Back to school: measuring content strategy ROI

Here in the United States, the summer is now officially over and students are back to school. For many, this means a change in routine and a fresh outlook on the remainder of the year. This is an excellent time to direct that fresh outlook to your content by measuring your content strategy ROI.

Whether new or established, measuring content strategy ROI is vital to your strategy’s success. What you measure and how you measure it depends on your strategy’s goals.

Are you aiming to increase content velocity? Decrease your localization costs? Increase consistency with intelligent reuse? Provide content that better targets what your audience needs?

It’s important to collect both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Qualitative metrics (or soft metrics) are great for illustrating the overall impact of your strategy over time:

• How has customer engagement improved?
• Do authors find it easier to develop and maintain content?
• Has content quality improved?

But qualitative metrics need to be balanced with quantitative metrics:

• Have content errors decreased over time? By what rate or percentage?
• Has localization spending decreased or the localization process improved? How much have you saved, or how many additional languages can you now accommodate
• Has time to market improved? By how much?

Our XML business case calculator is one way of capturing quantitative metrics. If you are thinking about moving to XML or want to improve your existing XML implementation, use this calculator to provide hard numbers for justifying your spending and changes.