Most organizations have a hidden goldmine of content. The problem is: they can’t consistently access their content internally to get the most ROI across their digital experience. Sound familiar?
When content is dispersed across an organization in this way, your content creation teams can spend enormous amounts of time and money creating stellar content, only to spend even more resources duplicating efforts for future campaigns — instead of optimizing what already exists.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the true cost of poor content management to help you discover how your brand can tackle this initiative and start delivering cost-effective content and asset management to fuel better customer experiences across channels.
True cost #1: Time
Poor content management significantly reduces employee productivity. In a recent study by Canto, marketers reported that the amount of time wasted looking for digital files can add up to 3-6 weeks out of the year.
As you might imagine, the frustrations caused when missing or siloed content results in the marketer creating duplicate content because they can’t find or access the content they’re looking for (or, were simply unaware of its existence).
It’s also fair to say that if a company can’t locate, manage, and track its content and assets effectively, it also doesn’t have the key metrics to determine which content offers the greatest ROI.
Without knowing which content pieces are performing and which aren’t, you may also be wasting time and resources producing non-performing assets — in addition to creating duplicate content. Which leads us to our next true cost.
True cost #2: Money
Inefficiency can lead to substantial costs that impact the company’s bottom line. Not only does poor document management waste employee time and lead to expensive duplication efforts, but it can also impact the organization’s ability to retain talent.
There’s no question that creating quality content is a resource-intensive process. However, those efforts lose their ROI value quickly if the content can’t be easily found, shared, and repurposed across channels, regions, or languages by marketers.
In fact, statistics show that 51% of marketers waste money producing or recreating assets that go unused because people don’t know they exist or can’t find them.
Plus, the inevitable frustrations that workers experience due to unorganized document control and processes lead to higher employee turnover, as a result. When you factor this into the equation, you need to account for the expenses related to recruiting, onboarding, and training workers, as well.
True cost #3: Limited personalization
The true cost of poor content management reaches far beyond wasted resources and has huge impact on the overall customer experience in ways that are far more difficult to measure. Today’s customers expect digital dexterity from their favorite brands, but enterprises that are failing to step up their marketing strategy often comes down to mismanaged assets.
The key to personalized user experiences is having the ability to retrieve and deliver relevant content. With the multitude of channels and customer touchpoints marketers now have to personalize, it’s very difficult to manage the sheer volume of content without some form of automation.
However, without the ability to tag and organize content, there’s little chance for marketing teams to automate the process effectively. Without a centralized content repository, there’s little chance for consistent tagging practices to power automation.
In an effort to support new channels quickly, many organizations have hastily supported new digital touchpoints (think Amazon Echo and smart watches) in a haphazard manner. Because their content and assets are fragmented across different back-end siloes, marketers once again must manually duplicate content for new channels, which often leads to content that’s off-brand or not properly optimized.
Content created for one digital channel is hard to adapt for delivery to another touchpoint. Without channel-agnostic content at hand, marketers are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to creating the content required to drive personalization across global channels.
True cost #4: Inability to scale
Content has a lifecycle. And companies should continually optimize this lifecycle as their customer experience evolves. If content flows through an organization smoothly, scaling to support new channels and markets isn’t a problem.
However, if content is stuck in fragmented siloes, with no searching or tagging system in place to help marketers find relevant, on-brand content quickly, scaling becomes a nightmare.
As we saw in the last point, content is the fuel for personalized digital experiences. A disjointed, disconnected, and disorganized content management process simply won’t cut it. Poor content management creates a bottleneck for marketers who need to quickly leverage new or existing content to adapt to regions, industries, or languages, as needed.
Even if departments can locate their goldmine of content, if there is no system or process in place to repurpose assets for new channels or touchpoints, the brand in question will find that its omnichannel marketing opportunities are limited, slowed, or costly, too.
It puts a considerable burden on organizations, hampering collaboration among stakeholders, and hindering communication and coordination efforts.
True cost #5: The opportunity cost(s)
Moving quickly is crucial for enterprises, and speed in the digital sense requires immediate access to content during time-sensitive situations. In addition, it means companies always need the right content readily available for marketers to launch new campaigns, landing pages, and social media posts on the fly.
If there’s something relevant trending on social media, for example, marketers need to access content quickly, so they capitalize on the opportunity. Poor content management, however, prevents companies from retrieving the right content during the most crucial times.
Moreover, if the brand does manage to scale, poor content management leads to inconsistent brand messaging or content that’s not localized or personalized for new regions and markets. Once again, the “solution” is to duplicate and re-hash content perpetually, fueling the vicious cycle of resource waste and lagging go-to-market.
Tag, search, and filter your way to scalability
If your organization is running into these costly content management mistakes, you likely need systems in place that can manage channel-agnostic content, which can quickly be delivered to mobile, websites, smartwatches, and more. The key to efficient content management is implementing a system that acts as a content hub.
Implementing an effective document management strategy with a centralized hub will help your company avoid major liabilities like security risks, costly errors, productivity losses, and compromised client relations, and offer better customer experiences.
A content hub is also designed to enable your organization to streamline the process of creating, storing, managing, and retrieving content required to power your brand experiences. It’s essential that the software you choose has the ability to tag content with keywords or categories. Tagging content is the key to enabling employees or automated systems to retrieve content through searches or filters quickly and efficiently.
Auto-tagging capabilities like what’s available with Sitecore’s solution can streamline content management for enterprise organizations. Curating content using the metadata and editorial portals also helps content managers to find content in the right context for right experience.
Learn more about Sitecore Content Hub ONE