RECOMMENDATION 01
Content production in-house

Four reasons to redistribute agency focus and embrace in-house content

Scale your content by investing in-house

According to a CMO Council study, almost half of marketing leaders say a top-three barrier to developing impactful and effective content is having the budget to develop high-quality robust content at scale. This will only have been compounded by recent events.

Redistributing the focus of your agencies away from content production and bringing your content engine in-house is your ticket to adjusting to new budgets while opening up a new way to boost content engagement, grow team creativity, and prove content ROI.

Here's 4 easy ways to invent in-house 👉

1. Cut costs and turnaround times

It’s easy to say that reducing outsourcing cuts costs – but what about the costs of training in-house colleagues or acquiring the necessary software to continue writing and publishing content independently?

In 2018, this was a question that Cisco’s EMEAR team was faced with. Their creative agency-led approach was creaking under growing pressure to produce content faster while reducing costs.

Determined to take on the problem, they moved content creation in-house and acquired software that anyone could use to produce and publish on-brand content at scale.

The results? Costs were cut dramatically and on top of this, turnaround times were shortened. No longer was there the risk that content would be out of date when it was finally delivered.

Cisco’s EMEAR team was able to see in-house results reach:

🟢 7 times more readers
🟢 Turnaround in days, not weeks
🟢 Content at a tenth of the cost

Finding the right tool mitigates training costs. Cisco’s Audience Campaign Manager (EMEAR), Kay Armstrong, says “We have reduced the production time of content by weeks, if not months in some cases, as this is a self-service tool."

58% of CMOs report they lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy, yet spending on in-house labor is static.

Source: CMO Council, 2020

2. Increase consistency and accuracy

When you’re working with multiple agencies and freelancers, it becomes almost impossible to maintain consistency. Even the most watertight of brand guidelines have room for interpretation and this can mean that your brand identity is diluted overall. Added to this is the inability for external writers to be as familiar with, and committed to, the focuses and priorities of the business as those in-house. Instead, imagine publishing content only written by members of your in-house team, who encounter the business’ growing objectives and needs daily. This allows you to refocus your agencies on more cost-effective tasks.

Not only can in-house writers adapt quickly to changing demands, but they are also able to reach out to members in other teams for different perspectives. The output is not only going to be more consistent with the brand, but also has the potential to be more engaging, thoroughly researched, and accurate.

With in-house software, it’s also possible to update content continuously – meaning that content is not outdated once it’s published. This means that you can be sure what you’re publishing in-house is only ever up-to-date information.

3. Boost creativity and collaboration
– while working remotely

In difficult times, when colleagues are working remotely, boosting collaboration is essential to keep morale high and improve communication. This can be one of the most overlooked benefits of bringing content in-house – the ability to bring teams closer together to work on a project collaboratively.

Faith Wheller, Marketing Director at Cisco found that collaboration between teams across the world was one of their strong points after moving in-house. Seeing amendments from other team members, and getting feedback instantly improved quality control and teamwork.

This can also be done by democratizing your content creation with a centralized platform. What we mean by this is having one dedicated platform that is already equipped with a series of on-brand templates to expedite the creation of core content. By enabling anyone in the business to quickly create materials that are dynamic, on-message, and compliant, the pressure on marketing would be relieved and those frustrating bottlenecks would dissipate.

Not only could this deliver significant savings, but a centralized content engine could provide efficiencies and boost productivity across every function of the business.

4. Prove ROI and content impact

Outsourced content gives you limited analytics back. You might be able to see how many people downloaded a document, or visited a page – but this doesn’t necessarily give you the meaningful insights you need.

Moving in-house means you’re able to find platforms that can track your content performance. This means that you can measure your content engagement, read-time, and bounce rates to find out what your audience prefers reading, and which topics they’re uninterested in.

Today marketers are putting their money in advanced marketing technology solutions to not just communicate with customers more effectively, but to help optimize marketing operations, improve the performance of their planned and always-on campaigns, and provide more marketing automation capabilities to support their overloaded teams.

These insights are invaluable to the wider business as a whole. A Forrester study, commissioned by Turtl, found that sales teams need more insights from marketing to close deals. In fact, 51% of sales teams surveyed said that marketing insights were lacking in the final stages of the sales cycle.

Moving content in-house provides marketing teams with the ability to deliver these insights, and steer their content strategy towards topics their audiences are engaging with.

Finally, with the impending doom of third-party cookies, marketers everywhere must develop their own in-house, first-party data strategy and deploy the right MarTech solution, so their data can be managed centrally and appropriately.

In summary

In difficult times, cutting costs to adapt to new budgets is a necessity. Moving content in-house not only reduces costs dramatically, but benefits the business by:

Reducing turnaround times from weeks to days
Ensuring content is accurate and up-to-date
Improving collaboration during remote working
Providing much-needed insight for marketing and sales teams
Freeing up agency resources to focus on less time-consuming tasks