Dormant Content Could Be Costing You

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Sixty to 90 percent of content in content management systems is unused and experts explain keeping this data around could be costing your business.

Keeping dormant data in old archives could be costing your business big time, according to Econsultancy’s Andrew Davies. He explains in a blog post, “Content wastage (content that is created but then never used by marketers or salespeople) is an inconvenient and ever-present problem for content marketers.”

One estimate claims 60-70 percent of content produced by B2B companies goes unused, while another suggests it is even higher (90 percent). “According to PQ Media’s Global Content Marketing Forecast 2015-19, $145 billion was spent on content marketing in 2014 with over $76 billion apportioned to B2B content marketing,” says Davies. “If we accept that at least 60 percent of budget is being wasted on content that is created and then never used or distributed, then B2B content marketing has a $50 billion problem that is soon going to bite.”

Davies suggests the following steps to get your unused data under control:

1.do a content audit

2.review your content strategy

3.centralize your content in a single repository

4.tag your content with descriptive metadata

5.automate the four steps above

Fierce Content Management reports the solution may be to simply tag your data, as noted in step four. “Use descriptive metadata to tag your content and make it easily searchable,” recommended Davies. “Metadata can go well beyond typical tags such as ‘content type,’ ‘date created.’ and ‘author name.’ You should use descriptors such as ‘topic,’ ‘theme,’ ‘buyer stage’ and so on, to map that content to your various buyer journeys and personas.”

“One of the best ways to improve ROI is not necessarily to do more content marketing but to make sure the content that you have created is actually used,” Davies concluded.