Successful marketing isn’t just creative ads and quality content.
It’s also about working smarter—so you have time to be creative and produce that quality content.
Melanie Deziel, co-founder of Creator Kitchen, helps marketers create better content by simplifying their workflows.
And in this clip from B2B Forum 2023, she shares her insights to help your team work more efficiently.
Simplify your content creation with the ideas in Melanie’s video clip, or read the transcript below. And for more expert insights on working smarter—not harder—join your peers for another great B2B Forum! Hundreds of B2B rockstars are gathering in Boston—and we’d live to see you there. See what’s waiting for you at B2B Forum.
Documentation is fun!
The most important thing with documentation though, is that it’s easy to find.
So getting clear on how people in your organization are—or are not—finding documentation is really important.
Logical location.
So ideally we have stuff in one system, whether that’s it’s all in Google Drive, or it’s all in Box, or it’s all in a brand folder… Whatever we’re using, it’s all in one place.
That’s not always realistic, especially in a larger organization.
But in that case, you want to look at the titles of these documents. I would rather have you have four documents or five documents with very specific titles than one guide to all the things that contains all of that information, because people will not be able to find it.
So, really accurate titles. Really consistent titles.
That’s going to look different in every organization.
But some of the things that I’ve found really helpful is if it shows you how to do something, it needs to start with, “How To.”
How to create a new document in the CMS. How to initiate a brief.
“How to” makes it easy for people to find and also makes it easy for people to understand what’s in a document.
So you’re not doing the “open… no, that’s not the one… let me try… no, that’s not the one…” Right?
We’re wasting a lot of time there. And having consistent and accurate titles goes a long way.
The other thing is, you should never create a document without a clear understanding of what it’s for.
I know this came up over here with our content, but the same is true for documentation.
I found a lot of really detailed, well-meaning documentation that is entirely unusable… because it started out as “how to put something in the CMS,” and now it’s got “how to edit the photo metadata,” and it’s got 46 other different things in it.
So a singular goal, a really clear title, and put it somewhere that people will know where to find it is obviously key.
And if you think this is not that serious? Nope, that’s not it. This is recent data.
Employees spend on average 2.5 hours per day looking for information. Just looking for stuff!
Imagine if we could get paid while we’re looking for stuff at home. That would be great.
But no, we’re getting paid for two plus hours a day to just be trying to find the things that we need.
That’s an insane waste of time.
It’s an insane waste of the very little resources we’re already working with. So having really easy-to-find documentation is going to help with a lot of that.
And again, having a clear guide, one go-to place that links up all of your clear documentation, is super helpful for this.
The next one is that it’s got to be easy to understand.
Because if we find it… and then it’s a big steaming pile of garbage… we’re not really any better off.
So some of the things to keep in mind is that, a document needs to have some sort of logical order to it.
So even if you have four or five things you need to list out in that document, carefully consider which one would they actually need to know first?
Because chronological order is not always the best way to go, if step number four impacts how you do step number one.
So think about the order of these things.
And make sure they’re getting what they need, when they need it—not necessarily when they do it, if that distinction makes sense.
The other thing is visuals.
I don’t know about you all, but it’s incredibly difficult to describe actions that you’re taking inside of any sort of system.
“Go over the hamburger menu, and click the third thingy from the left, and then go over one bar and then down two, and then hover over the button—but double-click it. Don’t single-click it!”
Sometimes it’s a lot easier to just have a visual show where the button is.
Show what something looks like when it’s correct versus when it’s incorrect.
Show what warning labels or errors might come up and what to do about those things.
This can be super, super helpful.
I’ll share some tools for this in a little bit…
But the other thing I highly recommend is getting some sort of video capture tool.
There’s lots of them that do this—Loom, Screencastify, there’s a ton—but they will work really well to help you capture a process and save you the stress of actually having to type out, “go to the hamburger menu and click the third thing.”
And then the second thing: avoid jargon.
It’s really easy to start throwing in your common acronyms, your internal stuff, but there’s a really good chance that that documentation is going to need to be used or seen by someone who is new, or someone who’s not in your department, or someone who is not a full-time employee.
And so you want to avoid some of those pieces of jargon, which are going to create more questions, more follow up, and more bottlenecks.
The other thing is, active voice.
I know this sounds silly, we’re going back to high school English here, but sometimes it’s really easy to talk about the content or the process as if it’s the entity.
But your people are the entity.
So, “you should click here, go over to this place…” Rather than, “this should be selected.”
And upon that time, it is easy to feel like documentation has to be really highfalutin and we kind of lose sight of the action, like the active things that we’re doing.
If you need some encouragement on that, nope, going back. There we go.
The average American reading level is seventh to eighth grade.
And I say that, not to be depressing, but as a reminder that our documentation needs to be simple if it’s going to be understood.
A lot of us are going to be referencing documentation when you’re in the middle of something else, when you’re multitasking, when you’re on one of those meetings that definitely should have been a Slack message… But we didn’t have the meeting documentation so nobody knew.
So this is one of those things where you really want to make sure you’re keeping it as simple as possible.
Longer is not always better for our documentation.
Alright, and the last one is going to be, it needs to be easy to navigate.
Because if I find the document and then I click on it… and it’s like 47 pages long and it’s all just like a block of straight text?
My eyes are glazing over just thinking about it.
So the simple stuff can really make it a lot easier to scan through.
Keep the formatting simple.
You don’t have to get the design team to come in and make this all serious.
It can just be text and bullets, and then drop in some screenshots or videos.
Take advantage of titles and subtitles. Use bullets. Cross link.
Click all the basic general etiquette, which… is that a thing? I don’t know if that’s a thing, but I think you know what I mean, right?
So general document etiquette there, and if you need some help on how to use plain language and make it really easy to navigate… this is another one you might want to screenshot or write down or take picture: plainlanguage.gov/guidelines.
I know you’re thinking, “the government giving us ideas on how to use simple language? How could that be?”
But this is actually pretty good. I’m guessing it was created by someone not in the government. But it’s good advice on how to use plain language, how to create really simple documentation that’s easy to understand. So, a really good reference to have.
All right, so do you believe me now that documentation is fun?
Maybe just a little.
One thing to note, too, is document versioning.
So if you have different people who are doing a process, they may need a different perspective.
What does this look like when you’re an admin versus when you’re a regular user?
How do you do this process as a freelancer versus as an employee when you may have access to different tools?
So consider whether you need multiple versions of these things.
This can also happen at a hierarchical level where we want people who are at this level of the organization to have this much access and do this many things—but if you are a senior, an executive, a VP, a director… we want you to do it with a greater level of detail, a greater level of oversight, for example.
And the next thing is document maintenance—which is just as much fun as documentation, I think, but maybe that’s just me.
It’s really important to update the documents regularly.
Set a reminder in your calendar every three to six months for those vital documents and processes that are being referenced on a regular basis.
They get out of date really quickly.
One UX update to your tool and all of your screenshots are irrelevant and you can’t use any of those guides anymore.
And I know that sounds like a pain, but even just a ping every three months in your calendar to say, “hey, do I need to add new screenshots? Do I need to update now that we have this new process or we’ve added, we’ve changed the workflow, we’ve changed the org chart…”
Just making sure things are updated.
Now it can be really tempting to have everyone in the organization helping you with this.
You get HR coming in on the bottom and they’re like, “we got a lot of thoughts about the language here.”
And then accounting comes in with the clipboards.
Finance, they’re always just a pain. They’re coming in making it messy.
And then the art department comes in and they’re just chilling. They’re trying to make it beautiful—and that’s not helpful at all.
So if you do need to involve other organizations, or if multiple departments are going to use this, designate one person from each department to be like the document czar, the document approver, the document keeper, I don’t know.
Give him a cool title, I promise. It’s really fun.
So having one person from each department or stakeholder that can really help own that documentation, helps distribute it without it getting too unwieldy.
Here’s some of the tools that can help you with the things I talked about.
Google Drive, a really common choice for storing documentation and making it.
Notion is increasingly popular.
My business partner on the… I run a mastermind called Creator Kitchen for Creators… and he calls me Notion Juan Kenobi. It’s his nickname for me.
Like, “yeah, let’s make a Notion page.” Love it.
Scribe is another tool that does a really good job of capturing your screen and then creating documentation for you.
Published September 11, 2024
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