The media organisation’s guide to optimising costs and enhancing efficiency

In today’s competitive media landscape, media and publishing organisations are constantly seeking innovative ways to boost revenue. It’s not always a matter of selling more: lowering costs and increasing efficiency can generate the same net result and offer a realistic scenario to achieve sustainable growth.

To give you a clear idea of what is possible, we’ll discuss several strategies that focus on increasing efficiency and lowering the costs of omnichannel content production.

Boosting content operations and collaboration

Optimising your content operations – the tasks and processes involved in creating, managing and distributing content – means refining workflows, implementing the right tools and adopting best practices to ensure efficient content production. For publishers, this should involve using tools, technologies and workflows that reduce manual labour, minimise delays, optimise resources and boost collaboration. Here’s how it breaks down:

Employ a robust, centralised CMS

Adopting a centralised CMS increases operational efficiency – it allows easy access to, and management of, content across the organisation. Centralising tasks in the content delivery supply chain prevents doubling up on work and ensures consistency in content delivery.

Automate content generation with AI

Employing AI tools such as ChatGPT can reduce the production time and costs of content creation to help generate a variety of content types. The temptation to AI-generate large amounts of content (including images), especially when it is incorporated into a CMS, can be hard to resist. Keep in mind, though, that relying heavily on a tool and leaving out the human factor that will make your content unique may generate undesired outcomes – you don’t want your content to be penalised by Google for being AI-generated. To make the most of using AI in content production processes, consider using an AI governance solution to guide your AI initiatives and prevent backfiring due to erroneous use.

Establish clear processes

Work on establishing clear workflows that streamline the reviewing, editing, approval and publishing stages to help your teams meet deadlines. A smooth workflow from ideation to publication enhances productivity, reduces bottlenecks and guarantees cross-platform content delivery in a timely, organised manner.

Use collaboration tools

A dedicated environment is great, but it’s not the sole condition. Also implement tools and systems that enable seamless communication, task delegation and real-time feedback among writers, editors, designers and others involved in the creative process. Such tools let you enhance team collaboration and project management by streamlining communication, task assignment and progress-tracking.

Streamline content creation with a channel-neutral approach

To reach a broader and more diverse audience, go multichannel and distribute content across a variety of platforms and formats. Develop content for all channels in one go by creating channel-neutral content. Or develop the content for one platform first, then repurpose it for additional channels. For reference, read how Hearst uses WoodWing Studio to cover multichannel publishing needs.