We’ve previously discussed how maintaining excellent documentation can have many benefits for your organization. The content generated by your company is a product of hours of labor. Unfortunately, this valuable content is often stored in an unstructured environment. Transitioning from an unstructured data storage method to a structured content management system will strengthen your business in the long run.

What is the difference between unstructured and structured content?

Content creation used to be as easy as publishing the content once and forgetting about it. But in the modern era of digitization, consumers are engaging with brands on a wide range of platforms. Gone are the days of simply publishing your content on the company website. Now you need to deliver consistent content on your website, across your various social media platforms and multiple device formats, or you risk losing customers. Traditional content is not reusable, but adding structure to your content storage strategy can make the cross-platform publishing a breeze.

Take this common scenario for example: you’re in charge of managing product feature descriptions on your company’s website. A new product feature requires an update across 10 of your web pages. The process of manual updates is complicated: you have to open each page, edit the content, republish the page, and repeat 9 more times. Even more likely, imagine that you have five product features to update. That brings your workload up to 50-page edits. Not only is this practice time-consuming, it is also prone to human error. The last thing you want to do is deliver inconsistent product information. Structured content management allows you to edit from one source as opposed to manually editing every piece of individual content, thus saving your organization time and labor.

What is structured content?

Structured content is “content that is planned, developed, and connected outside of an interface, so it’s ready for any interface.” Structured content is a modular approach to managing digital content that uses metadata tags and automation to publish content from a single source to multiple distribution channels. The content is separated into independent parts for acute organization purposes. Structured content uses automation to publish to multiple channels simultaneously. The content creator can determine publishing parameters in order to tailor the output for a specific platform. For example, content can be structured in such a way that it is fully displayed on a desktop monitor, but only summarized on a mobile screen.

Benefits of structured content:

• Increased productivity – Spend less time manually editing individual content pieces
• Enhanced personalization capabilities – Content can be easily rearranged in various forms to meet the needs of specific audiences
• Improved search engine optimization – Tagging your content with metadata allows search engines to index your content more accurately
• Simplification of the translation process – Streamline the translation management process with well-organized content
• Saves your organization time and money – By increasing productivity and decreasing the opportunity for human errors, your business saves unnecessary labor costs

Structured content management is beneficial for any business looking to improve their documentation strategy. In addition to streamlining the publishing and editing of content, structured content will save your organization money over time.

Trilyon, Inc. is proud to provide exceptional documentation consulting services tailored to your business’ specific needs. We specialize in documentation and content writing. Contact us today with any questions you have and to learn more about how we can help your business reach its fullest potential.