Modern intranets require a culmination of evolving digital workplace requirements, embracing diversity and responding to ongoing changes in business and employee demands.
Most packaged intranet solutions come with the best of communication and collaboration capabilities, focused primarily on enhancing employee experience. However, content management strategy remains the backbone of changing intranet needs, thereby influencing adoption rates.
Developing a strategy, plan, and roadmap aligned to the business goals, user needs, and operational capabilities helps the company implement an effective content strategy management.
Lift the odds against intranet success by using an effective intranet content strategy. Here are few of the advantages it brings:
- Drive streamlined web content management process
- Quick turnaround for updates
- Provide simplicity and ease of access for non-technical professionals
- Reduce dependency on IT team
- Improve workflow processes
- Increase intranet adoption rates
- Easy site maintenance and navigation
- Reduce errors and duplication of information
- Decentralised authoring
- Reduce system maintenance costs
To churn out the best of business advantage from the intranet strategy, the content management team must possess sound knowledge of best practices and guidelines to effectively control, maintain, develop and update content in a disparate and multiskilled way to see ROI.
Here Are A Few Factors You Must Consider In Order To Master Intranet Content Management And Strategy:
Understand The Lifecycle Of Intranet Content
Before you start to gear up with an intranet content management system, one thing you should focus on is, learning about the lifecycle of content and the collaboration tools. No matter what type of intranet content you’re creating, it should follow the content management lifecycle path.
- Assessment – First comes the assessment of current content and processes, which include relevance check, rewriting or deleting the content.
- New Content Creation – Next comes the creation of freshly brewed content, which includes a detailed understanding of architecture, wireframes, taxonomy, metadata, workflow, documentation and policies.
- Managing Content – Then comes managing content, which includes repurposing, rewriting, creating, maintaining, monitoring, archiving content and delete information, which is no longer relevant to make content more comprehensive and optimized.
- Measuring & Growth – During the measurement & growth stage, every aspect of content relevancy is scrutinized, followed by identifying further improvement areas.
Understanding the lifecycle of intranet content can significantly boost intranet adoption rates.
Identify And Train The Content Strategy Masters
Create A Strategy And Establish Guidelines For Intranet Content Creation
Intranet content creation should be aligned towards a specific goal. A strong, simple, strategy has to be defined around the goals set, after which a plan to achieve the goal should be set into motion.
Some organizations use the intranet to reduce email volume, increase employee engagement and reduce time spent on finding information. Others create content with external goals to provide self-service support for marketing purposes and increase ROI.
It is important to keep your goals and objectives realistic to have a bullet-proof intranet content strategy.
Identify And Train The Content Strategy Masters
Measuring commercial impact (ROI) of the content whilst achieving business goals needs a strong driving force within an organization. Enlisting the right content managers enables organizations to achieve common business objective at a faster pace.
The role of content managers is highly cross-functional. They represent the voice and image of a brand and drive communication with every word and image. Furthermore, they have to monitor intranet analytics to measure adoption and implement the best practices. In short, he oversees planning, development and management of informational content produced by the organization. They take into account what the content is, what it can be, and how to curate content so that it communicates the key values of the organization.
Content managers skills range from how to manage content strategy, content permissions, content analytics to using intranet software in a quick and productive manner. As this is a huge part of their role, it is important to choose content managers that can effectively support your intranet content strategy.
Intranet teams commonly train content authors/managers on how to create, publish and manage content in a content management system. Organizations will yield better outcomes if they go beyond the regular training processes in order to analyze and capitalize on the complexity and usability of the existing intranet content management system.
Organize Intranet Content
Fresh, accurate, relevant, well-organized, duly updated and accessible content is the key to success of your intranet content strategy. Intranet software is unique in allowing the user to tag content that has been created appropriately and in making content navigation, retrieving and accessing information easier.
Organizing intranet content according to hierarchy and department and categorizing by task, product or service will help employees find relevant information quickly.
For a streamlined access to intranet content, intranet content strategy should make sure to incorporate elements like:
- Properly filled out employee profiles
- Step-by-Step guides
- Tags and Metadata to aid in searching
- Documents and templates
- A big picture of company news, updates, and announcements
- Quick & meaningful status updates
- Product and service documentation and materials
- Discussion forums
- Troubleshooting information
- Employee policies, handbook, & procedures
The greatest advantage of organized intranet content is that it saves employees time and effort and allows them to search or exchange data and subsequently, drive productivity.
Communicate And Collaborate Often
Communication is the cornerstone of any intranet. Poor intranet content strategy results in diminished communication and collaboration between employees, content managers, and higher authorities.
One of the best ways to do a health check of the intranet content is to communicate frequently about the current stack of available content. Ideally, this can be done by gathering in conference halls or by initiating intranet forum discussions. It’s important to maintain constant contact with the creating and managing members of the content strategy team, as this has a significant impact on the overall plan of action.
Enable Dynamic Search Function
Enabling robust enterprise search in your intranet saves employees time, especially when the job involves searching for information on a regular basis. The faster the employees find the information they need, the more productive and engaged they will be.
Efficient enterprise search comes with a wide spectrum of benefits. They increase efficiency, maximize productivity, enhance employee engagement, reduce information overlay, reduce costs, facilitate better customer service and fasten decision-making process, through quick information discovery.
Employees look for information throughout the day – if you maintain a robust intranet search engine, it is highly likely that employees will find what they are searching for. As a result, employees use the intranet more often, subsequently boosting the adoption rates.
Precise Analytics On Intranet Content
If the wheel of intranet content management strategy has been spinning for a while now, then content managers will be in a better position to review what’s working and what isn’t. This provides room for enabling precise analytics on creating, publishing and managing content.
After investigating the present state of intranet content, the management team will know which content areas haven’t performed well and can be updated or deleted.
Easily searchable and consumable content is the foundation of intranet adoption success. Incorporating analytics tools like Seek help the management team to measure and analyze the usage of intranet content. Implementing analytics tools helps in extracting faster and accurate insights and make informed decisions while ensuring a healthy ROI.
Meaningful insights churned out of the analytics engine aids in identifying the best-performing assets and implementing intranet content management best practices.
Conclusion
Fussing over all the factors stated above isn’t necessary for every business scenario, but considering these elements will help your business traverse the right path for a successful intranet journey.
The most advanced intranets have content that is fresh, up to date, accurate, and supportive. To get there, it’s important to decide which content is relevant on the intranet and execute specific plans to keep it fresh and up-to-date. Employees visit an intranet with a purpose, so addressing that purpose is critical to boosting intranet usage.
Creating meaningful intranet content requires effort, time and knowledge of intranet best practices. Introducing a user-centric approach when formulating the intranet content strategy yields a better plan of action, that justifies the intranet investment.
Intranet software is often seen as the digital answer for internal communications, employee engagement, and team collaboration. An intranet content strategy helps you hone in on the purpose of the page and makes it readily available for consumption.
Ensure that the intranet content you are putting together is home for all types of content, making the intranet an important repository for your employees to find the information they seek and have a great experience using it as a working tool.
Looking for the right content management system for your organization? Mesh is a next-generation intelligent intranet solution, integrated with Workbench, a content authoring module. It helps content managers create news articles, announcements, events etc., easily with one-click publishing, editing and automated archival.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
