Last year, I spoke with a Marketing Director who spent two hours updating a product description on her company’s website. In the end, she had spent her time updating a version of the content that would be used for only a short period of time and that would then be overwritten by someone else. In total, there were 47 browser tabs open as she worked to update the content of a single product description. It turned out that the description needed to be updated on the company’s website, a partner portal, the company’s support knowledge base, 3 regional micro sites, and a number of in app tool tips.
It rapidly went from being quite amusing to being pathetic.
The real problem isn’t content. It’s copies of content.
The root of the problem is not the content. It is the copies of the content. As you distribute your content across different channels, every copy of the content becomes a new liability waiting to happen. As people edit their copy of the content, the differences will become visible to customers on support portals and in product UIs. Customers may not even know which version to trust.
Tracking and updating distributed content is a huge pain. Try to keep all copies of a piece of content in sync and you quickly realize that it is a lot like trying to keep a candle lit in the rain with your bare hands. It will fail.
This problem is structural and currently is being masked as a content quality problem. More documentation. More reviews. More approvals. More sign-offs in a spreadsheet.
Where things tend to fall apart
These aren’t typical errors. This isn’t a problem that can be solved by adding more people or more reviews. But that’s not how most mid-sized companies are organized. They function as a large number of independent channels, and errors will just keep piling up until one of them has a particularly large impact.
- Product specs get updated in the CMS, but nobody touches the PDF that lives on the support portal
- The knowledge base article was written in 2021 and still references a feature that was renamed
- In-app microcopy uses different terminology than the official product documentation
- Regional teams localize content in isolation, introducing variations that contradict each other across markets
None of these errors were unintentional and each one points to a much deeper problem – a system of distribution that treats each individual channel as an entirely separate entity, with no connections or relationships between them. In short, the way that most companies are organized is in direct opposition to the needs of the distribution of content within that same organization, with no single source of truth within which to root that content.
What actually helps (and what sounds good but doesn’t)
I mentioned a style guide earlier. The reality is that a style guide is great to develop but in many cases, a style guide falls by the wayside within a few weeks as a growing company becomes increasingly chaotic. It’s great to have a shared Google Drive folder or a #content-updates Slack channel, but, for most organizations today, these types of tools are not nearly enough to manage the number of channels and the growing number of people involved in managing content across departments, as well as external partners. These tools were developed to help a small, tightly-coupled group of writers to coordinate their efforts. But as a company grows, these types of tools will quickly fail.
The only way to maintain consistent up to date content is to have single-sourced content. This means that the content is written once and published wherever it is needed. For many businesses, the model of having parallel versions of content to be updated for different channels is the only model that they are familiar with. However, in the world of technical writing this model has been in place for decades. Why can’t marketing, support and product teams take a page from their book and adopt this model as well?
The fix for this sort of issue is content syndication tools, such as MadCap Syndicate, or tools that allow you to create and distribute content to various channels as you need to. These sorts of tools allow you to create and source your content in one central spot and then syndicate it to channels like your website, support portal, or knowledge base, as well as product UI. When you go back to update the source content, the downstream copies automatically update to reflect the latest changes.
While it is possible to implement a no-tools solution for maintaining consistency, at a certain point the issues encountered far surpass the ability to manually maintain said consistency. And honestly, that’s not how a company runs in today’s fast paced environment.
Picking the right approach for your situation
However, as with most things, there are many nuances to consider and the best solution will typically depend on the specifics of your company. Generally speaking, though, the more channels you have through which you distribute your content, the more you will benefit from adopting a more formalized and structured approach. The more frequently you update your content, the more benefit you will derive from a system that automatically manages updates for you. And finally, the more variation there is in your content, the more you will benefit from a solution that automates the process of consistency management for you.
| Situation | Likely root cause | Where to start |
| Small team, 2-3 channels | No clear owner for content updates | Assign ownership, build a simple update checklist |
| Growing company, 5+ channels | Manual processes that haven’t scaled | Audit your content duplication, explore single-sourcing |
| Enterprise, many teams and markets | Structural fragmentation across departments | Centralized content platform with syndication |
The question nobody asks early enough
When should a company start to consider the content consistency infrastructure that they will need before it becomes a crisis? It’s a question that few companies ask before it’s too late and as a result a tremendous amount of work is required to clean up years of content sprawl. Until companies start to invest time and money into how content flows through their systems, in addition to what the content actually says, there will continue to be problems that can be avoided with a little bit of planning.
The consistent experience that is delivered to customers as a result of a company’s content strategy is the result of the company’s approach to how that content is distributed through their systems. As a result, teams who focus on the distribution of content through a company’s systems are typically calmer because the content that they need to distribute is up to date and consistent, they get to write and distribute the content that people actually trust (i.e. up to date and consistent), and they get to deal with lower volumes of support queries (i.e. the content that people read before contacting support is up to date and consistent).
Content consistency isn’t a writing problem. It’s an architecture problem. And the sooner companies stop assigning it to writers and start assigning it to systems thinkers, the better off they’ll be.
