The brainstorming process always begins with promise. People sit around a conference room table kicking around potential ideas, and everything seems plausible.

Let’s create an infographic to show off our recent study, says the ambitious manager.

Sounds good, says the eager junior marketer.

Even though the project begins with the best intentions, challenges start to get in the way. Deadlines are pushed, messaging changes, another stakeholder doesn’t like the project. Things go wrong, and the once promising infographic dies in development. In large organizations, it’s even possible for completed content to sit unused because of bad communication.

At some point, your company will create content that never gets used; that’s a fact of business. That wasted content may even be out of your control.

But teams shouldn’t be complacent about content projects gone wrong. Every hour spent on a wasted piece of content adds up. When you account for the time of all the employees involved, the cost of software used to create the content, and the opportunity cost of not doing something else more productive, wasted content can be a massive weight on a team’s budget.

According to B2B analyst firm SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of content never goes public because it is either unusable (37 percent) or unfindable (28 percent). If you dissect these numbers to try to understand what’s causing these issues, the pie chart looks something like this:

marketing budget
SiriusDecisions marketing budget

Source: SiriusDecisions

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