Article

Mike Owen
Mike Owen 19 April 2017

Are your content production inefficiencies limiting your growth?

Relevant, timely and value-added content is now the ‘given’ to ensure all customer and prospect touchpoints are covered. However the cost of inefficiency in the production process is limiting how much quality content production can be handled.

Content growth

It is estimated that over 70% of B2B marketers expect to be creating more content in 2017 than in 2016 (Content Marketing Institute). Relevant, timely and value-added content is now the ‘given’ to ensure all customer and prospect touchpoints are covered and that the opening-up of new channels will only amplify the need.

Rise in ‘Hidden costs’

Research carried out by Gleanster/Kapost in 2015 stated that whilst two thirds of mid-large B2B companies ranked content marketing as a Top 3 priority in terms of future planning, nearly 25% of their budgets are wasted on inefficient content operations and processes bringing significant ‘hidden’ costs to the bottom-line, reducing the ability to grow.

While successful organisations advise they are increasing their total marketing budgets year on year, there is worrying concern that there is lack of content strategy driving this forward. The upshot of this is that there is an increasing amount of ‘hidden costs’ of content creation through wastage, non-reuse, redundant content and time searching for content.

Workflows and processes

The ability to improve internal creative workflows and processes is key. This is despite the massive investment in technology to create content (see chiefmartec.com). As more new technology is involved, the more the production process becomes fragmented and disruptive and costs ultimately rise.

Largely this is due to the lack of focus on the client’s own production processes and interactive systems. It must be considered that top performers may have people and process in place, yet they still need the technology to integrate smoothly.

The biggest challenge, is managing the overall content process. Process elements such as approval delays, communication between stakeholders, inconsistent tasks for each type of content, missing deadlines, lack of a centralised calendar or just general chaos, that figure highly in the report as inefficient factors. (Percolate)

Top performing organisations regularly analyse

Top performing organisations regularly analyse and audit to remove inefficiency from the content production process.

Common in these companies is to ability leverage technology to help bring efficiencies to workflow and approval processes which can result in significant cost savings and allow greater capacity to produce more content with the same level of resource. Very few technologies can be adapted for an organisation’s own marketing processes.

Significant cost savings and increased productivity

Top performing organisations are using technologies that encompass, smooth running processes through back-end integrations, automated workflow, content creation, management and multi-channel delivery from a single system. These are ensuring cost savings of over 30% and productivity gains that can deliver over double the amount of content with the same resource.

So why not seize the opportunity to unlock your marketing production process, make marketing budgets go further with a speedy ROI, which may speed further growth.

 

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