Superhuman content production: how to produce high-quality content at the volumes required for eCommerce

When you’re only publishing a couple of blog articles per week, producing all your content in-house is a perfectly sound strategy. But what happens when you need to step it up several gears and produce hundreds – or even thousands – of content pieces in the same timeframe?

This is a challenge familiar to many eCommerce brands, faced with the feat of launching thousands of new products each season, in line with consumer trends across each of the global markets in which they operate. And the quality of their product content can have a direct impact on their bottom line: 95% of shoppers are likely to abandon their online shopping session if they come across vague, incomplete, or inaccurate product information.

Many brands attempt to scale their content production in-house, but with small content teams using manual processes, often based on an unwieldy combination of spreadsheets, Word documents, and email chains. This is generally an inefficient process, resulting in:

Mistakes and errors – whether it’s a missed email, a deleted Word doc, or failure to spot embarrassing typos – mistakes are inevitable in an over-stretched team using manual processes.

Fatigue – an overworked and over-stretched workforce results in low morale, reduced productivity, and high team churn.

Failure to hit targets – mistakes and fatigue add up to missed deadlines, go-live delays, content that under-performs, and ultimately lost money.

If tasked with producing huge content volumes, an under-resourced team won’t be able to deliver to deadlines without compromising on quality. It’s simply unsustainable.

So, what are the alternatives?

Option 1: hire more people

Hiring more people is one potential solution. Regrettably, it’s not that simple and involves:

An arduous recruitment challenge – building and retaining a large content team is a monster task – with interviewing, on-boarding, training, QA, and ongoing management taking time away from core business activities.

Spiraling fixed costs – rapidly growing teams will mean rapidly rising overheads. Salaries, benefits, equipment, and office space are among the hefty fixed costs that can’t be flexed in response to seasonal demand.

…and what about other markets? – for brands operating internationally, content is required in multiple languages – which also multiplies the complexity of the challenge at hand. How do you scale up multilingual teams globally and cost-effectively?

As a result of these challenges, this option involves no economies of scale, declining ROI, and a major hit to margins.

Option 2: outsource 

Outsourcing can supercharge your content capabilities, but only if you select your content production partner with care – because many agencies face the same operational challenges as in-house departments when it comes to scaling content production.

We’ve laid out some critical pointers for selecting a production partner in our article ‘6 crucial boxes to tick when looking for a content production partner’, and they include:

1. A scalable approach to briefing
2. Rigorous testing before production
3. Investment in training
4. Editing and quality control
5. Full freelancer management
6. True content specialism

With a unique model that combines a global talent network with efficiency-driving technology, unlike other agencies, we are purpose-built to solve the operational challenges of high-volume, multi-language content production, offering:

Speed – the Network comprises 12,000+ screened, specialist freelance content creators, enabling us to rapidly build virtual teams for our clients & deliver projects at unparalleled speed.

Scale – our AI-driven proprietary technology removes the friction from content production – managing 1000s of tasks and content creators, with smart automation that delivers real scale.

Quality – with our in-house editorial expertise and automated QA controls, we ensure content quality is maintained, even at high volumes.

Global reach – with over 70 languages in our network, we can produce multi-language content that consistently reflects your brand voice across your target markets, all managed via a centralised brief.

Cost efficiency – by outsourcing, you can avoid taking on fixed costs and flex your spend to reflect seasonal peaks and troughs – making us approximately 40% cheaper than in-house content production.

A client story

Our client, a luxury fashion marketplace, needed to improve its SEO performance across 10 markets. This meant creating 9 million words of search-optimised category and meta descriptions in 10 different languages.

In-house, the client could produce content at a rate of 2,000 words per week. Jellyfish with a dedicated team and expertise was able to

• Built a freelance team of over 125 specialist writers, editors across all languages
• Achieved an accuracy rate of over 99% on all content
• Delivered 529,000 words per week at the peak of the project – the equivalent of 300 words per minute
• Completed the project 265x faster than was possible inhouse

Need a hand scaling your content production?

For more information on our unique content production approach, and how we achieve quality at scale, please get in touch. Alternatively, if you’d like a complimentary assessment of your eCommerce Content, you can request an Ecommerce Content Score here.