Content Engineering is an engineering speciality focused on using content in computer-facilitated environments
It is the practice of organizing content by using models and technology such as CMS, XML, Schema markup, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and APIs (Application Programming Interface).
When the content is not easily found or optimized for the customer journey, it makes it difficult to achieve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goals.
Content engineering helps bridge the gap between strategy and development by transforming static content into a more standardized, structured, and intelligent form. This allows for the creation of sophisticated, reusable content that is designed for use across multiple channels.
The various content challenges that are faced by organizations can be effectively addressed by Content engineering, for example:
- Siloed content supply chains
- Duplicate content during a myriad of formats
- Inefficient content authoring workflows
- Chunky, unstructured content
- Outdated technology
- Technology in place does not match the needs
- Inefficient content usage across multiple channels.
- Metadata and Schema are not used
- Lack of standards for metadata
- Lack of discoverability of content for internal and external use
- Poor SEO performance
- Not being able to implement personalization
Content Engineering consists of several primary disciplines:
Model – Content modelling is a way to represent types of content, their elements, attributes, and their interdependent relationships
Metadata – Metadata is content that provides information about other content. It can help applications, robots and authors use and relate content in smart ways.
Markup – Markup is everything that wraps around content, giving it meaning and context. This can include XML and content transformations.
Schema – Schema is a form of metadata that brings in meaning and relationship in content. It often uses standardized vocabularies like schema.org.
Taxonomy – Taxonomy is a way of categorizing content, it creates a map of concepts used to categorize content, often through tags. Taxonomy can enable dynamic collections of content items and support features such as multi-channel content use, navigation, personalization, and search.
Graph – Graphs form a node-based customer experience and customer data platform to help link various aspects of an enterprise’s content ecosystem and customer data platform, allowing for the creation of a flexible and personalized experience.
Advantages of Content Engineering
By integrating content engineering practices, enterprises can enjoy a varied range of operational, commercial, and financial benefits:
- Systematic and better collaboration for content creation across teams and departments.
- Standardized content formats that enable easy reuse
- Faster publishing
- Lower costs
- Improved Customer Experience
- Higher Customer retention
Content Engineering for Customer Experience Management
Content engineering enables customer experience management by adapting content to different devices and formats. This allows the users to have a more personalized content experience.
As the customer journey today involves search, social media, mobile apps and more, it is important to make sure your content is up to the task. Multi-channel content must be carefully planned and executed to be accessible across devices, platforms and contexts. Organizations that want to orchestrate digital customer experiences need to have content engineering practices in place. Leaders in customer experience management are ahead of their competitors in this area.
Content Engineering for Multi-Channel Content
Content engineering allows organizations to develop and design content that can be reused across multiple digital properties, applications and workflows, efficiently and effectively. This makes content assets more valuable as more people discover and use them.
- The work of content strategists involves intensive planning around the creation, publication and usability of content. Content strategy targets the ‘who, what, when, where, and why’ of content experiences and assets.
- The content engineer is responsible for the organization, structure and shape of content assets, as well as how they are used on platforms and publications. Content engineering focuses on the practical aspects of content creation and management.
- The content strategist and content engineer work together to identify how audiences understand the content, how devices should show the content and how content can be repurposed intelligently across multiple channels.
Advantages of content strategy and content engineering collaboration:
- An enhanced value of content assets
- Reducing costs for publishing content assets
- Better customer experiences as robots need structured content to effectively provide value to humans.
Content engineering is used by Google, Siri, Cortana, Watson and others to produce meaningful machine-consumable content and has seamless interactions between robots and humans.
Content Engineering for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engines and Google particularly are promoting the use of structured content and Schema.org markup and metadata.
Schema.org markup is a standardized set of tags that can be added to a webpage's HTML to improve how search engines interpret the page's content. Content Engineering can help make use of Schema by incorporating it into the Core Content Model, authoring the process and automating the transfer of metadata from CMS to Google.
Google uses Schema metadata to display results in various formats beyond traditional blue links. Some examples include
- Navigation Schema Markup
- Organization Schema Markup
- Event Schema Markup
- Person Schema Markup
- Image Schema Markup
Advantages of Schema markup for SEO-
- Better results and more visibility in Search results
- Better User Experience
- Unstructured content (image, video, voice) search optimization.
Schema markup can have a positive impact on businesses by getting-
- Increased CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
- More traffic
- Increased ROI (Return on Investment)
Use of Content Engineering for Digital Transformation
- Organizations have an enormous array of digital assets. The challenge now is utilizing those assets in intelligent ways.
- Content and data assets need to be able to move easily across different organizational platforms, including web services, search tools, CRM, CMS and DXP. For some organizations, content is more like a rock: inflexible and difficult to change.
- Content engineering creates content assets that can be used across multiple channels, are related and can be delivered quickly. This gives organizations an edge.
- Adaptive organizations start with a clear strategy, which they then execute with precision and efficiency. This allows them to bring their content to life in a way that is responsive.
- Customer journey must be properly engineered to ensure reach in various areas, including search, social, native mobile applications and syndicated views of the publisher's infrastructure.
Content Engineering for Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Computing
Robots rely on structured content to be useful to humans. Google, Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Watson, and others work by understanding relationships between semantic concepts. In a cognitive age, machine-consumable content and interactions between robots and humans are increasingly important.
Content Engineering for Digital Transformation
Organizations have a vast array of digital assets. Despite systems and content organizations face the challenge of utilizing the assets in intelligent ways.
To make it more mobile and mobile, it must be able to transform and adapt to the output channel shape to move content across organizational silos seamlessly. For many organizations, however, content is more solid and immobile, making it monolithic, inflexible, and almost impossible to move.
Content engineering empowers organizations by enabling them to use the content in a more structured potent and intelligent way.
Adaptive organizations start with strategy, the power of that strategy with engineering, and wrap it in operations to bring content to life. Putting together these elements makes intelligent digital transformation a reality.
Illustrative Representations on the role of a Content Engineer
Content Strategy meets Content Engineering
The content strategist and the content designer collaborate, as well as an information architect or user experience designer, to produce a complete set of deliverables.
The content strategist and content engineer complement each other to deliver optimal value.
- Content strategists plan the creation, publication, and usability of content. They consider who will see the content, what the content will be when it will be published, where it will be seen and why it is needed.
- The content engineer's job involves organizing, arranging, shaping and application of content assets, as well as publications.
Collaboratively, they work to enumerate how audiences apprehend the content, how devices should exhibit the content and how content can have an intelligent multi-channel usage.
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