In racing to deliver exceptional digital experiences for customers, businesses often overlook a critical factor: the experience of the content editors who manage and publish content.
While organisations invest heavily in User Experience (UX) within their customer engagement strategies, they frequently neglect the Editor Experience (EX) - the efficiency, usability, and satisfaction of the teams working behind the scenes to create compelling content.
A poor EX leads to slower publishing workflows, inconsistent content quality, and frustrated teams - all of which have a direct impact on business performance.
In this article, we’ll explore why Editor Experience should be a priority in your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) strategy, understanding the levers, and how your platform can support an ideal Editor Experience to drive better outcomes for both your team and your customers.
The Hidden Cost of a Poor Editor Experience
It can be easy to overlook the problems caused by a cumbersome content management process. In recent years, the marketing processes supporting content creation have become known as the ‘content supply chain’. Using this mindset is a great way to examine the problem.
In our experience, some of the ways a poor Editor Experience can hurt your business are as follows.
- Inefficient Workflows - Editors waste time navigating complex interfaces, or dealing with unintuitive publishing workflows.
When the content creation and publishing process takes too long and regulatory and sign off processes are not automated, you encounter two issues.
Not just the inflated time and cost of producing the content but also the opportunity cost of not getting the content out to your customers sooner.
- Inconsistent Content Quality - Without automation to underpin governance and intuitive tooling, maintaining brand and editorial standards across multiple teams can be a challenge.
There can be costs relating to rework and a lack of ‘right first time.’ And an even bigger issue may be inconsistent or sub optimal brand messaging.
- Slow Time-to-Publish - When editors spend too much time formatting content, finding the right images, and building pages instead of strategising and optimising, time-sensitive content can lose its impact.
Bringing tooling into the content supply chain that can help with ideation. Identifying content gaps or identifying competitive opportunities for your content enabling you to focus resources on the right content at the right time.
- Frustrated Teams & High Turnover - When we talk to Marketers looking for a transformative effect on their content supply chain, this is often the primary impact.
Teams working far harder than they should need to, feeling like they are simply standing still rather than moving forwards. This can lead to demotivated teams and higher staff churn.
The right tooling, implemented in a way that supports your content workflow, can reverse this problem by empowering your teams.
- Lost Competitive Edge - If competitors can publish and personalise content more efficiently, they gain an advantage in user engagement, SEO, and conversions.
Setting your organisation up to create well targeted and ordered content, quickly, with automated review gates, gets you moving.
Automating hygiene around content meta and image tagging pushes you even further forwards. While the machine may not be 100% right, having a backstop in place releases time for your team to focus on content optimisation.
Key Best Practices for Improving Editor Experience (EX)
We have seen many instances where business-wide stakeholders have contributed to share their perspective on what the DXP needs to deliver. And rightly so.
But very rarely have content teams considered the work they do and how a well-conceived and well implemented Editor experience can positively facilitate success for both their roles - and the wider business.
The following are best practices for integrating Editor Experience into your DXP strategy.
Prioritise User-Centric Design for Editors
Your content management system (CMS) or DXP should also be designed for editors, not just developers. When commissioning a new DXP, specifically look out for:
- Intuitive interfaces that simplify navigation and reduce clicks.
- Drag-and-drop content editing instead of manual coding or complex formatting. When creating a page, it is not just the words that should be intuitive. Adding, images and CTAs and related content call outs, should be something the editor can see and preview without publishing.
- Image management - Bring image sourcing selection and optimisation into the list of activities you can assist with automation.
Streamline Workflows & Automation
Reducing friction in publishing workflows is critical for efficiency:
- Real-time previews so editors, and equally reviewers, can see exactly how content will appear before publishing. If content can be seen in page, compliance and legal teams can review content without the need for a lot of back and forth.
- Automate repetitive tasks such as tagging, formatting images, and requesting and scheduling approvals.
- Implement collaborative tools to enable multiple team members to work seamlessly through ideation and content creation. Assigning tasks, approvals and project milestones within your DXP can cut out the need for shifting platforms. DXP’s like Optimizely can incorporate project management, workflow management and asset management capability.
- Use AI-driven content optimisation tools to ensure consistency and engagement. Engaging AI both pre and post-live can be helpful across your entire content lifecycle. From initial request, through ideation to eventual sunsetting when it is timely, or rights or approvals are no longer present.
Integrate Key Content Tools Seamlessly
Look at what opportunities there are within your DXP to integrate essential tools such as:
- Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs) to streamline content ideation and planning as well as campaign support and automation.
- Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems for seamless content and media organisation.
- Product Information Management (PIM) systems for when you have complex product meta data that will drive your catalogue or content/product personalisation.
PIM systems help you manage all that in one place, maintaining content relationships across the entire estate.
Enable Personalisation Without Complexity
Many DXPs offer powerful personalisation engines, but they must be easy to use for content teams:
- Use rule-based personalisation for quick implementation and straightforward relationships with your content.
- Consider AI-driven personalisation for advanced segmentation and automation where scale is required or user insight is lacking.
- Ensure clear reporting and analytics so editors can measure content performance. Look at what opportunities there are within your tooling to surface insights at the creation stage. Filling content gaps or identifying target, or under-utilised keywords is far simpler to action in the first edit.
Improve content management hygiene
An inadequate platform will frustrate editors and delay content delivery. To ensure a fast, reliable experience:
- Optimise system performance with regular updates and maintenance.
- Ensure real-time indexing and search for quick content retrieval.
- Look at how integrated your tooling is. Purchasing best of breed from a composable stack can work if your focus is on a small number of key areas of performance, say a third-party PIM or DAM.
But having a complex stack of integrated front-end and back-end technologies can lead to a significant maintenance overhead and a patch work of solutions and editor interfaces.
Try to achieve a holistic view of your content supply chain and look realistically at what the needs of your editors and content stakeholders are. If you find that you are spending a disproportionate amount of time filling the gaps in your content supply chain, look carefully at how your choice of DXP can make the difference you need.
How to Assess & Improve Your Editor Experience
If your teams struggle with content inefficiencies, it's time to assess your EX. We recommend using the following steps.
- Survey Your Editors - Gather feedback on usability, pain points, and frustrations.
- Analyse Publishing Speed - Track how long it takes to move content from ideation to draft to publication.
- Evaluate Tooling & Integrations - Identify gaps in your current DXP setup.
- Map pain points against your content supply chain workflow to understand where a focus on editor experience can help
- Conduct an EX Audit - Work with experts to identify and implement improvements.