Are Your Product Content Costs Spiralling Out of Control?
Ensuring consistent, high-quality content across all of your product lines isn’t just important, it’s vital. Time and time again, evidence has shown the huge impact that this one task can have on sales and brand presence.
But it’s not just one task, is it? It’s a dizzy array of processes that need to be combined and coordinated across multiple teams. When working at a global level, the complexity just keeps climbing. It shouldn’t be a surprise that brands often find themselves in a position where content costs begin to skyrocket.
As with many process problems, knowing where to look can be half the battle. Here are some of the most common product content cost-multipliers that we’ve helped clients with over past 15 years.
Image Creation and Translation
As we’ve seen in our recent post, automated tools for image translation are beginning to evolve. However, as much as they may promise an easier and cheaper future, the current costs are still all-too present. Put simply, the more complex your images are, the harder they can be to amend and translate. Both graphic design and translation resources aren’t always inexpensive and abundant, and late-stage rejections and amendments can cause the price to ramp up considerably. Add in the opportunity cost of any delays, and image problems can have a significant impact on your final costs. By factoring in ease of translation and amendment to your initial image creation process, you can help safeguard against these delays.
Translation Overspend
Even without the added complexity of imagery, translation and localisation services are expensive. By approaching it locally and at a piecemeal level, you can lose out on the negotiating advantage that comes from a central process. AI-assisted translation still requires constant supervision and amendment by human language specialists to maintain quality, and ultimately that is what you’re going to be paying for. However, with recent advances in technology and services it’s recommended that you review your translation choices on a regular basis. Are your providers giving you the level of quality that you require? Are there more-efficient alternatives out there? The space is changing rapidly, and offers plenty of opportunity for cost savings.
Resource and Organisation
Stop throwing people at the problem. Content creation brings with it a large amount of repetitive, low-skill tasks that need to be completed. Given all of the intersecting global processes involved, it’s easy to find work and roles being duplicated across teams. Organising from a central position means you can use tools such as SaaS platforms to automate administrative and repetitive tasks. This allows your teams concentrate on higher-level tasks that will return even greater dividends in the long run. Joined-up processes allow for greater collaboration between cross-functional peers, while established workflows with automated notifications will ensure nothing gets lost between the cracks.
Evaluate Your Solutions
Global content creation inevitably requires external solutions, whether platforms or services. Time and time again, we have encountered clients who are struggling; the solutions they’ve signed up for aren’t providing them with… well, all the solutions. Impressive high-level features can often mask an inability or an unwillingness to look after the basic functionality you need. And contracting different providers within the same function can lead to a mess of conflicting requirements and unclear processes as they struggle to integrate. Once again, approaching this from a central perspective with a clear understand of your individual teams’ needs can help you evaluate the effectiveness of any given solution, and how likely you are to use it to its fullest potential. Not only do you stand to lose by paying for services you neither need nor want, the difficulties integrating sub-optimal services into your workflows can be a cost generator all by itself.
We get it. Content can be a complex and confusing thing to approach, but Digishare has been working to help brands resolve these headaches for fifteen years and more. Our RAMP platform is specifically designed to be single place to solve all of your retail listing and content problems. We offer free assessments of your current creation, listings, and publishing processes, and we’d love to talk you through how take them to the next level. Contact us now to have an informal chat, or explore a free trial of our RAMP platform.