Content Strategy for Learning Content

By Erick Vera

So, you made all this great content to help your users learn your product. You want everyone to see it right? Well, of course you do! Learn about the strategies and processes the plucky Learn team at Adobe used to create and market their learning content to millions of users.

Learn our tried and true process for figuring out what customers need to learn so that you're always creating content that provides a stellar learning experience. Then, learn how to organize all that stuff into a learning journey (patent pending) so that you're always providing the right learning at the right time. Then, find out how to market your content so that your customers will find your learning materials wherever they're looking for them. Finally, learn our process for constantly improving your strategy so that you're always providing the best learning experience for your users.

All that and so much more in any easy to swallow candy coating!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erick Vera
• Release date: Aug 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463611906

Erick Vera

Erick Vera is the head of content strategy in the Learn group at Adobe.

Book preview

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Content Strategy for Learning Content

Erick Vera

with

Sarah Meiches, James Slaton, John Koch,

Renu Jinturkar

© 2018 Adobe Systems Incorporated and its licensors. All rights reserved.

This content is protected under copyright law, furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe Systems Incorporated assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in the informational content contained in this content.

Adobe Systems Incorporated, 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, California 95110, USA.

Why we wrote this book

There’s a ton of books and guides out there that will teach you all about content strategy and walk you through all the tools and methods of building out a content strategy for your needs. This ain’t that.

This book is about how the content strategy team in Creative Cloud Learn at Adobe created a content strategy to support our next-gen Learning Experience. Along the way, we picked up some super-groovy new ideas about strategies for content strategy for learning content.

So, while we’re not going to go teach you a ton of dry models and procedures, we are going to share what we learned and what worked for us. Heck, you might even learn a thing or two.

Who we are

We are the Creative Cloud Learn team and we’re pretty awesome (and modest). We’re obsessed with producing amazing learning experiences that help our customers use our products. Our content not only meets our customers’ needs, but it’s also delivered where they are.

Everyone on this team had a part in creating and implementing our content strategy, with each of them adding their expertise to the creation of this playbook. More specifically, we’re a team of superheroes with amazing superpowers:

John Koch aka The Master Planner

Superpower: A mild-mannered production manager with over 20 years of experience working with content, John juggles content types, production dates, and target languages while providing directions to content production newbies.

Sarah Meiches aka The Silver Sleuth

Superpower: An intrepid marketer turned content strategist, Sarah’s been the trenches of content sourcing and distribution for years. She figures out where all our content is and where it should go. Content doesn’t get to the right place without her.

James Slaton aka Communicator REX

Superpower: Is he a spy? Is he a super-soldier? Is he a product manager? Who knows for sure, but James can talk to anyone and get the answers he wants. Our understanding of our customer’s needs comes from him.

Erick Vera aka The Velvet Hammer

Superpower: For more than 20 years Erick’s been in the content business. With an awesome stealth, he moves all the cogs behind the scenes to make content strategy, development, and delivery possible. He fights the battles needed to get content to our users.

How to use this book

This is book is designed to lead you through the thought process and frameworks we created to deliver the content comprising the Adobe Learning Experience. You can use it to understand the reasoning behind what CC Learn delivers, or you can use this as a guide to help you build your own content strategy. To help you out, we divided this book into sections:

Why content strategy?

Read this part if you want to understand why we created a content strategy in the first place.

Build your strategy

This section is where we outline our framework and processes for building a comprehensive content strategy for learning content—it’s cooler than it sounds.

Market your strategy

This section explains how we determine what kind of learning customers are looking for, and how we make sure the people find what they’re looking for.

Improve your strategy

This section explains the content-strategy cycle and tools we use to constantly review and improve our plans.

Part 1:

Why Content Strategy?

What is content strategy?

Okay, we promised that this playbook wouldn’t teach you lots of models and outline lots of procedures to create a full strategy plan; however, if you’re going to get any use out of this playbook, you’ll need a little background in the fundamentals. This section will quickly walk you through the basics of what content strategies are and how they’re made. We’ll keep it short and light, we promise. (This time we really mean it!)

Right, here’s the deal, people, the world is moving pretty fast. When someone is trying to figure out if your product/service is worth their time, their eyeballs don’t stay in one place for very long. So it’s crucial that customers have the ability to learn anytime, anywhere. That’s where your content strategy comes in. It’s the rules and processes you use to figure out what content gets made, where it goes, and who sees it.

Content strategy is the rules and processes you use to figure out what content gets made, where it goes, and who sees it.

The biggest benefit of a solid content strategy is that it gets the right content to the right people at the right time, and for the right reasons. It makes sure that content is reusable, scalable, and measurable. It also ensures that you get the maximum return on your content investment. By properly managing your content, you can increase efficiencies, reduce production time, and enable learning to provide more opportunities for users to interact with your content over time, thus improving retention and performance.

A good content strategy meets customers where they are. It is a clear, well-structured learning path that provides relevant content and examples. It makes sure the content that reaches your customer creates active engagement and a hands-on experience.

Why you need a content strategy

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