Don Pierson says, "stop wasting money"

Who would argue that every bit of your content development budget isn’t especially precious these days? You can’t afford to waste a single nickel. So how do you know if you’re getting maximum return? How do you know you’re not wasting at least part of your investment? Well, you’re throwing money away if:

1.   Your investment doesn’t produce maximum results. OK, it may seem like I’m stating the blatantly obvious. We’ve all bowed to the ROI gods. Clearly any money spent that doesn’t provide a net positive return is a waste. But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I’m talking about maximum results. You need to prove that what you got for the money you spent is more than just “good enough.” It needs to be the best you could have gotten.

2.    You take too long. There’s a hidden cost if you take even an extra day in getting your content in the hands of people who need it. That extra day in equipping the sales force with the best possible interactive sales collateral or sales training means potential lost sales. The extra day that your production team wasn’t up-to-date with the newest information or techniques means increased expenses. The extra day that people didn’t receive compliance certification means added legal exposure. Literally, every day counts.

3.    You waste cycles. This is another huge hidden cost. I’m talking about the unnecessary cycles that stakeholders, subject matter experts, and content development resources take iterating through the development cycle until a satisfactory result is achieved. These days no-one has time to review, edit and change things two, three, four or more times, when once could have been enough. And yet too often we accept this because ‘it’s the way things have always been.

4.    You “settle.” When budgets are so tight it’s seductive to accept content that’s barely OK at best, because we’ve got a ready answer if someone questions it: “I know it’s not that great, but we didn’t have the resources!” But in reality, we’ve wasted money. We didn’t get the maximum value for the precious money we spent.

5.    You’re not building intellectual capital. This is a biggie. When we think of the return-on-investment we get on the content we produce, we think only about the value of the finished product. We willingly accept that as much as 100% of the budget spent on a project has no enduring value. We sometimes say that we’ll be able to re-purpose some of the finished product for use in other products, but we know that that’s very rarely true. The true re-use factor is extremely low. But what if as little as 20% of the content you create is truly reusable? Let’s take an example, keeping the math simple. Let’s assume that we anticipate spending $50,000 on a project and getting $100,000 in returned value, through either increased sales or reduced costs. That’s a 100% ROI. (The $50k net gain, divided by the $50k cost.) Very nice, indeed! But if 20% of the budget also results in truly re-usable assets, our actual project cost is down to $40,000, and our ROI is increased to 150%. That’s a huge return!

When you use Flypaper as your content development platform you don’t have to live with lengthy development times and wasted cycles. Flypaper gets you to the end result much faster, and many of the wasteful steps that used to be necessary can be eliminated altogether. For example, why create storyboards, when you can create a working prototype in less time? And rather than iterating through endless review cycles edging closer to an acceptable result, you can use Flypaper’s robust collaboration features to gather input and approval on every element of your project, up to and including the project itself. You don’t have to settle for inferior content any more either, because Flypaper content can equal custom Flash content in quality, and yet takes no more time to create than using low-end development tools.

But the really big win? Three clicks are all it takes to save any page as a completely-reusable template. Then upload it to your enterprise repository and it’s available instantly to anyone. Flypaper includes hundreds of re-usable templates right out of the box, so you never have to start from scratch. These can be your starting point for creating your own new templates. Soon you’re building an ever-increasing treasure trove of your own proprietary templates. Which means each project becomes less and less costly to develop, and can be delivered quicker and quicker. Because you’re no longer throwing money away. You’re investing in your company’s future.