9 Tips for Handling Content Changes

In our recent webinar, Keeping Up with the Content: Crafting Content Strategies for Customer Education, TechSmith’s Learning and Video Ambassador, Matt Smith and Skilljar’s Head of Product Marketing, Linda Schwaber-Cohen, shared a number of tips for creating content that is regularly subject to change. We also received a number of suggestions and recommendations from the audience and on LinkedIn that we’d like to share with you:

1. Prioritize updates vs. creating brand new content – Linda and Matt
2. Evaluate the impact of a change to ensure it is worth the time investment – Linda and Matt
3. Build simple, disposable content as needed – Linda and Matt
4. “With Customer Education, we’re about getting educational products to market as fast as possible. Sometimes that means we’ll skip some polish and make mistakes, but don’t worry! Customers of SaaS companies would rather have something than nothing. Lose your inner perfectionist. It’s a job requirement ;)” – Dave Derington, Outreach
5. “We have a system with three levels of quality, depending upon the shelf life of the item we raise or lower the quality accordingly.” – Tony Leeming, Tricentis
6. “We actually have our instructors record their own demonstrations and lessons at home. Then they upload the footage to our editors. The segments usually correlate to a particular magazine and/or season.” – Cathy Nagle-Ervin, Tools.com
7. “Make GIFs from your videos – so you have both content types available for customers. Then you can also repurpose your script as text — which has the benefit of being searchable and indexed by Google.” – Matt Pierce, TechSmith
8. “Not only saving your source files (which I hope people are already doing), but organizing files and folders in a logical way to easily find what you’re looking for. Putting a little thought and time into it will make it easier for you (and coworkers) to easily find what is needed!” – Cutler Bleecker, Skilljar
9. “Think about what you can reuse from project to project. Can you create templates that speed up the process? Do you have a formula that you can follow that takes away some of the decisions? Are you using a style guide so you don’t have to guess at the font, colors, etc… Sure it might not feel as creative, but all those decisions add up and take time – having things decided me you create faster.” – Matt Pierce, TechSmith

To learn more, check out our recent blog post for a summary of the webinar.