When it comes to writing content, grammar and spelling mistakes are a no-go. Often individual writers turn to tools like Grammarly or MS Word to keep those pesky errors out of their work. And a writing assistant like Grammarly can be a helpful safety net against grammar mistakes and typos — but for business, content has to be much more than just mistake free and grammatically sound.
As an enterprise, you need an authoring solution that can align all writers to your content guidelines and brand voice. Why? Because it’s vital that you communicate consistently with your customers.
When aligning globally distributed teams to your content strategy, you need a solution built for businesses, not individuals. Tools like Grammarly help improve the content that individual writers produce, but they don’t implement company guidelines systematically across different teams and corporate content types. For example, you might also want to check DITA content, UI strings, or knowledge articles. So, let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges tools like Grammarly pose to your enterprise.
What’s Lacking from Individual Writing Tools?
Alignment of content, through consistent brand voice, terminology, and style, is vital to enabling parallel experiences for your customers. Most businesses document their content guidelines for their writers’ reference, but successful businesses integrate content governance into the writing process itself. And when writers use tools like Grammarly, it helps remove spelling errors, typos, and grammar mistakes. But it doesn’t check if a writer’s style and terminology aligns with your corporate brand style, tone, voice, and approved messaging.
It’s a challenge to keep large volumes of content consistent with your brand’s voice. What’s more, editors struggle to align content written by lots of writers, using different voices, styles, and tones. And the worst part is that manually aligning content with your guidelines is extremely time consuming! This creates bottlenecks in the content creation process and reduces the efficiency of content production — which can slow time to market and other business initiatives.
Another major drawback of using individual writing assistants like Grammarly, is the increased risk of an inconsistent customer experience. Without a consistent vocabulary and style, customer-facing content can be seen as unreliable and negatively impact your brand perception. Considering that the Bonfire Marketing agency found 91 percent of customers value honesty, the last thing you want is for your customers to perceive your brand as untrustworthy. Honesty resonates with customers and builds loyalty toward your brand, and no business can afford the repercussions of mixed messaging and off-brand content.
Because of the nature of individual writing tools, they don’t allow for the collection of enterprise-wide metrics. Whether it’s the average reading time, reading ease and clarity, or the level of formality, metrics provide vital insights into your content operation. Without them, it can prevent your business from understanding what content best resonates with your target audience. Good grammar alone can’t create great customer experiences!
A lack of content alignment is another problem in large enterprises, whether it’s the duplication of content or the potential legal risk from non-compliant content. Individual writing tools, such as Grammarly, can’t protect your business from the legal risk associated with non-compliant content — because the writing process isn’t centrally governed. To address this problem, your business needs to adopt a content governance solution that it can deploy systematically across the content workflow. Without this critical centralization, you could face a plethora of problems: from efficiency and alignment, to legal and compliance.
What Does an Enterprise Solution Have to Offer?
While it’s well known that Grammarly or MS Word helps protect your business from embarrassing grammar or spelling mistakes, an enterprise solution does this and much more. With centralized content standards, you can streamline your workflow, check that content aligns with your brand throughout the content lifecycle, and still avoid unprofessional grammar.
Consistent Brand Voice
Enterprise content governance enables content creators to write in the voice of your brand. This means your enterprise speaks with one clear voice regardless of who’s actually writing the content! Content governance at scale goes beyond mistake free writing. It checks if content is aligned across different divisions and teams. Is everyone using the right word to describe the same part of your product or service? An enterprise ready solution helps your content reach editors already aligned to your guidelines. Without the need to focus on grammar and spelling alone, editors can spend their time making more substantive edits. Considering that content writers can be spread across the world, and may not be native speakers, this can help your business reduce the editorial review cycle, which saves both time and money — a real win-win!
Audience Alignment — Improving Customer Experience
And when it comes to audience-centricity, an enterprise content governance solution will check that all customer-facing content is consistent, according to your content standards. On-brand messaging across all distribution channels is the foundation for customer trust. It positions your brand within the marketplace, and increases the value of your business.
So what does this mean in practice? Well whether it’s a social media post, a support article, or an email, using an enterprise solution allows you to create parallel, on-brand experiences for your customers.
Insight Over Content Operations
What’s more, you can keep track of your content metrics. Far from being a business buzzword, metrics provide insights and measurable data to show how your content is written and received. As such, content governance gives you the power of a macro-perspective over your content workflow — one that allows for measurability, analysis, and informed business decisions.
Not to mention the reduction, or even elimination, of the legal risk associated with non-compliant or inaccurate content. Grammarly is great at helping you choose a different way to say things, but what if it suggests a word that isn’t consistent with your approved terminology? In highly regulated industries, a suggestion for an alternative word or spelling could be a risky mistake.
It’s clear that an enterprise content governance solution has far more to offer your business than an individual writing tool. But what should an enterprise content governance solution include?
Checklist for an Enterprise Content Governance Solution
We put together a checklist of all the “must haves” for an enterprise solution:
- Systematic alignment to your content guidelines and standards
- Seamless integration with multiple writing tools
- Support for different file and content types (e.g. can check xml. content, UI strings, emails, blog posts)
- Management of the complete content lifecycle
- Streamlined content creation to improve efficiencies across the workflow
- Improved individual and team performance through metrics
With all that in mind, an enterprise solution can operationalize the governance of your brand and content guidelines to create aligned and consistent content experiences for your customers. And the positive business outcomes are huge! Whether it’s increasing your audience-centricity or the ability to measure organizational alignment with your content strategy, implementing an enterprise content governance solution has become a must for all successful brands.
How Acrolinx Can Help!
If you’re ready to ditch your old-fashioned, inefficient method of content governance for a modern, AI-powered content governance solution, look no further than the Acrolinx Platform. Acrolinx learns how your enterprise writes and captures your content standards and brand voice — to make them actionable across the content workflow. Automation carries the burden of time-consuming editing for quality control (so you no longer need individual writing tools), and integrates into the content workflow to deliver automatic alignment. This delivers brand consistency and increases your content efficiency, so you can do more with your budget!
Acrolinx Analytics can access performance, pinpoint problems, and improve the performance of your content operation. This means you can measure your goals and objectives against your content’s performance, and make more informed business decisions as a result. Get ready for consistent and compliant content with automation and enterprise-wide content governance — it’s Better Content. Faster. Want to know more? Let’s talk.
