What is a content hub?

In many organizations, marketing content is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Divided across many workstreams, marketing teams have stored lots of different files and components in various formats and locations, potentially over many years.

You have it all somewhere — but where? How can you get a 360-degree overview of your assets, not to mention manage, add, and share them? A content hub is the answer.

A content hub acts as home base for all your disparate content, as well as a platform that helps streamline, speed up, and simplify every part of a marketer’s job — all in one solution. It offers a clear view and intuitive, collaborative features that keep the complexity low and the added value high.

That primes you to better tackle today’s marketing operations challenges and ultimately maximize omnichannel interaction and engagement, which is what content marketing is all about.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Having a massive volume of content or digital assets available for your organization’s marketing efforts may be a pride point — until you need to access it. You might have photos on a laptop, packaging artwork on a USB flash drive, layouts on an external hard drive, and videos in the cloud.

You know it all exists somewhere, but you ultimately lose time and resources, and risk duplication in your attempts to find and wrangle it all. This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) steps in to save the day.

The heart of a DAM platform is content storage, in a location where users can access and manage all their content and share it with others. It acts as the single source of truth for your company’s marketing assets, and for their distribution.

Done right, a DAM offers more than just basic storage. It should be fully equipped to handle elaborate digital asset management scenarios, including complex metadata, security, and digital rights management.

Far beyond simply being a valuable addition to a company’s marketing efforts, a robust DAM is an indispensable commodity for brands today, from startups to enterprises.

Content Marketing Platform (CMP)

Do you have all the content you need so support your marketing efforts? Where are the gaps in content – by audience, region, channel, or campaign? What types of content do you need to create? A content marketing platform helps you answer these questions and makes it easy to plan and execute your content strategy. With this tool, it’s easy to plan what content needs to be created, assign resources, then collaborate, review, and approve these content pieces for publication across your different channels.

Product Content Management (PCM)

As the name suggests, Product Content Management (PCM) is a system that stores information related to products in product-oriented, SKU-heavy organizations. PCM systems focus on customer-facing product information, such as commercial descriptions, benefits, translated content, and media.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

MRM platforms have a unique role: they support and measure marketing operations, from strategic planning to project management and measuring impact.

MRMs are solutions that have a broad scope of capabilities, from marketing calendars, creative reviews, approval management, performance dashboards, and more. When they’re leveraged to their full potential, they are as impressive as they are comprehensive.

As we’ve reviewed, a content hub blends and replaces traditional silos of DAM, CMP, PCM, and MRM as well as other capabilities. It acts as a home base for all your digital assets, as well as for collaboration and creative project management tools. And while storing all that content and making it available is one thing, fostering creative coherence is another.

Supporting and streamlining some of the underlying processes for bringing assets together and enriching or creating new content is just as important.

Getting teams to work together better

Project managers are accustomed to operating with structure. Creative teams? Sometimes not so much. How can you merge creative and marketing processes and foster collaboration in a quickly shifting environment with multiple stakeholders on tight deadlines?

A content hub offers tools that support both the project managers and the creative team, such as dashboards, calendars, task lists, and more. These tools give project managers insight and help them add structure to the creative process, while keeping milestones and KPIs in sight. Features that allow teams to upload, preview, and comment on assets also facilitate collaboration between internal and external teams.

When choosing a content hub, make sure it has a can-do attitude toward making connections — in other words, one that easily integrates with other platforms. Next to generic APIs, your content hub should have out-of-the-box implementations for third-party marketing technology such as ERP, e-commerce, and CMS platforms.

That way, every platform’s owner can work on the side they know best, because the content is available without technology or protocol roadblocks.

Learn how Sitecore Content Hub can help you deliver it all in one comprehensive, user-friendly solution.