What a Waste – How Much is Your Content Marketing Process Costing You?

 In Content Marketing, Organizational Change

They say process makes perfect. Perfection isn’t usually obtainable in any area, but process is the king of efficiency and effectiveness. Unfortunately, many enterprises don’t have a content marketing process. Or if they do, it’s not very effective. And that can cost you severely.

Here’s a quick story to illustrate the point. A while back, a prospect told us about an incident where they wasted over $20,000 due to duplication of work in their video production. Due to geographic siloes within their marketing department, they unknowingly hired separate agencies to create the same video!

You may be thinking, how did that happen? Where was the breakdown in communication? Why didn’t they have transparency into projects? Again, it goes back to process. Without adopting a process that facilitates planning, transparency, and communication, waste is inevitable.

Enterprise content teams can overcome these hurdles. And now we’re going to tell you how!

Where Is the Waste Coming From?

If you’ve ever seen an old-school horror movie, then you know the phrase “the calls are coming from inside the house.”

So, that trope connects to the idea of waste in your content marketing process because the cause is internal. The waste includes time, resources, and money. Here are the biggest areas of waste.

Most Meetings Aren’t Necessary

How much time does your content team spend in meetings? Likely too much, and video meetings are still on the schedule even with remote teams and hybrid work models. Meetings are notorious time drainers, and most accomplish very little, even if they have agendas. Here are some examples:

  • Status update meetings: Do you really need to spend an hour every week for updates? If you do, that means there’s a big problem with your process. If you had a content calendar that detailed every project and its status, all the necessary information would be available.
  • Brainstorming sessions: These can be fruitful when you lead with specific exercises and goals. Just throwing time on the calendar to produce ideas won’t.

Any meeting can be a waste if it’s not essential and expectations aren’t set. The best thing you can do is provide agendas, define objectives, and leave the meeting with action items.

Inboxes Overrun by Emails Waste Time and Often Don’t Resolve the Issue

The number of emails you receive every day seems to increase exponentially. While email will also be a necessary communication and collaboration channel, many go blind to the cascade of messages they receive every day.

As a result, important emails get lost or buried. Questions remain unanswered. Projects get lost in purgatory.

In considering how to better communicate in your content marketing process, you need technology that streamlines and simplifies. By deploying a content marketing platform, you can use it to be your notification system. It should automatically generate notifications for task creation and completion. They appear on the main dashboard, so users don’t have to keep track of their inboxes.

Additionally, having such a solution reduces or eliminates status updates. It’s all there in the content calendar. If anything changes with a project, the system delivers notifications of this.

Workflows Are Woes

Content workflows are fundamental to your content marketing process. While your content strategy is the guiding force, the workflows that come from it are the tactical elements. If you don’t have them, the time you waste on each project could be substantial.

If you do have workflows, but not all users abide by them, or there’s no formality, then there’s waste here, too.

The solution is to embed these workflows within your technology. You can customize these for each type of project. For example, your content workflow for a video would be different from a blog. You can also automate them so that the tasks populate and assign to team members with a few clicks.

You’ll be much more efficient and, therefore, able to increase your content production. This ensures that everyone is making the most of their time, and manual processes aren’t hindering them.

Reporting and Analytics Shouldn’t Require Loads of Manual Effort

Another area of waste occurs in reporting. Content analytics is critical to determining how content is performing and its ROI. Data for these will be from multiple sources — website, social media, email marketing, etc.

If your team must manually compile this information, they aren’t efficient. Instead, a content marketing solution can aggregate data from all areas and deliver automated reporting and dashboards. You’ll have better and faster access to insights, which is vital to tying content marketing to revenue generation.

Searching for Assets and Files Can Be a Wild Goose Chase

Is the question, “Where is that?” asked way too often? If you have multiple repositories for assets and files, then the answer is likely yes. Maybe it’s in a Google Drive? Box folder? OneDrive? Knowing where your assets are saves time and ensures that you can easily access old versions for updates or repurposing.

Content marketing software can eliminate this “hunt” by providing you with an asset library. It’s searchable, so anyone can find graphics, files, or other content.

What Does All This Waste Add Up To?

There are two sides to waste — time and money. Both are equally valuable. For time, it’s about eliminating manual tasks and unproductive activities.

When it comes to money, here’s a hypothetical of that below.

process costs - content marketing process

What more could you do with an extra $62,400 every year? For larger enterprises, that number is even higher. Efficiency matters in content marketing. The more you can produce consistently and with less waste, the more likely you will see the returns you want.

And it all starts with process — one you can perfect with DivvyHQ.

Cut the Waste with DivvyHQ

With our platform, you can minimize or eradicate most of the familiar wastes associated with content marketing. The solution is process-centric and designed specifically for content marketers. See how it can change your processes today by starting a free trial.

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