing. This is more than becoming Web metrics mavens. To put it bluntly, this means finding, proving, and sharing the link between content and revenue (or whatever measurement matters most to your organization).

True Stories About Content

Our work to transform the way that our business thinks about content began by establishing some key truths about the nature of content. We had to articulate what it is about content that makes it such a precious business asset before we could begin to build a business case for change. Consider the following six truths about content.

Truth #1: Content is a challenge

Poor-quality information experiences and ineffective content strategies cost our clients, our stakeholders in our organizations, and us. Those costs take the form of time, money, frustration, and poor decision-making.

Researchers Susan Feldman and Chris Sherman have analyzed the impact of these information-related costs in the behavior of knowledge workers—people who work primarily with knowledge products, such as software engineers, scientists, architects, and us! Citing aggregate findings from studies conducted by IDC, the Working Council of CIOs, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the Ford Motor Company, and Reuters, Feldman and Sherman found that:

• Knowledge workers spend up to 35% of their time looking for the information they need (Feldman).
• Knowledge workers find what they need less than 50% of the time (Feldman).
• Knowledge workers spend 90% of the time it takes to create new reports in recreating information that already exists (Feldman).
• Knowledge workers spend 15–25% of their time on nonproductive information activities (Feldman and Sherman).

With this data in hand, Feldman and Sherman delved deeper into the problem space by developing a fictitious company through which to analyze the opportunity cost of these information-related challenges. Their fictitious enterprise employs 1,000 knowledge workers, each with a salary of $80,000 plus benefits. Using this scenario, Feldman and Sherman discovered that “an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes at least $2.5 to $3.5 million per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found. The opportunity cost to the enterprise is even greater, with potential additional revenue exceeding $15 million annually.” Furthermore, Feldman and Sherman observe that:

Other unpredictable costs to the organization include the cost of poor decisions, the cost in frustration and job satisfaction of knowledge workers, and the cost in sales due to inability to provide information to customers. …
Time is also a factor. If information is not located online, employees resort to interrupting their colleagues to ask for help or information. All of these factors are hard to quantify, but they all add to the cost burden incurred through poor information finding.

Spira and Goldes add to this story when they record that a Basex survey of over 1,000 knowledge workers found that as a result of information-related interruptions those workers (us!) lose “an average of 2.1 hours per day” that together cost the U.S. economy $588 billion per year.

Truth #2: Content is an opportunity

A wise person once observed that “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” (Some have attributed this quote to Thomas Edison, but the jury’s still out on that.) We encourage fellow information professionals to don overalls and prepare for some good work, because the challenges that we described in Content Truth #1 come with a silver lining in the form of huge opportunity.

Consider the nature of this opportunity by observing the role that technical content plays in the buyer’s journey from apathy to sale:

• Buyers of technology spend 21% of the buying cycle talking to sales people and more than 55% using information (Albee, 2011).
• Buyers of technology report that interacting with technical content is the second-most-important pre-sales activity that they do (Hershey).
• Buyers of industrial products report that “the only information more highly influential than pricing was detailed product information and specifications” (ThomasNet).
• Buyers in general make buying decisions in which up to 70% of the buying decision is made based on “information he or she finds online well before a salesperson has a chance to get involved” (Albee, citing a Selling Power presentation at the 2011 Sales 2.0 Conference available at http://bit.ly/Z08RyM).
• Buyers in general make over 45% of the buying decision “before [the] buyer even says hello to your [sales representative]” (Gerard, 18 March 2013).

These data show us what many in the field are now coming to understand, at least initially: “IT buyers find online search and the vendor website more valuable sources of buying information than face-to-face conversations” (Schaub, 2011). This means that information has become a key agent in the process of generating revenue:

The buyer has taken control of the purchasing process; it’s a refrain heard often in marketing and sales channels. Information has become ubiquitous…. No longer are companies and their salespeople the gatekeepers that must be sought out for help to assuage curiosity, reveal solutions to problems, build business cases and select a short list of vendors to pursue. The informational gatekeepers are now represented by search engines, social networks and perceptions of relevance (Albee, 2012).

To be clear, we’re not just talking about content specifically designed for pre-sales. On the contrary, we’re talking about all content—including post-sales technical content. We’re talking about all content in the ecosystem that grows around a product in the public marketplace. Indeed, Fulkerson observes that “Post-sales information generates over 50% of viable sales leads” (emphasis ours). Similarly, IDC’s 2012 Buyer Experience study (cited by Schaub 2012) shows that “buyers prefer information sources that are value rich (thus buyers’ [first] preferred information source is technical experts) and expedient (buyers’ [second] preferred information source is marketing content).”

Thus content represents opportunity to drive the things that matter most to our companies: sales. Our work (get out those overalls!) is to design and deliver content that performs well against our companies’ business strategy, values, and KPIs—and relentlessly gather the data to prove it. We’re only starting to have the data to tell this story.

Truth #3: The client experience is not limited to the design of the product user interface

A “client” is an individual who buys or uses—or both—the product, solution, or service about which you create and deliver content. From a content perspective, it is important to think about the client experience rather than just the user experience, as the client experience more accurately reflects all the places in which your buyer or user has contact with your content. From a client’s point of view, the client experience spans every phase of the overarching lifecycle of product purchasing and use: evaluate, buy, deploy, use, manage, support, troubleshoot, and maintain.

Product user interfaces typically do not address each of those lifecycle phases as there are tasks in various phases that users complete outside of a product user interface. What fills in those gaps? What maintains the integrity of the brand before the buyer or user ever touches the actual product? Content. Our users touch content in every phase of the lifecycle. In fact, content connects each phase of that lifecycle. And each phase is an opportunity in which content can be leveraged to build awareness of our clients’ business problems and our company’s solutions, to generate client interest in our company’s capabilities, to gain visibility and mindshare for our portfolio of offerings, to grow loyalty, to generate sales leads, and to build community. Viewed from this perspective, content does more than shape the user’s end-to-end experience and their perceptions of our brand. Content is the client experience, and it’s a critical and inextricable aspect of the product user experience.

A postscript: We also believe strongly that our interaction and visual design colleagues should be focused on client interactions outside of the immediate product user interface for the same reasons, and thankfully some of them are! Clients have many non-product based interactions with our companies—in particular during today’s popular, self-driven, online processes for evaluation, purchasing, and support. These non-product, user-interface-based interactions can make or break customer relationships and loyalty. Wherever this broader focus on clients’ non-product based interaction is not happening in the interaction and visual design, content fills in the gaps to pay an even more important and primary role to build and maintain those client-company relationships.

Truth #4: Content is a catalyst for purchase decisions

We’ve got the beginnings of a strong link between content and what matters most in the marketplace, and we’ve established a definition of “client” and “client experience.” Let’s further explore the idea that content is the client experience by asserting that content is a catalyst that influences (dare we say it, that drives?) every aspect of product purchase and use. We don’t expect much argument about this assertion from a “use” perspective, but “purchase” is likely a new dimension of the argument for many in the field of technical communication. As a result, we’d like to talk about all of the things that we know about today’s typical client purchase process. Consider Figure 1:

Figure 1: Content as catalyst in the lifecycle of a purchase

 

In this image, the client interacts with content—from both official and organic sources—at every phase in the purchase process. From the early stages of product awareness and interest, through product evaluation and purchase, our clients use company- and social-authored content and have the potential to contribute content back to the content ecosystem. Properly cultivated, all of this content can drive and shape action throughout the lifecycle of product purchasing. A client’s product use, and the use of content during product use, also shapes purchasing—both that client’s future buying habits and her influence of other, potential buyers through creation of her own content about her experiences with the product. But don’t take our word for it. The latest industry research proves our points.

Base One’s BuyerSphere 2012 report tells us that “If you want to influence a buying decision you need to start by asking where buyers go for information—because 87% of buyers go out and look for advice before choosing.” Indeed, “buyers are constantly online,” notes another researcher. Recall what Schaub told us earlier: IT buyers find searching for online information and content on vendor websites “more valuable sources of buying information than face-to-face conversations” (Schaub, 2011). The BuyerSphere 2012 report paints a fairly detailed picture of the ways in which business purchasers use information as part of the sales cycle. For example, the BuyerSphere research shows that buyers consider word of mouth and Web searches together to be both the most frequently used and the most useful sources of information when researching a potential purchase. Buyers rated word of mouth most useful and said that they conducted Web searches more frequently than engaging in word-of-mouth interactions.

In general, and with good reason, technical communicators tend to focus on the “install-use-troubleshoot” aspects of a product. However, the research shows that technical content is a powerful driver across the entire purchasing and product-use lifecycle, including the buy phase. In the knowledge economy, technical content is as strategic a business asset, and as closely connected to revenue streams and the sales cycle, as any marketing content designed specifically for pre-sales contexts.

Web searches are fairly self-explanatory, but we should frame this “word-of-mouth” concept against new technologies. To clarify, the BuyerSphere 2012 report tells us that buyers use social media as their “word-of-mouth” activity only 21% of the time (56% said that they employ “other” word-of-mouth methods). 21% isn’t a very big number, but let’s break it down even further. Buyers aged 30 years old or less actually rated social media more useful than any other word-of-mouth methods, reporting that they use social media to find information 49% of the time. Compare that to 50- to 60-year-old buyers who do so 18% of the time. As the BuyerSphere report puts it, to buyers age 30 or younger, “[social media] is word of mouth!” (emphasis ours). And how is all of this social media being used? According to BuyerSphere 2012, 67% of buyers use community sites to find or link to “published information,” and 60% of buyers use LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (analyzed in aggregate) in similar ways.

IDC research, while not focused on social media specifically, confirms the importance to the buyer’s journey of “digital” information in all its forms. In its “Customer Creation Framework,” IDC shows that the initial exploration phase of the buyer’s journey begins with “digital dialogue” in which the “Internet-empowered buyer” seeks answers to their technical questions about a product or service (Schaub, 2012).

Other researchers tie in social media as well. ThomasNet’s research tells us that buyers use social media to research products and services; more specifically, 25% of industrial buyers use LinkedIn as part of their purchase process. ThomasNet quotes one buyer who said, “Social media has made it easier to see more about the services and tools available and help us to make our purchases.” Another buyer in the ThomasNet social media study reported that the “Opinions of others count … . [they] nearly always save steps and help to avoid pitfalls others may have experienced or likewise, [achieve] benefits they have had.”

So let’s net this out. Web searches are critical to the buying process. Word of mouth, increasingly enabled by social media, is critical to the buying process. The motivating force behind buyers’ Web searches and social media use is to find content in order to make decisions and take action. Content is a catalyst for action at every phase of the product purchase-and-use lifecycle and—likely most important for our business colleagues—it is a becoming an ever-more-critical catalyst for actual buying decisions and behavior.

Truth #5: Content does not stand alone

Content exists in an ecosystem that requires conscious care, as well as the partnership of many players. To address content strategy challenges, we must take a systems-thinking approach to growing and encouraging the health of the entire content ecosystem—not just the effectiveness of individual content piece-parts. We must recognize that the healthiest content ecosystems feature client-centered content that is interconnected and interdependent. Healthy content ecosystems feature content objects that work together to support clients’ business goals.

At IBM, we envision our content ecosystem as having three primary components that span the continuum of pre- and post-sales content:

1. Official IBM content that is embedded in our products’ user interfaces or that stands alone on the Web or on client intranets.
2. Supplemental IBM content that complements official content with case studies, reference implementations, education, demos, presentations, and best practices.
3. Social content, including collaborative content that grows out of IBM-sponsored communities, as well as completely organic content found in places like LinkedIn and Twitter.

An effective content strategy must address a content ecosystem that is alive—if you’re using social media effectively, your content ecosystem and the content itself is dynamic, constantly evolving. The ecosystem needs cultivation to ensure that high-value content is highly visible: “content … must be of high value and relevance in an increasingly crowded (and noisy) environment” (Gerard, 5 March 2013).

Truth #6: Successful products depend on content

Product information experience designers—information professionals who focus on the content ecosystem and experience that surrounds products—know that content is embedded in product user interfaces (UIs). Content is:

• The labels and text that appears within windows and panels
• The power behind the progression of wizards and advisors
• The heart of the error and informational messages that alert users to significant events and consequences
• The help systems that accompany the user interface and assist the user in manipulating features and functions to achieve desired outcomes
• The social and community-based content that many products are beginning to embed directly in the primary user interface

In addition to all of this product-embedded content, many products also link to additional content—things like education, samples, examples, patterns, best practices, and how-tos that span products or interfaces. When these links are presented in the product’s UI, the user perceives this additional content as part of the user interface; though not hard-coded into the product interface, the linking relationship causes the user to experience the stand-alone content as part of the product.

When talking about products we are by nature also talking about content, whether we intend to or not. In fact, if we want to get philosophical about it, most things that interest humans can be expressed as content, interaction, or both. Take the example of photography, simplified for our purposes. Is taking a good picture something you know about, something you do, or a combination of both? The answer depends on who you are. If you are an art critic, you might know enough about photography to evaluate it but not be able to create a compelling image yourself. If you want to become a professional photographer, you need to both know about the elements of composition, for example, and have mastered the technical aspects of capturing an image properly. If you are working in government licensing office for motorized vehicles, you may just want to take the pictures of busy license applicants as quickly as possible.

Product interfaces and content are designed in much the same way:

• We research target user personas, goals, and tasks
• We synthesize user data with product strategy to create usable, goal-oriented solutions that meet business requirements
• We validate and iterate with stakeholders

Product interaction designers, visual designers, and information experience designers should work together to determine whether ideas and tasks are best expressed as interaction (“do”), content (“know”), or both. Sometimes a simple programmatic interaction could replace pages of text and, in so doing, delight the user with function that eliminates work. Sometimes a user must complete a task in a product user interface that looks simple but that requires a wealth of knowledge in order to make the best decision. See our point?

Many of our business colleagues in product design, development, and management buy in to the value of user experience design. (You can thank your iPod for that—there’s lots we could say about the ways that consumer products have influenced all kinds of buyers, including IT buyers.) We need to change our business counterparts’ vision of the meaning of the user experience in the context of product design, development, and management. User experience design work that focuses solely on interaction—or even interaction and visual design—and fails to address the content ecosystem is only telling part of the story. The most successful products employ a smart combination of things that are about “knowing” (content) with things that are about “doing” (interaction). We cannot separate content from our products. By extension, we cannot separate content from product design, development, and management. Content strategy must be a part of product planning and go-to-market activities from beginning to end; product development and the supporting business structures, processes, and artifacts must embrace content strategy as key to their success.

Better True Stories About Content

Having clarified the nature and value of content, we at IBM set out to tell a story that would inspire our business colleagues to invest in new content strategy initiatives. As information professionals, we are trained to think “outside-in” about our audiences and their content needs; we know the impact of high-value, high-quality content in the total information experience. But as we talk about the business value of content within IBM, it is clear that we have not done a good job of telling the right story for our audience. It is not apparent that all of our business colleagues across IBM understand the business value of content and, at the time we started this journey, it was unclear whether our customers did either in the sense that we couldn’t prove it. This is what we want to understand, and we sought out proof to validate our theory: that content and an effective end-to-end information experience is very important to IBM clients and, as a result, it should be very important to IBM.

In 2010, we launched a simple Web survey for IBM clients and prospective clients, advertised and accessible from our primary delivery vehicles for technical product information. Because of its location, the survey targeted the very people who actively use our post-sales technical product information. In addition to a handful of questions about their roles, we asked survey-takers a single crucial question. We asked them, “For the products and solutions that you use in your job, rate the importance of high-quality technical information” on the following items:

1. Their initial purchase decisions
2. Their perception of product quality
3. Their overall satisfaction with the product
4. Their perception of the company that produced the technical information

And the results flowed in. At the time of this writing, we have data from 179 survey respondents (none of whom are IBM employees) who tell us this:

• 89.8% say that high-quality technical information is either important or very important to their purchase decisions
• 97.2% say that high-quality technical information is either important or very important to their perceptions of product quality
• 93.8% say that high-quality technical information is either important or very important to their product satisfaction
• 97.2% say that high-quality technical information is either important or very important to their perceptions of the company who produced the information

Note the number of survey respondents who answered “very important” in the summary of our survey data below:

Figure 2. Results of IBM “Importance of High-Quality Technical Information” Survey

 

Finally we had a start on collecting the data to articulate our story—the right story—to a business audience. We had metrics that matter in the marketplace:

• Purchase decisions—our direct link to the revenue stream
• Product quality—our direct link to customer loyalty
• Product satisfaction—our direct link to ROI
• Company perception—our direct link to mindshare

In the focus groups that followed, we discovered further validation—validation that requires a brief IBM history lesson to put into context. In IBM’s early years, professional technical communicators lived within product development organizations and had the sole mission to create official product documentation. Over time, because of the sheer size of IBM and the ease of publishing online, everyone can be an author. Silos of content creators blossomed across our various brands and business units (product documentation teams, service and support teams, technical sales, training, and so on). In talking with clients, we heard that the inconsistencies in content produced in different corners of the corporation had a profound impact on their success. Our customers told us without fail that high-quality technical information is important to them, and the additional validation we received concerned the fact that our customers don’t care and shouldn’t be aware of which silo produced the information. They said they wanted a “one IBM” information experience. We knew this instinctively, but we hadn’t properly collected and analyzed the direct customer feedback or data to back up that professional intuition.

In the final analysis, these clients told us that they want and need better product consumability, and that content is a critical component of product consumability. Across our survey data and focus groups, our clients confirmed that content is a strategic business asset.

Best True Stories About Content—Join Us!

We’re learning to tell a better story about content. We did the work to equip ourselves with the right data—that is, metrics that go beyond implied value to prove direct ties between content and our company’s bottom line. As a result, we are able to tell a story that resonates significantly better—and more valuably for us—across our company. The broader IBM business listens to clients and more and more of the business units within the company are declaring high-quality content to be a business imperative. One key change that we’ve seen in response to better story-telling about content involves a new position inside IBM. Our executives created the role of client information quality executive with a “total information experience” mission. This “total information experience” mission is now advancing at IBM through the efforts of technical communicators within traditional documentation roles. It’s also advancing thanks to those who create content in other business units and who know the value of high-quality content and the importance of the information experience to business objectives. Who better than content people to drive a content-centric revolution? Who better than information professionals to drive innovative and effective total information experiences?

Our learning process centered on discovering what matters most—to our clients and to the IBM business. In many ways this is about time-tested audience analysis and the principles of outside-in design, but it goes beyond that. For us, this process involved learning new skills: how to speak the language of business and how to identify metrics that really matter—not just buzzwords that sound good on the surface but fundamentally fail to contribute to the bottom line.

We’ve still got a long way to go—in our organization and probably yours. Now we ask the technical communication industry to join us in this transformation. The fact is that there’s just not a lot of data out there about the business value of content and the total information experience. Our entire industry needs to ensure that we collect the right data and conduct meaningful analysis to tell the best story. The best story about content is one that is true, that is based on core business metrics, and that inspires our colleagues in product design, development, management, finance, sales, and more with a vision for information experiences of the future that make a profound difference in the marketplace. Join us on the journey toward proving the business value of content. Imagine what we can accomplish together to transform our business colleagues into believers in the business value of content! Imagine what we can accomplish once everyone believes! 

 

ALYSON RILEY’s mother swears that her first word was actually a complete sentence, and she began her career as an information architect shortly thereafter by developing organization schemes for her toy dinosaurs and horses. Alyson is passionate about the value of content in her work as a senior content strategist and information architect on IBM’s corporate Total Information Experience team. Alyson serves as the corporate lead for IBM’s information architecture council, drives IBM’s corporate-level efforts to define the next generation of strategy for technical content, and consults with IBM content teams worldwide to develop effective content strategies. Alyson co-authors with Andrea Ames “The Strategic IA” column for Intercom magazine. You can follow Alyson on Twitter @ak_riley or find her on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/alysonriley).

ANDREA L. AMES is an information experience strategist, architect, and designer at IBM, and she designed, coordinates, and teaches for UCSC in Silicon Valley technical writing and communication program. Her mantras are “I don’t write doc; I solve user and business problems”; “installation is not a user goal”; and “think more, write less!” She is Fellow and past president (2004–2005) of STC and a distinguished engineer of ACM (the first technical communicator to achieve this distinction). She has published two award-winning technical books and more than 50 papers and articles and speaks regularly at conferences and professional meetings around the world. Follow her on Twitter @aames or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/andreaames), and check out her blog (http://thinkmorewriteless.wordpress.com).

EILEEN JONES is IBM’s client information quality executive and the director of IBM information development (ID). In this role, Eileen is responsible at the corporate level for the quality of IBM’s client-facing information and IBM’s Total Information Experience (TIE) strategy. She directs the team responsible for designing the IBM information experience, leading the IBM content community, developing IBM’s content standards, enabling the community of IBM content producers with education and collateral, delivering TIE and ID tools and technologies, providing content development infrastructure and services, and providing technical leadership to the development of the Oasis DITA standard. Eileen leads the total information experience transformation in IBM with an outside-in focus on content as a strategic business asset. Eileen specializes in driving organizational cohesiveness, efficiency, effectiveness, and strategic alignment. Connect with Eileen on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/eileenbjones).

 

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