Content Authoring: 3 Powerful Pains You Can Solve Right Now

Your learning and training materials have to do a big job: inform, train, and educate employees. But that’s a tough job if you don’t have a content authoring tool and if your content is out-of-date, dispersed, and not engaging

One of the biggest headaches we hear about from our customers is how to create, update, distribute, and measure learning and training content fast enough to meet demands while ensuring that the content is relevant to the job employees are doing.  

Wouldn’t it be nice to reduce learning content authoring time by over 30%, and to know that the content you’re creating is effective? At Inkling, we solve this problem!

You can do both (and more) with the right content-authoring software.

What is Content Authoring?

Content authoring is the creation and organization of digital content using specialized tools. It involves structuring and formatting material for blogs, articles, e-books, presentations, and e-learning. Content authors develop engaging and informative content to convey messages and deliver captivating experiences to audiences.

Pain #1: Creating and Updating Engaging Authoring Content

Put your energy and resources into content strategy, and not into learning complicated content authoring software. A no-code authoring tool makes designing engaging digital training content as easy as editing a Word document. You can even drag and drop a variety of media types like videos, slideshows, checklists, quizzes, and more. By using interactive media, you can more effectively engage employees than with a static document or bland Powerpoint presentations with the dreaded “next” button. 

Another key area of creating relevant content is collaborating with subject matter experts (SMEs). This can be cumbersome and challenging with traditional methods of content creation. Keeping track of edits and version control is a nightmare. But an authoring tool that leverages standard templates, widgets, and design patterns makes it easy because all SMEs need to do is provide content, best practices, or simply edit existing content. You don’t have to worry about version control either because this kind of tool tracks ongoing comments, edits, and requests so everyone is on the same page.

Pain #2: Distributing Learning and Development Content so It’s Easily Accessible

Once your dynamic employee content is created, ensuring that the right employees have access is critical. That means no matter where they are or what device they’re using, they can view and interact with it as they would any other consumer-based piece of content (think mobile apps). 

Sharing your learning and development content on the web or through an app is easy. You can choose who sees what without a lot of coding experience and be able to define accessibility by learner location, role, or any other criteria. And when something changes, you can quickly update it, publish it, and know that learners will see it. That’s because instant notifications are built-in. All the right people get alerts when important updates are made. Even if learners are offline, they’ll get updates and notifications as soon as they go online.

Pain #3: Measuring the Effectiveness of Employee Learning Content

With your employee learning content looking beautiful and available to anyone who needs it, you’ll want to make sure you know how and when it’s being used. You also want to know what content is driving business value. 

A dashboard that gives you real-time data to view who is using what content, how often they access it, and what they are using it for. Customizing dashboards means you have powerful visualizations that make sense for your organization. This data insight gives you direction on what content needs updating and what content is performing well. 

If you want to be like our customers and get rid of your content authoring headaches, discover more about content authoring software that enables you to simplify content creation and accelerate training here.