The Importance of Content as a Practice Area (Especially for Enterprises)

In most businesses, content is treated as a shared responsibility, divided among growth and field marketing, product, sales, and support teams. The distributed approach may work in early-stage or smaller companies; however, several compounding problems begin to emerge as the company grows.

Costs can include:

• Direct costs such as time, agencies, duplicative effort, and tools

• Indirect costs include lost productivity, project delays, damaged reputation (internal and external), and potential revenue loss

• Hidden costs, admittedly harder to track, can include delayed market entry or response to market needs, as well as diminished morale.

The most successful content teams we encounter are considered a distinct, strategic function, on par with product, design, or operations.

Here’s why it’s time for content to have its own dedicated practice area.

Scalability Requires Structure

As organizations grow, content spans dozens of channels, formats, and teams. From product teams and SEO pages to sales enablement and thought leadership, the scope is massive.

Without a dedicated function managing the infrastructure, governance, and resources behind it, content becomes fragmented and difficult to scale.

A centralized content practice enables enterprises to:

• Build shared systems (CMS, DAM, taxonomies, workflows)

• Establish reusable content components and templates

• Scale creation through clear roles, responsibilities, and repeatable processes

  
  

This foundation is critical when content needs to scale across languages, regions, and product lines—something ad hoc models can’t sustain.

Efficiency Through Centralized Operations

When content lives in silos, teams often duplicate work, reinvent messaging, or chase down assets that already exist somewhere else. The result is wasted time, inconsistent messaging, and lost opportunities.

With a formal content function:

• Teams have access to a centralized content library and version control

• Editorial calendars and approval workflows reduce bottlenecks

• Shared tooling and KPIs drive performance and continuous improvement

  
  

Efficiency isn’t just about doing things faster—it’s about doing them smarter, with less friction between content creators, approvers, and users across the organization.

Cohesive Strategy and Cross-Functional Alignment

Without a centralized practice, content strategy is often reactive, driven by short-term campaigns or departmental priorities. A dedicated content practice area includes a leader with a seat at the executive table - a strategic center of gravity working with peer leadership to establish a focused content strategy aligned with business priorities.

This alignment means:

• Messaging stays consistent across customer touchpoints—from awareness to advocacy

• Content is prioritized based on customer needs, not internal silos

• Insights from content performance inform decisions across marketing, product, and customer experience teams
  

A unified content strategy gives the entire enterprise a shared narrative—one that supports the brand, accelerates go-to-market efforts, and enhances the customer experience at every stage.

Final Thoughts

It might be time to ask the question - how much is our content really costing us? In time, in duplicative effort, in revisions, in reworked ideas due to misaligned or shifting priorities - the list goes on.

The fact is that as businesses grow, they can't afford to treat content as a part-time responsibility across people and teams. The cost compounds over time, becomes unsustainable, and disentangling it at the enterprise level requires a major overhaul.

Establishing a dedicated content practice isn’t about adding bureaucracy—it’s about unlocking scale, energy, efficiency, and strategic clarity.

For companies that want to deliver a unified customer experience, win in search, and enable every team with the right message at the right time, content deserves a seat at the table.