How to effectively set up content operations for publishing companies

Selling high-quality reports, analyses, and insights means placing content at the heart of your business. The success of your company is greatly influenced by how effectively you manage and distribute your content.

Any intelligence, insights, and research company knows that substantial content operations is essential for driving revenue and achieving business goals. But what exactly does content operations involve, how can you overcome the challenges they bring, and what best practices should you follow?

This article explores the core pillars of content operations, the importance of having a solid strategy, and the steps required to build an advanced publishing workflow for intelligence, insights, and research companies.

#What is content operations?

Content operations refer to the processes involved in creating, managing, and distributing content within an organization. This includes strategic planning, content production, team management, technology implementation, as well as measuring and optimizing content efforts.

Content ops cover all the processes, people, and technologies tied to content management. It involves every department that creates, consumes, or shares content, including marketing, sales, R&D, and leadership teams—all of which shape the content ecosystem across the organization.

Let’s break down the key components of content operations:

People

A strong content team starts with well-defined roles. Researchers, analysts, and editors each play a part in producing high-quality content. Research-driven companies may also need subject matter experts to ensure accuracy. A clear structure keeps the workflow efficient and avoids unnecessary bottlenecks.

Process

Effective content operations rely on structured workflows. Your team needs clear content types, defined production steps, and editorial standards to maintain consistency. An effective content governance strategy ensures accountability, while regular audits and performance tracking measure content’s impact. Accessibility and compliance should be integral parts of the process, not afterthoughts. However, despite the importance of content processes, many information-publishing companies lack the resources to measure and optimize their content effectiveness. Research shows that 65% of content leaders do not measure content effectiveness regularly, yet those who do report greater success. When workflows are well-defined, content moves smoothly from creation to publication.

Technology

The right tools help keep content operations on track. Editorial calendars and project management platforms like Asana or Monday.com help teams stay organized, while writing and publishing tools handle execution. A headless CMS, such as Hygraph, streamlines content management, making it easier to update and repurpose materials.

#Benefits when doing content operations correctly

Companies that fail to view content operations as a cross-organizational function miss out on significant opportunities to improve efficiency and enhance team collaboration. A strong content operations plan benefits more than just the content team.

Create replicable patterns within the workflow

When organizations don’t cultivate a content operations mindset, publishing activities become fragmented, leading to wasted time and duplicated manual effort. Inefficient content operations often result in silos where teams create and manage content in isolation, without a shared understanding of what content can be reused. By fostering a strong content operations framework, teams can learn from successful examples and establish repeatable patterns within the workflow.

Reduce operational costs

Content operations benefit more than just your content team. When your content operations aren’t optimized, analysts, editors, and developers all have to perform repetitive, manual tasks, driving up operational costs. When workflows are streamlined, team members can work more efficiently, saving time and increasing productivity. This can be achieved by investing in modern, efficient tools for your publishing workflow. While the upfront investment may seem significant, the increase in efficiency will ultimately lead to substantial savings in both time and costs.

Increase customer subscriptions

Ultimately, improving your publishing workflow boosts your bottom line. This improvement directly impacts the quality of your content. When operational work behind the content is optimized, your content team can focus more on creating high-quality material, and your development team can build a more modern, engaging digital experience on your platform. The biggest beneficiary is your audience, who will find your content more valuable and engaging, leading to higher subscription rates.

#What’s preventing you from establishing an advanced publishing workflow?

Content operations are crucial for intelligence, insights, and research companies, where content is the core product. Yet, many still rely on outdated publishing processes like file uploads (usually PDF or CSV), leading to silos and poor content accessibility. Our State of Content Management report highlights that the biggest CMS challenge is the limitation of content changes to a small group of people (46%).

Many information-publishing organizations are stuck between traditional and modern content management approaches. These companies often built their own CMS when they started in the early 2000s, but the pace of digital transformation has now outgrown their development capabilities. What was once a practical solution—uploading PDFs or CSV files—has become outdated, limiting their ability to leverage their content fully.

Companies who skip investing in content operations solutions also fail to deliver personalized content experiences that customers expect. The State of Personalization Report points out that 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience.

Internal politics and status quo bias also prevent innovation projects around replacing existing technology and embracing new content operations processes. The “sunk costs” fallacy often costs large organizations millions in recurring hidden costs for homebrew systems or legacy monoliths maintenance, disgruntled engineers leaving a company, and tons of missed opportunities.

#Content operation best practices

Foster a modular content mindset

Publishing PDF reports slows down the process because you can only hit "publish" once everything in the document is finalized. Repurposing content is nearly impossible, which means every update is a duplicated effort. While a content management tool that breaks down large chunks of content into smaller pieces is essential, it's equally important to adopt a modular content strategy.

TechInsights, a leading platform for semiconductor intelligence offering detailed reports through a subscription model, switched to Hygraph’s headless CMS to improve the user experience. Previously, their compiled PDF reports included screenshots from Excel, PowerPoint charts, Wistia videos, and Word documents. This made the publishing process slow, hurt content searchability, and created redundant work when repurposing content. The team knew little about how short and long-form PDFs are actually used: who is reading and sharing them, and how much time do readers spend on different sections. It was challenging to manage and standardize metadata.

The TechInsights team knew that to unlock the full potential of a headless CMS, they needed to adjust their content operations. They:

• Broke down long reports into manageable pieces by creating Hygraph schemas that reflect individual content elements, connecting them with relationships.
• Now deliver incremental, bite-sized updates rather than complete reports, significantly speeding up the publishing process.
• Standardized content creation and established consistency when creating metadata across all systems.

While we often recommend a headless CMS for a modern digital experience, embracing content modularity with the right mindset is just as crucial.

We want to divide content into smaller consumable reusable pieces. To create new content products, to distribute content to the right audiences.

Embrace programmatic content delivery

BioCentury, a San Francisco-based publisher and intelligence platform, provides cutting-edge analysis and insights into the biopharma industry, assisting executives and investors in making informed decisions. As their content operations grew more complex, BioCentury faced the challenge of scaling their infrastructure while maintaining a seamless and high-quality user experience.

BioCentury turned to Hygraph to optimize both content delivery and data accuracy. They also use Hygraph to federate data from their CRM and eCommerce systems. They programmatically create, edit, direct, and deliver to the necessary frontend systems instead of manually updating content across multiple channels, significantly improving efficiency and consistency.

Hygraph’s Content Federation capability further enhanced their operations, enabling BioCentury to fetch live data from external sources and automatically update it in real-time. This shift allowed the team to deliver dynamic, up-to-date content to users without manual intervention, reducing redundancy and keeping their content accurate and relevant. The use of structured content models also ensured flexibility and scalability, allowing BioCentury to adapt to evolving content needs and provide a seamless user experience across various platforms. By leveraging both programmatic content delivery and real-time data updates, BioCentury has set a strong foundation for future-proof content operations.

My eyes lit up at how intuitive content modeling is. Hygraph gives unlimited possibilities of what we can connect and build.

Leverage the power of API

Statistics Finland, the national statistics body of Finland, provides citizens and government entities with crucial data on topics such as population, housing, and monetary indicators. As part of their digital transformation, the organization needed to modernize their content operations and improve the management of vast statistical datasets. With a tight deadline for overhauling their publishing workflows, Statistics Finland chose to implement an API-first strategy by partnering with Hygraph.

By building a tech stack that was frontend-agnostic and powered by APIs, Statistics Finland ensured that content could be easily delivered across multiple channels without being tied to a specific platform or framework. This approach allowed them to adapt to changing needs while maintaining a seamless and consistent content experience.

Hygraph’s API-first structure allowed Statistics Finland to manage and distribute their content efficiently, whether it was statistical data, dynamic tables, or key figures. By modeling their content in a flexible, reusable way, they could quickly push updates to various platforms, streamlining workflows and saving valuable time. The integration of structured content and the ability to serve content via a predictable API also empowered the team to make updates without requiring major backend changes, ensuring their system remains future-proof and ready for new opportunities. This shift has given Statistics Finland the flexibility and control they need to meet the evolving needs of their users. Over 300 content managers, analysts, and editors are working in parallel and publishing vital economic, demographic, and business data for the Scandinavian country.

Hygraph contains all the metadata and relations of the content. Publishing is controlled within the CMS and synchronized with our other systems, and then accessed through microservices in Azure.

#Leverage modern tools for content operation

Intelligence, insights, and research firms must be able to manage and deliver content quickly, consistently, and in a way that maximizes value to both internal teams and their audiences.

Hygraph breaks down content into modular pieces, enables programmatic content delivery, and a robust GraphQL API, ensuring that content can be efficiently managed, updated, and distributed across multiple platforms. This approach enhances both the quality and speed of content production, while allowing organizations to scale effortlessly as their needs evolve.

For intelligence, insights, and research companies looking to future-proof their content operations, Hygraph offers the tools needed to optimize workflows, reduce operational costs, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction. With Hygraph, content teams can focus more on creating valuable, high-quality insights, while leaving behind the inefficiencies of outdated systems.

Adopting a headless CMS like Hygraph is a strategic move that can lead to greater operational efficiency, richer content experiences, and sustained business growth. If you are curious about how exactly your content will look like inside Hygraph, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!