Costly Content Production Mistakes You’d Be Wise to Avoid

Producing great content at scale can be costly. Large enterprises often have hundreds or even thousands of writers on their payroll, not to mention all of the other professionals who spend at least some of their time contributing to, reviewing, or approving content. Practically speaking, that means there’s often a lot of overhead associated with content production, which can make delivering ROI difficult.

At the root of the problem is the fact that most companies lack the tools necessary to make sure they’re producing content efficiently and cost-effectively. That’s bad for business because it not only means that it takes more time to produce less content, it also means that they often can’t keep up with stakeholders’ demand. To help put this into context, let’s look at some of the content production mistakes most large enterprises wind up making that are costing them a fortune.

The Brand Consistency Dilemma

Within large companies, teams often produce content in silos. Since there typically isn’t much communication between those teams about what their content needs are, what content they’re working on, or what standards they’re following, you wind up with different variations of content — with some that are dramatically off brand. Brand inconsistency isn’t just confusing, it can weaken both your marketing efforts and customer engagement, in addition to customer satisfaction. A better production strategy is to unite your content creators around one clear voice and one set of brand standards, to deliver consistent messaging across your organization. 

Low-Quality Source Content Is a Liability

Global enterprises can easily spend millions of dollars each year translating their content for different audiences around the world. And while that’s a necessary cost of doing business overseas, the reality is that translation and localization are expensive if your source content isn’t high-quality content. If translators need to spend extra time trying to decipher meaning or translating superfluous words, it slows the process down and costs more money. To prevent that, you need to make sure your content isn’t simply error-free, but that it’s also clear and concise. (By the way, for advice on running better translations, see this guide)   

Getting into the Rut of Relying On Editors

A great editor is worth his or her weight in gold. The problem is that in-house editors aren’t a great solution at enterprise scale. To review all of the content that a large corporation produces (everything from content marketing to digital, social media, and technical content), you’d need a small army of editors, which is typically cost-prohibitive. Instead, you could get by with fewer editors, but the trade-off would be having much slower turnaround times, thus increasing time to market. Either way, it’s a suboptimal solution that’s going to wind up costing you more money than it should.

Flying Blind Because You Lack Data-Driven Insights

Data is critical for effective decision-making across every aspect of business, including content creation. If you don’t have analytics on how your teams create content or how that content is performing with your audience, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to refine your content workflows. Ideally, you’ll want a metrics dashboard that gives you the insights you need so you can direct precious resources — like the limited number of highly skilled editors you have on staff — to the places where they’ll have the greatest impact. 

What’s the Solution?

If you want to avoid wasting time and money and improve how your company produces content, you’re going to need the right tools, policies, and frameworks in place to govern content production. A content governance platform like Acrolinx automates all of this work for you. By centralizing your content strategy and style guidelines, for example, it eliminates the risk of content that’s off-brand or off-voice. Meanwhile, because it learns your enterprise content standards and helps your writers apply them, it’s able to improve the quality and consistency of your content without the need for additional human editors. Finally, it delivers precise analytics you can use to gain deeper insights into content production at your company, thus helping you continually improve your content. 

For any enterprise looking to deliver greater ROI through all of their content types, adopting a content governance solution is mission-critical. Learn more about Acrolinx and our content governance platform in our short explainer video.