What your content funnel is really costing you.
Content creation can be slow. But this is no reflection on the teams creating content.
It's an outcome of the way they collaborate to get the work done - and it could be costing you more than you realise.
In some businesses, content teams are working with workflows and inside platforms that slow everything down. Often, it's not the content creation that is time-consuming.
Ideation, reviewing, approvals and publishing all take too long.
And if you're spending time manually transferring content from one platform to another, you're compounding this problem.
Small changes can take an excessive amount of time, due to the process steps required to get work actioned. In an environment where content optimisation only happens sporadically, if at all, then some (or all) of your best content will see disappointing results.
And unfortunately, there is no clear link between content effort and commercial outcomes.
This is an operational problem rather than a tooling one. And it's felt in performance, cost, and confidence.
Where content operations lose value
Content teams know what 'good content' looks like. They also know from looking at the data what content has performed well. They're under pressure to create more of the good stuff - they just can’t get it published quickly enough.
Across the organisations we work with, these issues appear again and again.
What to look out for
Slow, fragile workflows
Content moves through many steps, many tools, and often a number of manual checks. Simple updates take moments to write but days to brief, review and publish.
Time-sensitive opportunities can pass before anything goes live, and feedback and insight are slow to apply.
The cost is not the time. It's loss of relevance, delayed learning and possibly missed commercial opportunities.
Inconsistent quality and rework
When governance is manual and tooling is clumsy, “right first time” becomes the exception. Teams can spend time fixing formatting, style and correcting metadata on content that could have been solid from the start.
You may not see that rework in the numbers, but it eats up time fast, as reviews need to be scheduled and facilitated.
Optimisation that never quite happens
When teams are busy just getting content live, optimisation becomes an afterthought. Performance data is after the fact, or in a format that is hard to act on while the content opportunity is live.
Changes that could feel braver are batched or avoided rather than being tested before being rolled out to a larger audience.
The result is flat content performance and rising customer acquisition costs.
Teams stuck in firefighting mode
Over time, this creates a familiar pattern. Teams work harder but feel like they are standing still. Morale drops. Staff turnover rises. Knowledge is concentrated in a few individuals or suppliers.
At that point, leaders stop trusting the operation to deliver the content that reflects the business at the pace the business requires.
Why this becomes a leadership problem
At senior level, these issues show up in different ways.
- Digital performance stagnates. Traffic decreases as does engagement.
- Content velocity plateaus. Content is not updated or refreshed.
- Costs rise. You're paying more to stand still
- Teams hesitate when faced with further investment because the estate already feels fragile
This is why content operations matter far beyond the marketing team.
They directly affect decision confidence. Organisations are asking for confidence, not more dashboards; to move from understanding the problem to identifying the solution.
What high-performance organisations do differently
Organisations that break this pattern do not start with features or upgrades. They start by treating content as a system, not a set of tasks.
Three things consistently make the difference.
1. Workflows are designed for flow, not control
Approval, compliance, and review are necessary, especially in regulated sectors. But when they rely on sending work back and forth between people, and working across disconnected tools, they become bottlenecks.
Effective operating models automate the predictable parts, clarify ownership, and keep work moving without increasing risk. A single platform managing content creation, review and publishing ensures everyone is aligned, and responsiveness can be managed. Blockages are exposed and can be mediated.
2. Tooling supports decisions, not just publishing
The most effective platforms bring planning, ideation, creation, management, and optimisation closer together. Editors aren't switching between systems or rebuilding context. It's all centralised into one knowledge base.
Information is brought to the coal face. Content insights are available at the point where content is being developed - not at a pre-live review.
For some organisations, the tools are all there. They just need to work better together.
3. Performance is built into everyday work
High-performing teams can see how content is contributing to outcomes while they are creating it, not weeks later. Insights are surfaced early enough to influence decisions - decisions that are being made when the content is in initial draft, not just post publishing.
This reduces wasted effort and lays the foundation for optimisation - it's institutional rather than heroic.
Where platforms help - and where they hurt
Modern Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) can support this way of working, but only if they are implemented with intent.
Common pitfalls we see include:
- Platforms treated like publishing tools, rather than something the business uses to manage the content lifecycle.
- ‘Best of breed’ stacks that look shiny, but create heavy integration and maintenance overhead, alongside system bottlenecks and reporting delays.
- Personalisation tools that are powerful in theory but unusable in practice.
- AI tooling being bolted layered on top of broken workflows, adding risk rather than value.
The question is not “does the platform support this feature?”
It is “Does this platform help us change, learn, and improve safely over time?”
Is your content operation is holding you back?
If any of this sounds familiar, a useful starting point is to step back and look at the operation as a whole.
Key questions to ask:
- How long does it really take to move from idea to a live piece of content?
- Where within that flow does work get stuck, slowed, or repeated?
- Can teams be empowered to act on performance insight quickly, and can you create the confidence and governance to support that?
- How much effort goes into keeping the system running versus improving outcomes?
The goal is not to perfect everything.
It's to identify where the biggest constraints sit and which ones you can change, and then to address those first.
3 steps to understand the cost-saving potential
1. Assess your average time to create content (hours)
Let's assume a current baseline per asset: 12 hrs
2. Having examined workflows, we can assume an improved efficiency (%) from better workflows & reuse
Let's say 30%
3. Take your average hourly cost (£) and content volume
Loaded staff rate: £50
Volume of content pieces per year: 400
Annual Time Saved (hrs) = (Baseline hrs × Efficiency % × Volume) 12×0.3×400=1,440 hrs
Annual Cost Saving (£) = Time Saved × Hourly Cost £72,000
Get the Content and Experience Clarity playbook
If you want a clear, practical way to improve how content and assets are managed, we have a playbook that lays it out step by step.
Our Content and Experience Clarity playbook shows how to design content workflows, implement DAM properly, and integrate it into the wider content platform so teams can move faster with confidence. It covers governance, tooling, and day-to-day ways of working, with a focus on optimisation rather than theory.
It is comprehensive, practical, and built from real delivery experience.
Get in touch with Mando Group today to request the playbook for free.
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