Become your subscribers’ go-to knowledge partner with streamlined subscriber workflows

Time is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity across the board, and the world of B2B publishing is no exception. Leading firms are discovering that how they deliver their research can be as crucial to client retention as the analysis itself.

Immediate access to highly targeted, pertinent information and an intuitive, frictionless process to access and re-purpose this information are now key concerns for consumers of market analysis. Publishers can no longer expect to serve up useful content and immediately produce satisfied subscribers – their content must also fit into a well-planned, thoroughly-tested workflow process designed to streamline their subscribers’ time if they are to become a go-to research partner.

Here are just a few reasons why publishers should be considering the role their content plays in their subscribers’ day-to-day tasks and we provide an overview of the workflow tools required to streamline these end-user workflows.

Maximising content value in the subscription age

The rise of subscription packages has led to a reciprocal increase in the number of reports users have access to as content becomes more concise and tailored to individual user needs. Subscribers may now have an overwhelming amount of content at their fingertips, so it is essential to make sure they have the tools they need to get full value from this content.

Edwin Bailey, COO at Content Catalyst elaborates: “If a subscriber has access to hundreds or thousands reports, they’re going to need an efficient means of extracting what they need and make all that content work in their favour in a consistent, quick and accurate manner, enabling them to maximise the value of their subscription.”

Large, increasingly diverse libraries of content have made efficient extraction of relevant information a must for publishers and poses a headache for those who have not picked up on this aspect of the end-user journey.

This poses the question: what workflow features can be incorporated into content delivery platforms to streamline the end-user experience?

Search is key

It may sound simple, but search is central to the effectiveness of workflow tools. Search functionality is so highly valued that clients have been known to cancel entire global subscriptions if they feel as though their employees cannot quickly and intuitively find the information they need.

In our experience, search is a common headache for market analysis providers building content delivery systems in-house. The search engines your subscribers use day-to-day are now so advanced and highly intuitive that this has become the expectation for search on your platform too. However, getting search right for content catalogues of thousands of technical, complex research products is a difficult, and often expensive, process.

The content produced may be valuable, but if it can’t be located what purpose does it serve?

Content Catalyst has over 20 years of experience working with analyst research firms and has developed powerful search tools tailored to research products. Allowing end-users to search for key terms across an entire library of content, displaying these terms within the context of the report it is found in, and having the ability to filter terms by content type transforms the search-based workflow experience and ensures end-users can quickly find the information they need.

“We used to get complaints from clients and from people internally that search was not functioning properly, but that’s completely gone away now,” comments the CIO of a leading economic advisory firm which adopted Content Catalyst’s technology.

Collate and Export

The purpose of workflow tools is to accomplish complex processes with minimal user intervention in as short a time period as possible.

For instance, end-users do not want to compare data or analysis across multiple reports by manually opening and navigating between individual documents. Saving relevant sections, viewing relevant returns for all reports, or viewing corresponding sections side-by-side in report series creates a dynamic, intuitive reading experience free from laborious, manual navigation. Once relevant information is located, it should then be easily saveable to a custom content library for later use.

Allowing subscribers to collate pertinent information in-platform is useful, but publishers have often sought ways to fully immerse themselves into their end-user workflows. In-platform functionality allowing these multi-formatted content snippets to be exported and integrated into a single Office document is a powerful way of achieving this.

Creating an intuitive, integrated user journey such as the example above, using the tools built into the Content Catalyst platform, maximises the value and impact of high-quality, informative analysis.

Boosting renewal rates

Following a subscription purchase, the capabilities offered by a content delivery system to streamline workflows and enable the consumer to easily collate bespoke reports could be the overriding factor driving positive renewal discussions. A user-friendly solution will also act as the catalyst for wider use amongst colleagues, expanding the subscriber base within that company and providing further growth opportunities.