This post is part of a series of “Tactics,” giving you tangible practices to implement in your product education strategy.
Every content producer will have a steadily growing library of content and assets. With product education, it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating new screenshots, GIFs, and videos for each release or product change.
This approach is a ticking timebomb, where at best, you may find yourself with thousands upon thousands of unmanageable assets; at worst, you waste valuable time creating the same types of content and media over and over again.
Here’s how you can get ahead of this issue before it’s too late. If you have read my previous post, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, it’s a great compliment to this one.
Change Once
To put C.O.P.E. into practice, you have to start with a centralized repository of content and assets. This repository needs to be organized and manageable by features like search, folders, and tags, allowing you to find what you’re looking for easily. Once you find what you want to change, you should have the ability to replace the content or asset with a newer version within the repository.
For example:
Changing an old product name to a new one
Updating an outdated screenshot with the latest version
Changing branding assets (like logos, favicons, and more)
Updating an old asset with a new one is simple enough, but the critical next step is the ability to publish that change everywhere it’s currently used.
Publish Everywhere
Once an asset is changed, you need the ability to automatically push that change out to every single place where it is used. This functionality may be built into your CMS, but you’d be surprised at how many don’t include it; you’ll need to explore supplementary tools if it isn't natively provided.
Here are a few standalone tools that have C.O.P.E. support for digital asset management: