Remember the days when having a great website was enough? Now people are getting answers not only from our website, but also from Siri, Google Search snippets, and mobile apps. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted: Omnichannel content strategyIts mission is to reach audiences through a variety of digital channels and platforms.
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But how do you set up your content management system (CMS) to reach your current and future viewers? I am content model—Definition of content types, properties, and relationships that enable people and systems to understand content —My more familiar design systems thinking will break down our clients’ omnichannel content strategies. You can avoid this outcome by creating a content model that is semantic and connects related content.
I recently had the opportunity to lead a CMS implementation for a Fortune 500 company. The client was intrigued by the benefits of an omnichannel content strategy that included content reuse, multi-channel marketing, and robotic delivery, and designed the content to be understandable by bots, Google Knowledge Panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.
Content models are a critical foundation for any omnichannel content strategy, and they are necessary for content to be understood across multiple systems. semantic Type – A type named according to its meaning rather than its expression. Our goal was to enable authors to create content and reuse it wherever it’s relevant. But as the project progressed, we realized that supporting content reuse at the scale our customers needed required the entire team to recognize new patterns.
Despite our best intentions, we continued to leverage design systems that were more familiar to us. Unlike web-centric content strategies, omnichannel content strategies cannot rely on WYSIWYG tools for design and layout. The tendency to approach content models with a familiar design system mindset has constantly led us away from one of the primary purposes of content models: to deliver content to audiences through multiple marketing channels.
Two essential principles for an effective content model #Section 2
We had to help designers, developers, and stakeholders understand that they were doing something very different from previous web projects, where it was natural for everyone to think of content as visual building blocks that fit into a layout. The previous approach was not only friendlier but also more intuitive, at least at first, because the design felt more realistic. We’ve discovered two principles that help our team understand how our content model differs from the design systems we’re used to.
- The content model should define semantics instead of layout.
- And the content model must connect content that belongs together.
Semantic Content Model#section3
all Semantic Content Model Use type and property names that reflect what the content means, not how the content appears. For example, in a non-semantic model, a team might create a type like this: teaser, media blockand card. While these types make it easier to place content, they don’t help the delivery channel understand what the content means, which opens the door for the content to appear on each marketing channel. In contrast, the semantic content model uses type names like: product, serviceand certificate Ensuring each delivery channel understands the content and can use it as they see fit.
A good starting point when creating a semantic content model is to look at the types and properties defined by Schema.org, a community-based resource for type definitions that platforms like Google Search can understand.
The semantic content model has several advantages:
- Semantic content model even if your team isn’t interested in omnichannel content Separate content from your presentation. Your team can evolve your website design without having to refactor content. This way, your content can withstand a disruptive website redesign.
- Semantic content models also provide a competitive advantage. by adding structured data Based on Schema.org’s types and properties, websites can provide hints to help Google understand their content, display them in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use them to answer voice interface user questions. there is. Potential visitors can discover your content without ever setting foot on your website.
- In addition to these practical benefits, delivering omnichannel content also requires a semantic content model. To utilize the same content across multiple marketing channels: The delivery channel must be able to understand this.. For example, if your content model provides a list of questions and answers, you can easily render them on a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, but you can also use them in a voice interface or a bot that answers common questions. .
For example, using semantic content models for articles, events, people, and locations, A list separate Provide cleanly structured data to search engines so that users can read content on your website, Google Knowledge Panel, and future virtual voice interfaces.
Connected content model#section4
After struggling to explain how to create a good content model, I realized that the best model is one that connects semantic and related content components (e.g. question and answer pairs in a FAQ topic) rather than splitting them up. . Content across different content components. A good content model connects content that needs to stay together so it can be used across multiple delivery channels without having to put the pieces back together first.
Think about writing an article or an essay. The meaning and usefulness of an article depends on whether its parts hold together. Does one of the titles or paragraphs make sense on its own without the context of the entire article? In our projects, our familiar design system thinking often leads us to want to create a content model that splits the content into different chunks to fit a web-centric layout. This had a similar impact as the article that would be separated from the headline. Splitting content into independent pieces based on layout made it difficult to manage content that belonged together and nearly impossible to understand across multiple delivery channels.
To illustrate, let’s look at how related content linking applies in a real-world scenario. The design team for the client presented a complex layout for a software product page with multiple tabs and sections. Our instinct was to follow a content model. Shouldn’t we make it as easy and flexible as possible so that we can add as many tabs as we want in the future?
Our design system instincts were so familiar that we felt we needed a content type called “Tabbed Sections” to allow us to add multiple tabbed sections to a page. Each tabbed section displays different types of content. One tab can provide an overview or specifications of the software. Other tabs can provide lists of resources.
Our tendency to break the content model into “tab section” pieces would have resulted in unnecessarily complex models and cumbersome editing experiences, as well as incomprehensible content across additional delivery channels. For example, how would other systems know which “tab section” refers to a product specification or resource list? What other systems would have required calculating tabbed sections and content blocks? This prevented the tabs from being reordered and required adding logic to all other delivery channels to interpret the layout of the design system. Moreover, if the customer no longer wanted this content to appear in the tabbed layout, migrating it to a new content model to reflect the new page design would have been a tedious task.
Our breakthrough came when we discovered that our customers had a specific purpose in mind for each tab. This displays specific information such as software product overviews, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Once implementation began, our tendency to focus on the visual and familiar obscured the intent of the design. With a little digging, it didn’t take long to realize that the concept of tabs has nothing to do with the content model. The meaning of the content we wanted to display in the tab was important.
In fact, the customer may have decided to display this content in a different location, without a tab. This awareness led us to define content types for our software products based on the meaningful properties our customers wanted to render on the web. It had the following obvious semantic properties: name and explanation It also includes rich properties such as: screenshot, Software Requirementsand Feature list. The software’s product information was kept together because it was not split across separate components, such as “tabbed sections” derived from the content presentation. All delivery channels, including future ones, will be able to understand and present this content.
In this omnichannel marketing project, we’ve learned that the best way to keep your content model on the right track is to make sure your content model is semantic (including type and property names that reflect the meaning of the content) Keep content that belongs together together (instead of fragmenting). These two concepts reduce the temptation to base your content model on design. So whether you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy or want to ensure that Google and other interfaces understand your content, keep these things in mind:
- A design system is not a content model. Team members may be tempted to integrate them and make the content model reflect the design system, so they need to protect the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process. This makes your content available across all delivery channels without the need for a magic decoder ring.
- Even if your team is struggling to make this transition, you can still reap some benefits from using Schema.org-based structured data on your website. Even if additional delivery channels do not emerge immediately, the benefits of search engine optimization are compelling reasons in and of themselves.
- Additionally, remind your team that separating the content model from the design makes it easier to update the design because you won’t be encumbered by content migration costs. You can create new designs without barriers to design and content compatibility and prepare for the next generation of innovation.
Upholding these principles rigorously will help your team treat content legitimately as the most important asset of the user experience and the best way to engage with your audience.