Content as a Business Asset: Maximize Your Enterprise Content ROI

Why understanding your content’s value is crucial

Content is as valuable as any of your best employees. Here’s how to make it work as hard as you do. 

Hi! Before we get started, we need you to do something quickly. It’s going to make this blog even more useful. If you can already answer the following questions, jot the numbers down somewhere and feel free to keep reading. 

1. How many pages of web content does your organization create and maintain? 
2. How much money do you spend on creating (and maintaining) a page of web content monthly?

Let’s say that a “page” is about 250 words, and for this blog, we’re going to limit the discussion to content on your company website. 

If you’re thinking “this is starting to get complicated,” trust us, it’s better if you use real stats from your organization. 

The value of your enterprise content asset is about more than simply uncovering the number of pages and their production costs. It’s also about understanding your content’s business value and the critical role it plays in delivering the customer experience. Here’s an example: 

• A typical Fortune 2000 company may have 30+ million visits per year to its website content. 
• People, on average, spend about 23 minutes per visit, which means customers are interacting directly with content for almost 700 million minutes per year.

All that time that customers spend with your content is (*drum roll*) customer experience.  

Your content is there to represent your brand when people in your enterprise can’t. Its role is to provide a seamless customer experience, start conversations, and build customer relationships that substitute for face-to-face interactions. Why? Because consumers love to learn about brands independently, and there’s no team in your company that can be as omnipresent — across the world and different channels — as your content can. 

And yet, most companies’ content engine performs like an employee with burnout. It has a lot of potential, but it’s working as hard as it can and still falling short of delivering true business value. 

The truth is, many enterprise content operations are inefficient and ineffective — and it’s costly for your business. It stops you from being able to meet your strategic and operational goals, like creating amazing content across all your digital touchpoints, making sure the process of creating content doesn’t sap the productivity you need in other business areas, and protecting your organization from the risk associated with poor quality content. 

So, how much is your current content worth? Well, it turns out that because a lot of content creation happens alongside people’s primary professional roles, that cost doesn’t appear on your company balance sheet. And yet, you’re still paying real people, real money to create it and maintain it. 

The true cost of web content

Here’s a small example for web content:

Cost of Creating and Maintaining Enterprise Web Content Annually	Estimate*
Number of owned web pages created per month	400
Creation cost per page	$750
Cost to create per month   Cost to maintain per month (15% of cost to create)	$300,000   $45,000
Annual cost to create   Annual cost to maintain	$3,600,000   $540,000
Total annual cost	$4,140,000

*estimates derived from research conducted by Acrolinx

Okay, so take another look at your little piece of paper with your web content numbers and replicate our example. Are you surprised?  

This is just one small step toward estimating the value of your enterprise content asset. Remember, we’re still only talking about web content. But you’re likely producing many different content types for a range of services or products. And (sorry to break it to you), you might be paying a fortune, when really, you could be maximizing the value of all that content. 

The content lottery: What could you do with the savings?

Now’s the time to let yourself dream. This is what we like to call the “content lottery” question: 

What would you do with the savings if you could improve the cost of content creation in your enterprise? 

The consequences of not understanding how to improve the ROI of your enterprise content leads to people putting in effort where it creates the least amount of value. And that has a tremendous impact on your revenue. Which is why Acrolinx prioritizes first uncovering how much your company content is worth – before calculating how much you can save with greater alignment and efficiency. 

Acrolinx can help you bring out the best in your content, much like an inspiring leader brings out the best in their teams. But it all starts with recognizing the value of enterprise content. Then, you’re ready to give your tired content engine the VIP treatment, by bringing insights to where teams are creating content, shortening the editorial process, and using analytics to continually improve it. 

Ready to maximize your content ROI?

Ready to begin? Download our new mini guide, Content as an Asset: How to increase the value of your corporate content operation. It prepares you for a productive conversation about how much you’re spending on content creation (and maintenance) today, and how Acrolinx can help your enterprise create high-value technical and marketing content more efficiently and effectively.