An agile state of mind: Ship quality content faster

One of the biggest drivers of resource waste within business organizations is inefficiency. A 2019 report from Asana indicates businesses may lose anywhere from 20-30% of their revenue on inefficient practices or ineffective internal processes, costing time and, ultimately, money.

In addition to the high cost of resource waste, inefficiency and errors onsite can cost customers. In the same way that poor service tanks your brand reputation, errors or accessibility issues onsite cause potential customers to seek out alternatives. The internet is a high-stakes environment where every interaction can put users one click away from giving up on your brand.

That’s why we developed Siteimprove Prepublish, a CMS plugin that puts efficiency back into the hands of agile teams, allowing them to avoid costly errors and consistently optimize content for both SEO and accessibility.

How Prepublish supports an agile framework

As of 2021, 51% of marketers reported they use agile principles to align teams, reduce inefficient workflows, and achieve organizational and business goals. Agile marketing is crucial to cutting productivity waste and providing the strategic alignment needed to impact marketing goals.

The hallmark of agile frameworks is to leverage cross-functional teams to do frequent iterations with lots of feedback. Once confined exclusively to software teams, agile principles and the Scrum concepts they rely on are so effective that marketing teams have taken inspiration from them to ensure maximum flexibility and a focus on deliverables.

However, one mistake agile marketing approaches can make is to rely exclusively on humans to manually power through sprints, continuously gathering feedback in ways that can feel overwhelming to the daily process.

Prepublish does the heavy lifting by ensuring consistent, error-free content that reinforces brand messaging and values. Trimming the time-consuming process of correcting onsite errors or updating old content is just the beginning. Prepublish also provides cross-functional teams with easy tools to identify accessibility issues and deliver on SEO optimization.

Changing the way teams work one sprint at a time

Say goodbye to those enormous backlogs of site errors that take your IT and tech teams weeks to work through. Prepublish empowers content teams to automate the process of correcting branding, accessibility, and SEO errors during content production.

Make content production scalable

Pumping out a ton of content may seem like the goal for most marketing teams. However, many marketers say their desire for “perfect” content gets in the way of their content production goals. What if you could have your cake and eat it too? 

"One huge mistake is manually processing the vast amount of data involved across the content life cycle (research, planning, briefing, writing, editing, publishing, optimization, and reporting),” said Jeff Coyle, co-founder of MarketMuse, in an interview for The Content Marketing Institute. “The days of handling the data manually are over, and content marketers that fail to realize it are facing an uphill battle.”

Prepublish allows marketing teams to scale content production without worrying about circling back to fix accessibility errors or optimize SEO. With instant checks, teams feel safer experimenting more and testing faster.

Optimize SEO and accessibility

Some cross-functional teams don’t have the necessary skills to address accessibility concerns or optimize search engine performance. And the team members who do have those skills may be in demand for higher priority sprints.

However, waiting for SEO optimization until lackluster performance raises alarms is too little, too late. According to a survey by morningscore, 82% of industry experts expect a good SEO strategy to take six months or more to produce increased organic traffic.

The Prepublish plugin automates this process by flagging errors and opportunities for better SEO strategy within your CMS and making recommendations about how the content team can address these concerns before pushing to publish.

Create more efficient workflows

Time is money. Always. And bottlenecks have real-world, measurable effects.

Creating more efficient workflows for your teams with Prepublish means you can make the most of your team’s resources. McKinsey estimates that 45% of most workflows could be automated using existing technology. In this way, automating simple accessibility and SEO strategies frees marketing teams to focus on the creative work of content production and building brand value.

Empower confident teams

Agile frameworks encourage the breakdown of silos and strive for maximum transparency and accountability, leaning into making mistakes and thriving on feedback. Accurate content insights provided in real-time can further empower this approach by allowing teams to prioritize and fix potential issues before they become problems dissected in the next Scrum retrospective.

As Simon Mainwaring, global keynote speaker, CEO of We First, and best-selling author put it, "Brands must empower their community to be change agents in their own right."

Control cost and reduce waste

An often-cited study from The Systems Sciences Institute at IBM states the cost to fix an error uncovered after a product release was four to five times as much as the cost to fix one during design.

The blow to efficiency and the cost of resource waste is only one reason it’s preferable to fix errors during the content production process. The effect that’s much harder to measure is the damage to brand reputation due to inconsistency, poor user experience, and loss of credibility. Because you only have one chance to make a first impression, Prepublish can ensure you get it right the first time.