Content Matters

Content is your single, greatest business lever

Every business generates content. Few put content to work with the ease. When your teams can’t find content, when content isn’t current, when team members can’t surface the right content for the call or the task at hand, it’s not just an annoyance—it’s disruptive to the business. Costs increase. Revenues stall. Customers and employees become frustrated.

Content Matters to Business1:50

But when you view content as a strategic asset and put content to work, you fuel competitive advantage and drive bigger outcomes. Higher revenues. Lower costs. Peace of mind. Motivated employees. Happy customers.

Think of your content as high-performance business fuel. Then let us help you put it to work across your organization to drive revenues, collaboration, and business agility.

Content Matters for revenue

Content helps you tell and sell your story. It’s the hook that interests buyers long before they engage with you. Content is also a critical representation of your brand. When that content is hard to find or out of date, buyers move on to your competitors. And when your teams spend too much time recreating content—such as contracts and proposals—they’re unable to grow relationships and make sales.

Content Matters for collaboration

Spreadsheets, presentations, Word documents—and much more—represent the best thinking of your teams. In fact, that content is your organization’s intellectual property—and it’s critical to maintaining a competitive edge. People come together, and work happens, around content. Making sure content is easy to find, generate, and share is the fastest path to business outcomes.

Content Matters for business agility

Content is the gating factor in how quickly you’re able to adapt to changing market conditions. Why? Because content and business processes are so closely linked. How easily you can execute content and how much visibility you have into roles, responsibilities, and status directly impacts how efficiently your business runs and how well you control costs. Changing market conditions always involve updating content, generating new content, and clearing the way for new content flows.

Content Matters to new, high profile investments

If you're engaged in business strategies for mobile, cloud or social business Content Matters a great deal. It shouldn't be the last thing you think about. The explosion of mobile, cloud, and social technologies has ushered in a business renaissance, forever changing how work gets done. Businesses are rushing to invest in these areas yet often overlook the role content plays, specifically how teams access content and how they interact with content in each of those environments.

Content Matters to your mobile business strategies

Content Matters to mobile because the lines between work and home have blurred. We’re always on and we’re always working. As a result, businesses will soon be investing upwards of $1.3 billion annually to equip employees with mobile devices, according to Forrester. However, these investments will fail if we leave content trapped in old-school systems and don’t provide secure, synchronized access to content from any mobile device or application.

Content Matters to your cloud strategies

Content Matters to the cloud because we are shifting applications to the cloud to leverage the cloud’s many advantages, including greater agility and lower costs. GigaOM’s recent 2012 Future of Cloud Survey shows 50% of respondents comfortable with the cloud model, a number that’s more than double the prior year’s findings. However, these investments will fail if we force employees to navigate multiple systems to find the content they need. For example, when we put the sales team on Salesforce, how will they access content needed to generate proposals, contracts, and quotes? If the content isn’t embedded in Salesforce or it’s hard to find, we’ve just added one more layer of complexity and cost.

Content Matters to social business

Content Matters to social because the dialog in employee, partner, and customer communities is often around the content and documents needed to resolve a problem or perform a task. According to IDC, companies spent just under $1 billion on “Facebook for the enterprise” technologies last year. Over the next five years that number explodes to $4.5 billion. However, these investments will fail if we make it difficult to surface, use, and modify content.