News
How Publishers Can Do More with Less – Without Sacrificing Effectiveness
June 10, 2024
Your team is passionate about their work. They want to produce and distribute great content to your readers. But today, many must do more with less, facing increased competition and operating with a fraction of the staff of a decade ago.
The potential effects of trying to do more with less?
- Quality control suffers.
- Limited manpower makes it harder to meet tight deadlines.
- Your team is stretched, which can lead to burnout if they don’t get additional support.
- It’s harder to make time to innovate content and how you deliver it.
- With limited resources, publishers struggle to create the content that they need to attract advertisers and readers, which impacts revenue.
- It’s harder to compete with larger competitors.
Despite these challenges, news, magazine and other publishers can streamline operations and do more with less without sacrificing effectiveness, creativity and growth.
The biggest opportunity lies in revamping editorial workflow, but there are other areas where you can get more without doing more, including breaking down data silos and seeing and acting more quickly on audience behavior.
Here are four ways publishers can do more with less – while unlocking growth.
1. Create a unified workflow.
To create a unified workflow, you need the right technology stack. Demand an actual publishing CMS that manages all your content and digital assets, including print (InDesign) and newsletters. Your goal should be to unify content, editorial workflow, audience data, marketing and sales so you can deliver related content through any channel at any time without ever having to copy and paste.
If you manage multiple properties, you should also look for a tool that allows you to manage them from one place.
ePublishing’s suite of software is a unified data-first ecosystem that powers category-leading websites, ecommerce and audience tools to transform your business.
2. Leverage AI in your workflows.
Use AI to optimize operational and editorial inefficiencies. For example, if you lack the time or budget to source relevant and compelling images, use AI to generate those for you. AI tools can also speed up headline generation, generate meta descriptions and support content ideation.
In ePublishing’s latest Continuum and Ellington releases, we’ve increased AI functionality to boost productivity, drive creativity and increase visibility with better SEO. With the touch of a button, users can find inspiration for articles, generate unique images, or add keywords and eye-catching headlines.
3. Break down data silos.
Is your audience data scattered across multiple apps? This includes subscribers, one-off purchasers, casual readers, event attendees, webinar participants and more. Not only does integrating your audience view allow you to send more relevant communications to your customers from one place, you can also leverage that data to drive sales and engagement.
This matters today because publishers’ business models have shifted. As Tom Davidson wrote in Editor & Publisher, it’s no longer about building a big audience and selling ads around it. Publishers need to go far beyond that to attract and engage the right readers across multiple platforms if they want to survive. Look for the ability to individualize content, where you can automatically deliver different content to each registered user based on demographics and behavior.
4. Repurpose your content.
Your readers are consuming your high-quality content in multiple ways across multiple platforms. But you don’t have to start from scratch each time. By repurposing your content, you’ll efficiently extend its reach and get more from your writers’, editors’ and producers’ time.
And if you focus on high-quality, high-impact content in this effort, your results will multiply with little extra work.
Repurposing content means giving it new life. For example, you could publish it in a new format, break it into smaller pieces, combine it into a new larger piece or even tailor the content to a new target audience. You could also curate content, bringing together related pieces for your audience on a landing page or through email.
The editors, freelancers, research and reporting it takes to produce top-notch content is likely your No. 1 cost. You owe it to your organization to maximize the ROI from that investment.
ePublishing clients have the advantage.
Our efficient and collaborative publishing tools (and their “enter once, distribute anywhere” data flow) pair with powerful audience management software to save organizations countless hours each month.
Learn more about how we can help you do more with less.