Is your content missing the mark? A content transformation example

The business writing that your team creates is vital to the success of your business. Even well-written content is not necessarily usable. Precision Content helps you create high-value, usable and scannable content that is easy to understand.

What is content?

Content is any information people generate in the process of doing business. Many kinds of content are created by people who are not dedicated solely to writing content, such as

reports
procedures
policies, and
guides or reference materials.

How Precision Content makes a difference

Content can be well written, with no grammatical mistakes and even include all the necessary information but when people try to use it, for whatever reason, they can’t.

If every piece of content represents a business goal for your company, then content that is not used is like a target that no one can hit.

Not only is that content and effort wasted, it means that the business goal never met its mark, which may have far-reaching consequences. If the intention was to inform, then that information is never communicated.

Why does content miss the mark?

There are a variety of reasons that content fails to be usable, including these common problems:

Not concise or focused: the content includes extra details that become noise and drown out the real message.
Poor organization: people can’t find the content they need or don’t recognize it when they do find it.
Inconsistent: readers can find more than one piece of content on the same subject, but with conflicting information.
Not clear: we make readers work too hard when we make poor choices for terminology and format. Ideally, we want readers to understand content by simply scanning it quickly. Sometimes content also has unstated assumptions that are not actually written.

Precision Content is an entire content strategy framework that fixes all of these problems at once. Your writers are trained to create content that always has high value to your readers.

Example: Before

This example is about car insurance.

Although it is well written with no obvious errors, it’s still very difficult to parse and understand quickly. Specifically, the difficulties with the content are as follows:

1. The title is too generic and not descriptive
2. The paragraphs must be read carefully to parse their meaning
3. There is missing information that is revealed only after transformation.

Example: After

Precision Content authors go through the process of re-writing (we call it “content transformation”) that addresses the content challenges.

Results of the content transformation:

1. Labelling

Clear, descriptive labelling helps readers orient themselves and immediately understand the subject matter without having to parse a paragraph. When a title is accurate and descriptive, readers can understand the context of what they are reading at a glance.

2. Clarity

The process that is briefly described in text in the before sample is now fully developed, identifying the actor and discrete steps in a consistent manner. The reader quickly understands how complex the process is, who performs each step, and the beginning and end of the process

3. Organization

The results of the process are separated from the process itself and clearly identified as occurring as a result of the process. The reader can then easily understand why a CRS may have changed, what factors affected it, and what the process was that resulted in this change

4. Presentation and consistency

The three possible changes that can occur are presented in an easy-to-read format, where it’s easy to understand how many possibilities exist and the associated result for each one

5. Information gaps identified and filled

As a result of this “transformation,” the author identified an unstated assumption: a third possible result. When added to the re-written content, the completed table gives the reader the full picture of the situation.

This content is now clear, concise, usable, and precise!

Whether you engage Precision Content authors to transform content, or train your own writers on the Precision Content authoring standards, the positive effect on your content will be the same—a complete transformation from missing the mark to a high-value business asset.

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