Want to know a dirty secret about creating content at scale? For most big enterprises, it’s usually a pretty inefficient process. As a result, lots of companies wind up spending more money and taking longer than intended to get their content out the door and in front of their customers. Over the long run, that can be a bad strategy for your business because it reduces output, increases time to market, and ultimately puts an unnecessary drag on your company.
So what exactly is preventing enterprises from being efficient content creators? There are lots of reasons, but in this post we’ll look at some of the most common systemic issues companies typically face.
Your Company Creates Content in Silos
In an ideal world, all of your content might be centrally coordinated or created by a defined team. But in most cases, that’s simply not the reality. Instead, you’ve typically got different teams, business lines, industry experts, and offices that all have their own unique approach to creating the content they need without much regard for each other.
Unfortunately, when lots of different teams create content without any kind of centralized oversight, it becomes an inefficient process. You miss out on economies of scale, meaning that it just takes longer and costs more. Not only that, you’re more likely to find teams creating duplicate content and ending up with content of varied quality that has the potential to undermine your marketing and brand. And unfortunately, lots of that content never gets used and simply goes to waste.
Your Subject Matter Experts Are Wasting Time on Low-Value Work
Subject matter experts (SMEs) are essential for creating high-impact content that’s both technically accurate and provides value to your audience. It’s great to tap into their knowledge and to get their help writing and editing on specific topics, but given that they’re expensive resources, it’s important to manage their time carefully.
Yet all too often, SMEs wind up editing their company’s content not to make substantive changes, but rather to correct grammatical issues, fix spelling mistakes, or make stylistic changes. That’s obviously not the best use of their time and a sure fire way to exponentially drive up the true cost of creating content.
You’re Relying on Editors to Save the Day
In-house editors are great resources. They can serve as a critical stopgap by making sure that all of the content they review is ready for prime time. But the problem is that they’re expensive and, unless you hire them in droves, they probably won’t have the capacity to review all of your company’s content. Before using Acrolinx, at large enterprises like VMware for example, editors were only able to review one percent of the company’s total content output. It simply wasn’t scalable and created considerable bottlenecks. Given the demand being placed on editors’ time, the review process was adding days or even weeks to the content creation process.
Your Source Content is Driving up Your Translation Costs
Global enterprises need a content strategy that delivers for global audiences. That means translating one piece of content into lots of different languages. While that can be a costly endeavor in the best of circumstances, that’s especially true if the source content you’re beginning with isn’t well written. If that content is unnecessarily wordy, for example, it means you’ve got extra words to translate that don’t add any value to the end content, thus driving up costs. And if the writing is unclear, the translators have to guess at the meaning, which inevitably makes the process take longer, while reducing accuracy.
For companies that need content in many different languages, having low-quality source content can be a real problem, resulting in delays and unnecessarily high translation costs.
What’s Making Your Content Operation Inefficient?
There are lots of reasons why content creation at your company isn’t as efficient as it should be. And while that might not matter when you look at any one individual piece of content, when you think about all of the content your company creates collectively in any given year – from blog posts to social media to digital content to technical product content and beyond – the scope and scale of the problem begins to take shape.
Ultimately, if you want to create efficiencies, you need ways to govern the content creation process so that it’s a streamlined process. One way to achieve this is by using the right content governance technology. Doing so will allow you to automate essential parts of the creation process like applying quality control standards. In that way, you can save time and money by allowing people to focus on higher-value work. That’s a win-win for everyone involved.
