By Cindy Van Luyck, CMO, CHILI publish
Today's marketers need to meet an ever-growing demand for content. Marketing has never used more channels simultaneously, and it has evolved to feel personalized across the digital customer experience. Relying on one-size-fits-all communication will not cut it anymore. Audiences get bombarded with information from every angle. If your marketing efforts want to have any chance of success, you will need to deliver highly relevant content to your target audience — as individuals or peer groups.
Why brands face content supply chain roadblocks
Creating the content required to personalize experiences at scale often remains a mostly manual affair, even if unified platforms manage content creation for different channels. Designers and internal or external agencies work with their specialized tools, often disconnected from other marketing activities.
Creative works like a black box: it receives input and marketing requirements and delivers assets on time. The inefficiencies and communication challenges inherent to traditional graphic design remain mostly hidden from view. Marketers are often unaware of the number of resources it takes to create multichannel content.
A siloed approach continues to plague marketing with each channel doing its own content creation and management. The teams responsible for publishing content in their specific channel tend to be the ones in charge of producing it. The social media team builds its visuals, the web team generates its assets, and there are dedicated production files for print. This siloed approach lies at the root of many problems:
- Building each needed variant is tedious, error-prone, and takes up a lot of time and effort
- Existing content is often not re-used
- Brand violations and content inconsistencies are rife
- There is no proper control over the end result
- Campaigns lack consistency
- Operations are impossible to scale without adding more people
The benefits of an end-to-end content supply chain
Where there is a challenge, there is usually an opportunity. Deploying the right technology in a unified platform has the potential of fundamentally transforming marketing operations.
Where ownership traditionally lies with the channels, it resides upstream in a modern content supply chain. Centralizing content creation across all channels and making assets available as smart templates makes channel content users rather than content creation centers. With a straightforward user experience similar to using a web-to-print solution, everyone with the correct permissions connects to the platform and can easily customize and personalize ready-to-use assets for all channels. There are a few ways in which that makes a big difference.
- Governance: Smart templates provide brand governance because they contain the brand identity guidelines. Template builders can not only lock specific elements but also decide which ones are editable and how. Users can self-service with confidence; they will not inadvertently violate brand identity guidelines. Instead of using specialized tools to edit source files, customized and personalized assets originate from a single, centralized platform.
- Single source of truth: Smart templates can avoid content errors. Connected to one or more existing data sources from DAM, PIM, ERP, PLM, CRM, and many more systems, smart templates refer to carefully curated single-source-of-truth information. If there are any changes to the data sources, the smart template automatically updates and adapts to reflect the changes.
- Scalability: A unified platform with smart templates connected to data will allow a marketing department to scale. In case a single asset, like an online banner, is needed in multiple variants to accommodate various languages, dimensions, and formats, users can indicate what they need, and the required files are available immediately.
The unified platform, then, optimizes the content supply chain. It brings together asset management, workflow organization, and creative.
Sitecore & CHILI publish deliver a unified platform
Sitecore Content Hub ™ and CHILI publish cover the entire lifecycle when deployed together. A prime example of the whole being better than the sum of its parts, a unified platform lets marketing operations re-engineer the entire content supply chain instantly.
“Our vision has always been to streamline work and take the tedium out of the creative process for our customers,” said Tom De Ridder, CTO, Sitecore. “With version 3.4 of Content Hub, we’ve taken several massive steps to further drive this mission with new capabilities, enhancements, and integrations in a SaaS product that makes it easier for all content stakeholders in a distributed environment to work together to solve the content crisis — all in a single solution that distributes content to all channels.”
Content Hub lets users plan, collaborate, manage, and curate assets, while CHILI publish allows self-service access to modify the assets they need. When the assets are ready for use, Content Hub takes care of publishing to the relevant channels. The joint solution helps organizations break the silos and provides brand governance across multiple channels.
Creativity is the oxygen of marketing. Design automation ought to be its breathing mechanism. Why waste time and money on countless, error-prone iterations if you can maximize a creative design by optimizing its entire lifecycle from the start? That’s what we envisioned Smart Templates would do for the visual creation process and why we made sure CHILI publisher could integrate smoothly in every setup. The Sitecore Content Hub results prove that design automation is the way forward for brands who care about the best content lifecycle for their team’s creative campaigns.
Why waste time and money on countless, error-prone iterations if you can maximize a creative design by optimizing its entire lifecycle from the start? That's what we envisioned Smart Templates would do for the visual creation process and why we made sure CHILI publisher could integrate smoothly in every setup. The Sitecore Content Hub results prove that design automation is the way forward for brands.
The end result? A marketing organization capable of the impossible: meeting the ever-growing demand for targeted content, reducing the time to market, and saving more cost than ever anticipated.
Takeaway: Learn more by joining John Arnsdorf, CHILI publish Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Tim Pashuysen, Chief Strategy Officer, Sitecore Content Hub, for an on-demand webinar “Create meaningful content through curated design”
Register now →
Cindy Van Luyck is the CHILI publish brand guardian. She ensures all outbound and inbound communication is aligned to show B2B markets and brands of any size how they can simplify and automate how visuals are made with Smart Templates.
Her in-depth tech knowledge spans the frontend and backend of marketing and graphics arts markets; her pragmatic, humanistic approach fuels the ever-growing SPICY community of customers, partners, and teams worldwide.
Find her on LinkedIn.