In this post, we’ll walk through 8 easy steps to design an effective internal content strategy, and provide templates and examples for you to get you started.
Are you looking for a way to ensure that your business is using content effectively? Content strategy is key to the success of any internal documentation. It involves setting goals, understanding your target audience, and deciding which types of content are the most effective way to reach them. With the right approach, you can create a content strategy that delivers results time and time again. In part one of this series, we discussed the challenges with content documentation and 5 ways to fix them. Today, we’ll walk through 8 easy steps to design an effective internal content strategy. We also provide templates and examples for you to get you started.
Creating a successful internal content strategy is essential for any business that wants to increase adoption and retention of its knowledge and content. An internal content strategy offers a framework to ensure all content is consistent and up-to-date, and allows you to identify the types of content that are most effective for your employees. Additionally, an internal content strategy allows you to avoid creating a “black hole” full of stale, disorganized content, and instead save time and frustration by creating the content your team actually needs.
By following these 8 easy steps, you can create an effective internal content strategy that helps boost adoption of your internal processes:
1. Evaluate your audience, their needs, and crucial processes
2. Develop a plan
3. Design your system and content
4. Create relevant content
5. Gather feedback from key stakeholders
6. Communicate and train end users
7. Make it a habit
8. Keep it fresh
The most challenging part in creating an internal content strategy is knowing where to start. Instead of overwhelming yourself with every single piece of content that might need to be created in the future, take an agile approach to content strategy that enables a crawl, walk, run approach to documentation. Start small by outlining the basic process, policies, or information that someone needs to understand. For an accurate forecast on what content you need to create first, consider the following questions.
So, how do you gather the answers to these questions? Perform a needs analysis.
Here are some simple ways to identify needs:
Needs analysis surveys:
Audit internal support channels:
Creating content can easily be overwhelming if you try to do too much at once. Remember, taking a crawl, walk, run approach to content creation helps prevent being overwhelmed and allows you to get your content out to your team in a reasonable timeline.
Once you have a better understanding of the needs of your key audience, build a content map to easily visualize the content that needs to be created for each team, tool, or process. Get your content map template here.
Before you create this content, audit your existing content. You may be surprised to know much of the content you need already exists and might just need an update. Get your content audit template here.
Prioritize your project and create realistic expectations with key stakeholders with a content roadmap. For example, you may start with creating content around the basic information your team needs to know once they first log in to key tools, then work your way up to workflow training, followed by workflow optimization, and then, an extensive process, such as CPQ rollout.
Map out your roadmap then use the example project timeline below as a reference. Use this template to create your own.
Step three is when you start getting into the nitty gritty by creating the design of your content system as well as the content itself.
Create a system design that is easy to manage. Consider the following:
Design content that’s easy to consume. Part one of this blog series dives deeper into best practices for internal documentation. As a reminder: effective content is:
When designing your content, keep ease of use in mind. Use:
Next, you’ll actually build your content (yay!). Traditional content tools like Google Docs or Notion often make knowledge harder to maintain and share across teams. Spekit eliminates that friction by centralizing content and guidance in one platform, automatically surfacing answers in Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, or Slack. With pre-built templates and AI-assisted content creation, you can enable your team in minutes — not weeks.
With Spekit, creating content is as easy as four simple steps. We provide free, pre-built training content so you can start enabling your team in minutes on the most popular tools. You can then transfer this content into Spekit in minutes, bulk assign content based on areas of ownership, and assign this content to your experts.
Tap into the expertise of others on your team to keep content aligned and accurate. Here are a few ways to gather feedback efficiently:
Effective content strategy requires change enablement. Developing an effective content strategy isn’t just about having the right content; it also requires having the right processes in place to ensure changes can be enabled. Change enablement is the key to creating an effective content strategy that will help your business stay ahead of the curve.
These can be big changes that occur at a low frequency but have higher organizational impact (e.g., rolling out a new tool like CPQ) or micro changes that occur at a high frequency but have a lower organizational impact (e.g., a new field in Salesforce).
To effectively communicate change to teams, design a repeatable process. Developing a repeatable and documented change enablement process reduces surprises and eases the friction of change. We recommend creating a “change enablement playbook” with T-shirt sizing for differently sized process changes (S, M, L, XL) and associated communication and training playbooks for each.
For example, a new tool rollout (e.g., CPQ) may be an XL-size change management effort. As such, your change enablement process might involve several email communications leading up to the change to drive awareness, a message from leadership at your department’s all-hands, a formal UAT process, several training webinars, and office hours along with documentation and training — including reinforcement. However, if the change is simply adding a new required field to your Opportunity, it may fall in your Small (S) category. For S changes employees may expect just a written communication and a training video.
When creating your playbook, keep these Dos and Don’ts in mind:
With AI Sidekick, change enablement becomes proactive. When new processes, tools, or fields roll out, Sidekick automatically surfaces updated guidance and training right in the tools where employees work. This ensures no one misses a change and that communication and adoption happen seamlessly.”
To increase adoption of the internal documentation you’re creating, help your employees build the habit.
Lastly, keep your content fresh. The last thing you want is to let the content you’ve worked so hard to create grow stale. There are a few things you can do to ensure that your content stays fresh and engaging.
On a monthly cadence, review top searches and analytics to understand what content is being used, which topics are resonating with users, and identify any gaps.
On a quarterly cadence, create a needs analysis and perform content audits to better inform your next round of content.
Spekit Analytics makes it easy to keep content fresh by showing which resources are most viewed, which need updates, and where knowledge gaps exist. With these insights, you can continuously improve your content strategy based on real engagement data.
Don’t forget to download Spekit’s content strategy kit to get you well on your way to creating effective content for your organization. If you need more help with internal documentation or employee training and onboarding, schedule some time with one of Spekit’s experts today.
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