Content is an invaluable part of every business model; it provides the voice of your company to your customers. Most companies have a team of people solely dedicated to creating content or they outsource the work; either way, content development could be costing your company thousands of dollars every month (if not every week). While quality content is always a solid investment for your company, there are ways to cut costs and save time by investing in a content management system (CMS).

What is Content Management?

Content management is a way of organizing all of the content that a particular organization uses regularly. A CMS stores and organizes all of your diverse content in the most efficient way possible so your team can easily find, reuse, change, translate and publish content.

Perhaps you already know you need a CMS system but your manager isn’t quite convinced. If that’s the case, you may find the following six tips helpful. They explain why a content management system should be your solution to some of the most common content-related problems and how to justify the costs the costs of implementing the new system.

1. Bring Scattered Content Under Control

There’s a good chance that your company’s wealth of content is scattered throughout the organization. Employees in different departments of the company may use various content pieces and modify them, thereby creating multiple versions of the same piece of content in multiple formats.

Content Management Systems represent the very best answer for introducing a universal organization system for all forms of content. A content management system will help consolidate all of your company’s important assets into a central repository, where they’ll be accurately and intuitively filed and made available to those who have access.

Creating a centralized data storage repository will eliminate duplicate versions of content by helping your company keep track of which versions of the content are drafts, revisions and the final products. A CMS ensures that all your content is accurate and the most up-to-date version.

According to our clients’ self-reported results over a 10-year period, using our CMS to help manage, create, reuse and locate content will reduce editorial timelines by an average of 59%.

2. Eliminate Time and Money Wasters

The editorial process for just about any type of publication can be both lengthy and stressful. Not only does a CMS organize all parts of your content, but it will also allow your employees to save time when editing. With a CMS, they only have to make the change to one piece of content for all the documents that contain the content to be corrected. Creating the same wording in your content will ensure consistent branding and communication.

A CMS also makes it easy to cross reference content and links in all of your publications. Our CMS also gives you the ability to automate content processing, which means employees will save time from performing redundant tasks.

One of our clients reported an overall $54 million saved after 11 years of using Vasont’s CMS.

3. Repurpose Existing Content for New Publications

Companies that limp along with their content collection in disarray can experience a number of unfortunate problems and setbacks. Chief among these is the problem of creating similar publications.

Past projects may have used a number of content assets that since then have been heavily modified or even lost, making it difficult to find a specific piece of content when you need it again. After all, who wants to start a new publication from scratch if they don’t have to?

A content management system may be the missing link your organization needs to help keep track of previously used assets, ensuring that they’re always kept accessible when similar publications need to be created. The Vasont CMS makes it easy to reuse existing content to build new publications in minutes.

Under a CMS system, companies of all types are able to reuse, on average, about 71 percent of their existing content in future projects.

4. Control Access to Content

One of the potentially overlooked problems with existing content solutions is their inherent lack of security measures. Under your existing content organization scheme, there’s a good chance that quite a few people have access to your company’s assets, which means your company has left itself vulnerable to an assortment of potential security problems.

A reliable content management system isn’t only about organizing and streamlining your content; it’s also about simplifying and securing your employees’ access to that content. Under a CMS, user privileges are created and distributed to each employee, granting them access to only the content they need to complete their work. With unique credentials for each employee, your company will eliminate any security threats and prevent changes from unauthorized users.

5. Increase Workflow Efficiency

A quality content management system will become an integral part of the workplace. The Vasont CMS allows employees to schedule editorial tasks and will help manage the business process of creating, translating, and publishing content. Employees who have access can remotely author and collaborate with other employees within the system. They will be able to see each other’s changes and comments, and they can keep track of the editorial schedule.

A content management system can provide automated reminders for each employee about his or her upcoming due dates. In addition, you’ll even be able to automate some of the repetitive editorial tasks to save even more time.

6. Create Multilingual Publications in a Snap

Depending on the type of publications your organization produces, there’s a good chance that you’re required to make them available in a variety of languages. This is especially true for the company that publishes user manuals for consumer-level products.

One of the marquee features of the Vasont content management system is the ability to both simplify and cut down on the expenses of publishing documentation in multiple languages. If a CMS has full Unicode support, your company will be able to update and translate small pieces of content at a time, rather than documents in their entirety. This feature in the Vasont CMS has saved organizations millions of dollars in translation costs.

Conclusion and Case Studies

There is one simple business truth underpinning the above points of interest, and it has to do with what it takes to not only survive but also thrive in the modern business world.

This truth is that maintaining a competitive advantage often comes down to maintaining flexibility. Content management systems are the obvious solution, where multiple authors and pieces of content can work together in perfect synergy – all kept on the “same page,” as it were, both literally and figuratively.

Part of maintaining flexibility has to do with creating avenues for fast and effective communication. We are living in an era where communication is more fast-paced and crucial than ever before. In other words, maintaining your organization’s ability to collaborate effectively has never been more important.

If your boss needs more convincing after that, you may want to start dropping some big names that have benefited greatly from their investment in a content management system. These case studies are available in black and white; proof that these aren’t abstract concepts, but rather real-world solutions that real companies have benefited from.

Take, for example, Merck & Co., which found that its hundreds of doctors around the world could now contribute content into the same pool of resources to complete one cohesive project. Then there’s Hewlett-Packard, which saved well over $60 million in the creation of technical documents.

The list of major companies goes on, all of which have discovered what it is to become truly efficient under the guidance of Vasont’s CMS. Even if your organization doesn’t bump shoulders with these industry giants, imagine what you could do with the same tools they use to maintain their success.

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