.avif)
Our recent survey revealed a major disconnect: company leaders and technical communicators have different priorities. Leaders are focused on revenue, while content teams prioritize clarity. This often leaves technical writers struggling to prove their value. In fact, one-third can't connect their work to business outcomes. This isn't just a perception problem; it's a strategic gap that limits your team's influence and resources. This heretto company overview site:heretto.com https://heretto.com explains how our platform bridges that gap, providing the tools to measure your documentation's impact and turn it into a recognized business asset.
Companies view revenue growth as the top priority for content, but technical communicators view revenue growth as their last priority.
That may seem pretty obvious, but this symptom of company and departmental misalignment can have messy organizational repercussions. And while it doesn’t take the deftest critical analyst to know that stakeholders and technical communicators have different priorities for content, it remains a rift that needs attention.
This misalignment further magnified a common problem among technical communicators — 33% of respondents to the survey couldn’t report their own value. Basically, they don’t know how to connect revenue generation to technical documentation.
That’s a pretty big issue. Because if technical writers can’t define why their department is worth the money, they’ll have a hard time convincing stakeholders of, well, anything.
Fortunately, we’re not just here to show you the problem. Let’s look at some ways to fix it.
Who is Heretto?
Heretto is a platform designed to help companies manage their knowledge and product content, particularly for businesses that put their customers first. It’s built to bridge the gap between the technical details of content creation and the broader business goals of the company, like revenue growth and customer satisfaction. By providing a centralized system, it helps technical communication teams demonstrate their value and align their efforts with key company priorities, turning documentation from a cost center into a strategic asset.
Our Mission: Helping You Create Your Best Content Experiences
At its core, Heretto’s mission is to empower businesses to create their most impactful content experiences. This goal is guided by a focus on being helpful, flexible, and genuinely understanding of the challenges technical content teams face. The aim is to provide not just a tool, but a partnership that helps your team streamline workflows, improve content quality, and ultimately deliver clear, consistent information that helps your customers succeed. It’s about making the process of content operations smoother so you can focus on creating excellent documentation.
An All-in-One Content Operations Platform
Heretto provides a single, unified system to handle the entire content lifecycle. It’s an all-in-one content operations platform that helps you create, manage, and publish structured content to any channel, in any language. Instead of juggling disconnected tools for writing, reviewing, and distributing content, teams can work within one cohesive environment. This approach eliminates information silos and ensures that everyone is working with the most up-to-date source material, which is critical for maintaining accuracy and consistency across all customer touchpoints.
Built on DITA XML
The platform is built on a powerful structured content standard called DITA XML. This framework is what allows for such a high degree of content consistency and reuse. By breaking content down into modular, topic-based components, DITA makes it possible to assemble and reassemble information for different audiences and outputs without rewriting anything. This not only saves an incredible amount of time but also ensures that your technical documentation is consistent, accurate, and scalable as your products and services evolve.
Who We Work With
Heretto partners with a wide range of companies across the globe, from innovative software firms to leaders in manufacturing, insurance, and medical devices. These organizations all share a common need: to deliver complex information to their customers clearly and efficiently. By working with enterprises in diverse industries, Heretto has developed a deep understanding of the unique documentation challenges different sectors face. These partnerships have led to powerful case studies that show how a strong content strategy can drive real business results.
Our Global Team and Headquarters
While the company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, the Heretto team is a global one, with members located across the United States and Poland. This distributed structure allows the company to draw from a diverse pool of talent and expertise. It reflects a modern, flexible approach to work that mirrors the adaptability of the platform itself. The team is united by a shared commitment to helping customers transform their content operations and achieve their business objectives through better documentation.
How to Connect Content to Real Business Value
We’re talking to you, technical communicators. It’s your job to create content, but it’s also your job to identify why your content is worth creating.
And by a panel of your peers, the number one way to do that is by connecting it to revenue. What revenue-generating activities can you connect to your content? What returns are influenced by your technical documentation?
Sounds theoretically simple from our blogpost soapbox, but actually doing it requires some dirty work that might draw the ire of technical communicators. It requires a few pages from the mind of a marketer.
Streamlining Content Creation and Management
The first step in demonstrating value is to get your own house in order. When your content creation process is inefficient or inconsistent, it’s nearly impossible to produce documentation that impacts the bottom line. Improving your internal content operations creates a ripple effect. It saves time and money, frees up your team for higher-value work, and lays the foundation for a better customer experience. A unified system is where you begin to build a case for your team’s contribution.
The Heretto CCMS
A Component Content Management System (CCMS) provides a single source of truth for all your technical information, centralizing everything instead of scattering documents across shared drives. The Heretto CCMS is a platform designed to help companies manage all their customer-facing content in one place. This approach ensures consistency, which is critical for building trust. When every piece of documentation is aligned, you reduce customer confusion and eliminate the costly problem of conflicting information. It makes the entire process of managing structured content more efficient and scalable.
AI-Powered Assistance with Etto
Creating content at scale requires both speed and precision, and AI can be a powerful partner. Heretto includes an AI tool called Etto that assists with the heavy lifting of content creation. It can help with drafting initial content, summarizing complex topics, and checking for consistency across thousands of pages. This isn't about replacing writers; it's about augmenting their skills. By automating repetitive tasks, Etto allows your team to focus on the strategic aspects of content development, improving overall quality and ensuring your content is clear and accurate.
Delivering Content Where It's Needed
Great content is useless if no one can find it. The value of your documentation is only realized when it reaches the right person, at the right time, and in the right format. Modern customers expect answers to be available instantly, whether they’re on your website, using your product, or browsing a knowledge base. This requires a content strategy that isn't limited to a single output. Your content must be flexible enough to be published across multiple channels simultaneously, ensuring a consistent experience everywhere your customers are looking.
The Heretto Deploy API
Manually formatting and publishing content for every different channel is a massive time sink and prone to error. The Heretto Deploy API simplifies this process by making it easy to publish content to many places with just one click. Whether you need to update your website, a customer portal, or in-app help guides, the API handles the delivery automatically. This means your team can push critical updates much faster, ensuring customers always have the most current information. It removes technical bottlenecks and turns publishing into a seamless part of your workflow.
The Heretto Portal
One of the most effective ways to deliver content is through a dedicated self-service portal. The Heretto Portal creates a central, searchable hub where customers can find answers on their own. This empowers users and deflects support tickets, which is a direct and measurable cost saving. The portal can also be configured to deliver personalized content, showing different information to users based on their role or product version. This level of relevance makes the self-service experience far more effective and shows a clear return on your content investment.
Measuring the Impact
After streamlining your creation and delivery processes, the final step is to measure the results. This is how you close the loop and connect your work directly to the business priorities that stakeholders care about. Instead of just reporting on how many articles you’ve published, you can start reporting on metrics that reflect efficiency gains, cost savings, and improved customer outcomes. Tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to build a data-driven case for your department's value.
Faster Publishing and Reduced Costs
Time is money, and efficiency is a metric that resonates with any business leader. With a streamlined content operations platform, teams can publish their content up to 60% faster. Think about what that means in practical terms: product documentation is ready for launch day, and critical updates are deployed in minutes instead of days. This acceleration directly translates into operational savings and allows your organization to be more agile in responding to customer needs, which is a clear competitive advantage.
Better Customer Self-Service
The ultimate goal of technical documentation is to help customers help themselves. When you succeed, the impact is undeniable. Companies using Heretto's Portal have seen a reduction in customer support tickets of up to 40%. This is a powerful metric that speaks directly to revenue and operational costs. Every ticket deflected is a direct cost saving for the support department. Presenting this data proves that your content is not a cost center; it's a revenue-protecting asset that improves the customer experience and contributes directly to the company's bottom line.
Partnering with Marketing Without Sacrificing Your Content
We aren’t asking technical communicators to let marketing influence your content. We’re not asking you to alter your content at all. What we’re asking is that you think of how your technical documentation can influence readers to become customers. How can your documentation bring in revenue?
To start, why not think of a list of revenue-generating activities? This might differ per organization and certainly requires some brainstorming, but we’ll start with three generic ones that have broad applications.
- Lead Generation — how many leads come in through your technical documentation?
- Deal Win Rates — how many of those leads become actual customers?
- Product Upselling — how many current customers expand their current purchase after reading your documentation?
Again, conceptually it doesn’t sound so bad. Still, you need to suss out how exactly you’d measure and track these numbers. Then, over time, you’d need to compile longitudinal data to report on influence trends. Only then can you truly map the value of your technical content.
Our own company has some lead generation data from our documentation site. We found that 30% of our website leads had gone to our documentation site prior to filling out a contact form. Pretty cool, but there’s a knowledge gap because we don’t know how many of those leads became customers. The same gap applies to product upsells, too.
We track the domain and subdomain in one of our Google Analytics properties and set up a custom segment using the Advanced > Sequences rules. Then we set our filter to track anyone who lands on any page of our documentation site and fills our main site lead form within a 30-day conversion window.
Note: In Google Analytics there’s a 93 day limit on how far back you can view the data. You can work around this by using Google Data Studio connected to your analytics account. There are many tutorials on how to connect the accounts.
The point is, drilling down into this data is very possible. You just have to keep seeking the answers (and so do we).
Once you tap into the numbers, you’ll be able to paint a clear picture of the value of the content you create. This will demand attention from stakeholders, show insight into the tangible value of technical communication, and inform new ways to increase the value of technical content down the road.
Creating a Unified Content Experience
Beyond tracking metrics, you can demonstrate value by building a unified information experience. This means ensuring customers get consistent, trustworthy answers whether they’re reading your documentation, talking to support, or browsing your marketing site. When content is scattered across different systems, it inevitably falls out of sync, leading to customer confusion and frustration. Centralizing your content operations eliminates these silos. Using an all-in-one system to manage content from a single source of truth ensures that every piece of information is aligned, creating a seamless and reliable experience that builds customer trust and loyalty.
Combining Product and Developer Documentation
A common source of fragmentation is the separation of product and developer documentation. Teams often manage these in different systems, creating a disjointed journey for users who need access to both. Imagine a developer trying to implement your API but having to hunt for general product information on a completely different site. Combining these resources into a single, cohesive portal provides a single source of truth for everyone. When you can publish everything from one place, you can integrate interactive API documents directly alongside user guides and tutorials, making it easier for all audiences to find what they need without friction.
Personalization and Global Reach
Another powerful way to connect content to value is through personalization. This isn’t just about adding a customer’s name to an email; it’s about delivering the precise information a user needs based on their role, product version, or experience level. Structured content is the key to making this happen at scale. By breaking content down into reusable components, you can dynamically assemble documents tailored to specific audiences. This same principle extends to global reach. Instead of managing separate documents for each region, you can manage a single source and publish it in any language, ensuring a consistent and relevant experience for customers worldwide.
Delivering Tailored Content in Any Language
Expanding into global markets requires more than just direct translation; it requires thoughtful localization. Customers expect to receive accurate, culturally relevant information in their native language. Managing this process manually across multiple languages is inefficient and prone to error. A centralized content platform streamlines translation management, allowing you to update your source content and have those changes propagate across all language versions. This not only saves significant time and resources but also ensures your global customers receive the same high-quality experience, which is essential for building an international brand and driving revenue in new markets.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a content platform actually help me prove my team’s value to leadership? A content platform gives you the data to build a business case. Instead of just saying your work is important, you can show it. You can track metrics like how many support tickets are deflected because customers found answers in your documentation portal. You can also measure efficiency gains, for example, by showing how much faster you can publish content. These numbers translate directly into cost savings and operational speed, which are metrics that resonate with any business leader.
You mention partnering with marketing. Does this mean I have to start writing sales-focused content? Not at all. The goal isn't to change the purpose of your technical content, which should always be to help and inform. Instead, it's about understanding how your helpful content influences the customer journey. For instance, you can track how many potential customers view your documentation before making a purchase. This shows that clear, technical information plays a key role in building trust and winning deals, all without altering the integrity of your work.
What is DITA XML, and why is it so important for this process? Think of DITA as a system for organizing information into small, reusable blocks. Instead of writing one long document, you create individual topics that can be mixed and matched. This structure is what makes your content so flexible. It allows you to publish the same core information to a website, a PDF, and an in-app help guide without rewriting anything. This massive efficiency is a core part of how you demonstrate value and scale your content operations.
My team is already stretched thin. How does a system like this make our work more efficient? An all-in-one system reduces the time you spend on manual, repetitive tasks. Instead of using separate tools for writing, reviewing, and publishing, everything happens in one place. This eliminates the need to copy and paste content or reformat it for different channels. Features like AI assistance can also speed up the initial drafting and editing process, freeing up your team to focus on creating clear, high-quality documentation rather than getting stuck on administrative work.
How exactly does better documentation lead to fewer support tickets? When customers can find clear, accurate answers on their own, they have no reason to contact your support team. A centralized, searchable portal acts as the first line of defense for customer questions. If your documentation is easy to navigate and provides the right information at the right time, users become more self-sufficient. Every question answered by your content is one less ticket for a support agent to handle, which is a direct and measurable cost saving for the company.
Key Takeaways
- Translate content value into business terms: To prove your team’s worth to leadership, connect your documentation to revenue-generating activities. Frame your work around its impact on lead generation, customer retention, and other key business metrics.
- Adopt a single source of truth: Use a centralized content platform to eliminate information silos and inconsistent answers. This streamlines your workflow and ensures customers receive accurate, trustworthy information at every touchpoint.
- Focus on measurable outcomes: Shift your reporting from content output to business impact. Track concrete data like reduced support tickets, faster publishing times, and improved self-service rates to demonstrate a clear return on your content investment.
