Every job comes with repetitive tasks—mundane work that’s both essential and endless. Consider, for example, how many emails your team sends in a typical workday. How much of the content in those messages is similar information, such as answers to frequent customer questions or responses to common concerns? In other words, how much time does your team spend reinventing the wheel? 

For most managers or team leads, the answer is simply: too much time. In fact, a recent study showed that repeated tasks cost businesses about 19 working days per year per employee. 

But you can help your team save at least a few of those days. With some preparation, forethought, and the right tools, you can reclaim at least a few of those days. The secret? Reusable content.

What is reusable content?

Reusable content is a phrase, sentence, or passage that can be saved into a program and quickly recalled, typically with a customizable keyboard shortcut. This content can be used on social media platforms, emails, documentation, and customer support chats. 

Reusable content tools are particularly useful for customer support, sales, and marketing teams that are repeatedly using similar language to respond to customer inquiries or generate branded messaging.

How reusable content helps your team

Reusable content can hold more value than most businesses think. First, look at your existing content and consider all the ways it can be repurposed. Better yet, create new, well-structured content with this strategy in mind to make repurposing easier moving forward. By investing in quality content now, you’ll save time and money in the future—while improving your brand’s consistency and credibility.

For example, let’s say your team writes a weekly company newsletter updating staff on a few ongoing projects. Although your updates vary, they follow the same general format. Rather than rewriting the whole newsletter from scratch, you could use reusable content. By changing and updating your prewritten content, you’d save time and keep your newsletter consistent.

Improve efficiency

Thoughtfully reusing content conserves time and resources that would otherwise be spent on recreating pieces from scratch. With reusable content, your team can increase their productivity by spending less time rewriting the same material.

Boost consistency and credibility

By carefully curating quality content, you’ll give your teams the tools they need to craft a strong, consistent online presence for your brand. That, in turn, helps them build trust with your audience. By showing them a dependable face, you help them feel comfortable working with you.

Make onboarding easier for new team members

When your teams have access to one central database of approved content, any client or project detail snippets can be viewed by new hires. This lets them quickly get up to speed with their workload. 

When to use reusable content

If your job requires you to write, reusable content can make your life easier. For example:

• Imagine your team puts out a company-wide newsletter each week updating staff about ongoing projects, administrative notes, and other important alerts. The news changes, but the format doesn’t. You spend at least two or three hours each week pulling these newsletters together. 

Now imagine you had a program that let you save an approved, prewritten framework for your newsletters. By providing the basic language you need, the reusable text snippets let you skip poring over previous newsletters and rewriting each issue from scratch. 

• You’re responsible for updating your company’s website. Some of the posts you make require a standard disclaimer that changes occasionally. You get an email notifying you when this happens, but it’s easy to slip up and use outdated, incorrect language.

Instead of scouring your inbox for that pesky new disclaimer, you can simply create a new text snippet with the correct language and update the snippet when your disclaimer changes.  

• You lead a customer service team. Your team members frequently find themselves answering the same questions from different customers, and they worry that they won’t have time to deal with more complex problems. 

Instead of typing out your business hours over and over again, they can now focus on helping people with more complex questions or problems.

And the benefits don’t stop there. You can use reusable content to: 

1 Drive consistency in emails and customer communications

2 Boost productivity and response times to customers 

3 Align customer expectations to brand standards

4 Reduce time spent writing and editing customer communications and spend more time focused on individual inquiries that require more attention.

Content creators and marketing teams can also use reusable text snippets to enhance efficiency and ensure brand consistency across marketing communications. Whether you’re creating copy for a marketing campaign or posting on social media about a new product, snippets can save your team time spent writing and editing the same language used across all materials.

What to look for in a reusable content tool

Snippet tools allow you to easily save reusable content. They increase productivity, maintain consistency, and drive cost-effectiveness throughout communications. The best snippet tool will have the following features:

1 The ability to quickly insert existing snippets and capture new text as you write

2 A customizable “library” of text available to approved team members

3 Snippets that can range from short phrases to longer paragraphs

4 Accessibility in minimal keystrokes

Many programs offer snippet tools that provide some of these features, but only in a single application or context. For example, the Gutenburg Editor is strictly for WordPress blogs, and Gmail Snippets is only accessible through Gmail. Instead, try the versatile snippet tool included with Grammarly Business that can be used across all platforms. You won’t have to worry if you find yourself working in Chrome instead of Safari or using your iPad. Your preferences and reusable content are available anywhere Grammarly Business is supported. (Click here for a full list of our product offerings.)

Coupled with our tone detector, customizable style guide, grammar checker, and analytics features, Grammarly Business is an artificial intelligence-based writing assistant designed to help teams improve productivity while staying on-brand with consistent communication. Not only does Grammarly Business improve and align business communications, but it also meets individual team members at their current communication skill level and helps them learn and grow via intuitive suggestions and recommendations for improvement. 

Repetitive tasks are inevitable. However, with reusable content and text snippets, you can ease the burden on your teams while still maintaining an effective and productive workplace. This tool can significantly cut down on the time your employees spend on repetitive tasks and free them up for more rewarding, complex work. It can also help your company develop and maintain a distinctive brand identity. 

With snippets, product launches can run effortlessly, brand campaigns can develop faster, and cross-team collaboration can be simplified. Efficient content marketing can cost 62% less than traditional marketing and generate three times the volume of leads. By reusing content with the right snippet tool, your business can produce significant ROI. 

To learn how you can leverage reusable content/text snippets (should we include both?) with Grammarly Business, contact us to request a demo or upgrade now.