Project

In 2020, Zapier was rapidly scaling as a company and expanding our user base, and more content was being created than ever. At the same time, the only content guidelines that existed were written back in 2014, hidden on a brand subdomain, and largely outdated.

I identified a need to develop an official content and messaging guide that internal users could use to create any type of content—from blog posts, to emails, to landing pages, to product content—and write about Zapier in a consistent way.

Strategy

Creating a comprehensive content resource was not something I could achieve on my own. As the first non-marketing content hire at Zapier, one of my top priorities when I joined was to set up a monthly cross-functional content meeting with content marketing, editorial, email, and product marketing.

This meeting was the perfect place to raise this idea, and representatives from each team immediately agreed that development of a content and messaging guide was well-aligned with their own problems and initiatives. For example, each team had variations of their own guidelines and templates, but their adoption was poor as these resources were scattered.

We spent several hours discussing the purpose and structure of the guide, and landed on the following three objectives:

Besides the specific rules for each content type, we also identified a number of universal content guidelines (e.g. voice and tone, grammar and mechanics) that would apply to all content types, and decided on the following ten sections.

After each team completed their content sections, I performed a final review of the entire guide to standardize formatting and structure and flesh out leftover work-in-progress content. A small preview of the guide can be viewed below:

Outcome

We launched the finished Zapier Content and Messaging Guide with a three-pronged publicity approach: announcing the launch in the company-wide Slack channel, publishing a post on our internal wiki, and publicizing it at our weekly company all-hands meeting.

We worked with the internal Learning & Development team to include the guide as required reading in the onboarding process for new Zapier employees, and pinned it as a resource in all content channels for visibility and easy reference. For product managers and designers, the guide was also a helpful follow-up resource for writing product content to complement their content design training.

The guide now receives hundreds of views a week, and the content teams are able to process, edit, and review ready-to-publish drafts and content requests more efficiently.