Problem
Without the tools in place to create relevant content, marketing teams focus on creating new and interesting web page design, but the problem is it’s time-consuming, expensive, creates inconsistent experiences across the globe, and in the end teams don’t get the results that they strive for.
Approach
My approach was to focus on the long-term outcome: better performing, more strategic, personalized, and relevant content. The path to get there wasn't easy or short and involved a process of change. I was part of a cross-functional team and together we built a platform and tools to allow marketers to minimize the need for bespoke designs, maximize cohesiveness across global sites, and maximize content effectiveness. We delivered the following to solve the problem: Content strategy toolkit (shown below) to strategically plan for and brief creative teams, a page builder tool to quickly create and publish pages within the design system, and a design system guidelines site to maximize adoption.
My role
As the sole global content strategist, I closely collaborated with my product, product marketing, design, SEO, and engineering partners on all outputs. I led the discovery and definition phases of our guidelines site development (screenshot of design system guidelines shown below). I created the content strategy toolkit as a framework to help digital marketers plan their content and invoke the design system. I also co-facilitated workshops with marketing teams and agencies worldwide to promote adoption of strategic content planning, design system, and page builder tool. My small team of one content designer, was responsible for content design for design system components and the care and feeding of the design system guidelines (example shown below).
Though it looks simple, it's a check to make sure that you're designing for the customer as well as the business. When working with teams using the toolkit, we noticed that teams who couldn't define the target customer segment and problem in detail struggled with execution in design and content. It's helpful to have this summary recorded to get stakeholder alignment early on.
This template is used to capture your high-level strategy. It also checks that you're thinking about where the customer is on their journey and that you understand who they are and what they're thinking and feeling.
This is designed to help you structure your page narrative, topic by topic, and it connects to the next step in the design process where you'll choose the component best suited for the content you've defined. It documents a plan of record for the page and can be used for initial stakeholder reviews to get sign off on the narrative and creative concepts.
This shows the design system guidelines site and the detailed guidelines, best practices, and ideal use cases for one of the components within the design system. Once you've planned for your content topic by topic, you can search and browse in the guidelines site to find the component that will best communicate your vision.