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What your business needs is a sustainable content strategy, geared towards business growth. When creating — or refreshing — your content strategy, the best place to begin is by looking at how your content is currently housed and organized. You may be familiar with how valuable a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can be for storing, managing, and accessing all your marketing content — from photos and artwork to videos and source files. Going a step further, if improving the customer experience through omnichannel or personalization strategies is a key concern for your business, you may find that a DAM alone is not enough, and a Content Hub might be more suited to your needs. Ideally, your assets will live in one repository as a single source of truth for all stakeholders, such as a DAM or content hub.
To say everyone is prioritizing content is a major understatement. In fact, 97% of senior marketers say producing and publishing personalized digital content more quickly is a priority.
But for many businesses, creating, personalizing, and sharing content has become a cumbersome process — a constant churn of box-ticking, tagging, and replicating content across channels. And with the rising demand for personalized experiences online, businesses are under more pressure than ever to deliver an increasingly high volume of relevant, shareable, and engaging content. It’s understandable that creating — and keeping to — a content strategy can fall down the list of priorities.
Unfortunately, simply publishing more and more content is not enough. What your business needs is a sustainable content strategy, geared towards business growth.
So, where should you begin?
When creating — or refreshing — your content strategy, the best place to begin is by looking at how your content is currently housed and organized.
You may be familiar with how valuable a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can be for storing, managing, and accessing all your marketing content — from photos and artwork to videos and source files.
A DAM allows you to streamline the management of your assets, so that you can always find what you need, when you need it. And this is a great first step towards building a sustainable content strategy.
Going a step further, if improving the customer experience through omnichannel or personalization strategies is a key concern for your business, you may find that a DAM alone is not enough, and a Content Hub might be more suited to your needs.
A content hub allows you to take charge of your entire content lifecycle. It goes beyond simply organizing assets by unifying content planning, production, collaboration, management, and distribution within a single, integrated solution.
For example, an ecommerce business would not only have numerous product images, but also numerous product descriptions. A content hub would allow these assets to be linked and easily found alongside other useful data, such as packaging artwork, specifications, and benefits. When you can find it all with one search and easily move it through to distribution channels, the process quickly begins to feel a lot smoother.
Evolving from a traditional DAM model to a modern content hub will strengthen your operations and help you achieve the high-end of what is possible with content ROI and content performance.
A valuable exercise for your organization to undertake is to evaluate your strengths and capabilities for the major attributes of the content lifecycle. Doing this can help you to understand how you can begin to leverage the three Rs approach — reduce, reuse, and repurpose — in your content operations.
Time, energy, and resources are often wasted trying to locate the latest version of a digital asset because it could be held within multiple tools, systems, teams, or agencies. Ideally, your assets will live in one repository as a single source of truth for all stakeholders, such as a DAM or content hub.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
The average creative person looks for a media file 83 times a week and fails to find that asset 35% of the time – a DAM solution will reduce that figure to 5%.
Misplaced or hard-to-locate assets often means that valuable resources are unnecessarily spent in re-purchasing or re-creating content. An efficient content operation can reduce the number of net new assets that need to be created by enabling you to reuse existing assets.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
IDC found that businesses reduced their asset creation costs by an average of 28% by eliminating duplicative effort, reducing the number of assets that are created but never used, and improving asset reuse.
Maintaining brand consistency and brand integrity between different online channels and from online to offline is paramount. Brand consistency is a big contributing factor to building trust with your audience; consistency demonstrates that your business is reliable. Having consistent messaging and branding means there is little room for interpretation, so you can ensure that you are presenting your business in the way that you intended.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
Consistent presentation of a brand has been seen to increase revenue by 10-20%.
From creation and review to approval and distribution, working across multiple disjointed systems can make collaboration very difficult. A lack of clear workflows can cause governance pain points, lengthy turnaround times, and cumbersome communications.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
Streamlined processes and enhanced approval workflow functionality empowers organizations to save thousands of man-hours and reduce on-brand asset creation costs by up to 80%.
Traditionally, end-to-end content marketing activities have required the use of multiple solutions and platforms. They are often only loosely integrated or completely siloed and maintained by the IT team. Managing this kind of disparate and dynamic marketing technology stack, often with custom integrations, can be expensive and high-risk.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
A 20%-50% reduction in IT costs can be expected for an integrated solution approach.
Purchased assets typically have strict terms of use associated with them. The misuse of assets can result in expensive fines, reputational damage, and legal action. In addition, within regulated industries, policy non-compliance penalties are significant.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
The cost of asset misuse can be extreme. For example, an allegedly co opted photograph turned into a $2.2 Billion headache for Chipotle.
There are multiple departments in any one organization that utilize content, not just marketing but also sales, legal, and many more. When content is siloed, content management is almost impossible, leading to issues such as inconsistent messaging, duplicated content, and version control.
Where is there room for improvement in your business? Consider the following:
When you change the way your content is created, stored, and distributed, you can revolutionize your content strategy and fuel your organization’s business growth.
Implementing a sustainable content strategy that is agile, streamlined, and smart, improves customer experience, leading to increased loyalty, spend, and advocacy. The result: unlocking a direct route to improved ROI, and subsequently, business growth.
How does it do this? A sustainable content strategy reduces time spent on content updates and publishing, marketing overhead, content creation costs, and much more. It’s truly about working smarter, not harder.
Sitecore Content Hub comprises a range of Sitecore content offerings, allowing businesses to consolidate asset management, optimize content planning and production processes, and unlock significant gains in efficiency.
With your end-to-end content lifecycle under one roof, you can start seeing results like:
To find out more about the Sitecore Content Hub and how it could support your business, download our new guide “Your content strategy, supercharged”.