Don't write the same content twice: 3 benefits of a content library

“Is there a way to efficiently re-use content?” 

For many proposal teams faced with the reality of completing and delivering proposals before the deadline, this is the proverbial $64,000 question.

Proposals and other business documents tend to say the same thing or include the same sections such as an ‘About us’, product/service descriptions, SLAs, or terms of service.

The quickest path to the goal is to complete these parts of the document by reusing the fruit of your labors – your best content from the past. This cumulation of approved and vetted content can be a relative treasure trove, if leveraged correctly.

Spending time managing the never-ending cascade of files, copying and pasting, is not the best way to reuse content. Instead, create your proposals with a co-authoring and automation solution that supports the ability to use a content repository or content library. 

Let’s take a look at 3 key benefits of using a content library.

Produce documents faster with easy content search

How much time do you and your team spend manually tagging and searching for content?

Easily tracking down the right content when you need it is key to creating winning proposals quicker and more efficiently.

Using a co-authoring and automation tool custom-built for easy content search is a lifesaver, and a business winner. 

Save time and energy by re-using content  

A co-authoring and automation solution that offers a content library allows you to easily reuse pre-approved and vetted content in multiple documents. 

You can use ‘linked sections’, which are any pieces of content you would like to re-use and keep updated. For instance, your terms of service section is most likely going to stay the same across every contract or document you create, so you will constantly have to find the most recent version and copy and paste it into your new contract. This leaves a lot of margin for error. 

Instead, make your terms of service a linked section. You don’t copy and paste from your most recent document but “link” your master terms of service section to your new document, and ta-da! It appears automatically. 

Reusing content, outlines and workflows can be an extreme time saver, improving your productivity many times over. 

Ensure your content is always up to date and ready to use

An enterprise-grade co-authoring and automation solution should enable you to assign a content expiry date to linked sections. Content expiry lets you set an expiration date on your re-usable content to ensure it will always be up to date and ready to use. 

Let’s stay with the terms of service section example from above. Using the content expiry feature, you’ll be able to assign that section to a writer with a content expiry of every 4 weeks or 4 months or one year. When the expiration date is hit, a message will automatically be sent to the writer letting them know they need to update that master piece of content.

As your terms of service section is linked, any changes or updates you make in the master terms of service section will be automatically pushed to all documents that use the linked sections. Your one change will update all documents. Simple, easy re-use of content!

Removing process inefficiencies

The value provided by a content library is accepted as industry fact. Producing proposals and similar business-critical documents by using assets from an immediately available content library brings improved efficiency, transparency and accuracy to the document creation process.