The ROI of content reuse comes from significant time, cost and resource savings associated with decreased development time & faster time to market.
Intelligent content reuse is essential to effective personalization at scale, as it allows core content to be repurposed across audiences, with unique contextual content elements added as appropriate to create truly personalized content experiences.
When content is developed for one-off use, it is impossible to reuse published content for different audiences and formats without duplication. As a result, creating and publishing — not to mention updating and maintaining — content deliverables for different audiences and delivery channels becomes both increasingly costly and time consuming as you increase in scope or scale.
The ROI of content reuse is driven by decreasing the time and resources required to create and manage content, reducing time to market and improving accuracy and consistency across the extended enterprise.
What makes content reusable?
1. Reusable content is succinct & self-contained
Reusable content must be self-contained in short, logical chunks (or “components,”) that can stand on their own or be grouped together with other unique content components. Reusable content isn’t created as a long-form document, instead it’s built with many individual content building blocks.
2. Reusable content is flexible & format agnostic
Reusable content isn’t tied to a specific format, such as PowerPoint, Word, PDF, Captivate, Articulate, etc. It’s format agnostic, built in a flexible format like XML, so it can be endlessly reused across any desired format—including those that don’t even exist yet.
3. Reusable content is evergreen & built to last
Reusable content must be built to last. It should focus on descriptions, instructions, examples, etc., that aren’t likely to change often (and if they do change, it’s imperative to have a reuse strategy that allows you to update them efficiently). Contextual content can then be added around the evergreen, reusable content to tailor the overall content experience for the appropriate audience, channel, location, and use case.
With truly reusable content, suddenly it becomes easy for organizations to customize content components and add the necessary context to deliver truly personalized content experiences, on any channel, in any format, for any number of diverse audiences, products, and business needs. And therein lies the true ROI of content reuse.
Content reuse is critical to personalization at scale
If you want to efficiently personalize and localize content for a wide range of audiences, business needs and distribution channels, you need to rethink the way your organization designs and develops content, and start by implementing a content strategy centered on reuse.
Still using traditional “rapid” authoring tools to build your content? Take a closer look at why WYSIWYG and so-called rapid authoring tools fall short for creating reusable content.
The ability to reuse content efficiently hinges on linking intelligent content components into different deliverables and outputs — not copying and pasting content from one publication to another.
Linking content components allows organizations to repackage and repurpose core content, layering in contextual content where appropriate, in order to truly personalize content at scale without creating a maintenance burden.
It’s the only way to effectively (and sustainably) personalize content at scale.
Xyleme customers achieve a 50% reduction in content development time, on average, thanks to the ability to “create once and publish anywhere.”
Proprietary enterprise content has the highest reuse potential
The potential ROI of content reuse is highest for proprietary enterprise content. Here is just a sampling of content types that have significant reuse potential:
- Onboarding & new hire training
- Technical training
- Certification & compliance management
- Reskilling & upskilling
- Technical documentation
- Product training & documentation
- Customer onboarding
- Customer training & support
- Self-service learning & support
- OTJ training & just-in-time resources
- Field service support
With the right content strategy — supported by the right content operations tech stack — organizations can reuse and repurpose content across the extended enterprise, tailoring it to meet the unique needs of each individual audience you serve.
