Best practices for managing the content lifecycle according to industry leading B2C companies

At a Sitecore Symposium 2024 panel discussion moderated by Sitecore’s Director of Content Strategy, Jacqueline Baxter, B2C industry innovators including Manuel Janzen, Product Platform Lead Communications, Bayer, and Jim Nelson, Director of Digital Platforms, Beyond Blue, discussed their strategies for successfully managing the content marketing lifecycle.

As part of their recent digital transformation, Bayer made the decision to cut back significantly on their content, removing some 70% of their pages. Reflecting on the experience, Manuel Janzen, Bayer’s Product Platform Lead, Communications said: “There’s a reason for every piece of content, I mean, people don’t create it because they are bored. They create it because someone thinks it’s important and it’s there to serve a purpose, and of course, you need to have the discussion – is this purposeful now or can something else represent its purpose?”

Jim Nelson, Director of Digital Platforms, Beyond Blue, echoed these sentiments, saying the organization’s use of the term ‘well-intentioned content’ to describe certain assets led to some confronting conversations. Ultimately, they decided “If it’s not working the way it should, we need to refactor it,” he said.

Jacqueline Baxter, Director, Content, Design and Strategy, Sitecore compared content auditing to the process of clearing belongings before moving to a new house. “The first stage is easy, it’s all the stuff that you’re meant to give away. The second stage may be a little more difficult, but the third stage, people are attached, they look for ways to rework it, or maybe come back to it at another stage,” she said.

Underlining the importance of clear guidelines and frameworks to bring order to the process, Nelson said “We made sure that the precursor to phase two was to implement a process or framework that means content has a lifecycle and that everything now has to go through that gate including the refactoring of content, so you have a standard that you hold everything to, so you don’t end up with exactly the same problem.”

For Bayer, the auditing process delivered some important lessons, “We reduced from 300 internet portals into one. The first step in the lifecycle was content review, replanning it, rewriting it, reducing it – bringing it down to the new platform and from there it was then templated, and we put the governance on really having that template and having review processes. At the beginning we were so strict, we said every year, you’ll get an email about your content, you have to reapprove it, if you don’t do this, it will get automatically unpublished. We have 400 content editors and I think that was the worst idea we ever had – after one year when the content got unpublished, we got complaints, so we increased minor amends, but we don’t unpublish anymore,” said Janzen.

Janzen also spoke about Bayer’s realization that content must not be approached in a one-size-fits-all way, saying “It’s very different how people in the US communicate and how people in Europe and Asia communicate, it’s a whole different style. If you are in Asia, every white space is filled, meanwhile we are used to crisp information, where you don’t need to scroll, and that’s what we had to learn – you really have to adapt to the market where your content is distributed.”

Next, the panel tackled the topic of cross-team collaboration. Speaking about his experience at Bayer, Janzen said “We had IT, we had communications, we had a creative agency, and the development agency. We quickly realized we needed one team.”

He went on to describe how they implemented a number of rules, “The first rule was ‘no blaming’– when something is wrong, every one of us is at fault. If something goes wrong, we did it together, and we shared product ownership, so we had one product owner in communications, and one in IT which was me, and we made all decisions from there. If it was an IT or communications decision, we did it together and that automatically led to acceptance of both functions because communications knew they were involved in every decision and IT knew they were involved and if things went wrong, that automatically led to a solution-finding process instead of looking at whose fault it is in the process. That was an interesting learning.”

Commenting on cross-team collaboration at Beyond Blue, Nelson said: “We have a unique situation because the nature of our content is clinical and often speaks to things that need to have medical backing, we have a clinical governance framework that all content has to go through. The thing that is probably the most interesting is that as we went through that migration, it began to expose content that perhaps had crept in, and so we almost had to relitigate everything that we’d previously published and revisit it because either the science or methodology behind it had changed, or it had dated, or it was no longer relevant, especially post-pandemic, we saw a lot of our content was reframed differently.” He continued by saying that the separate gated workflow is an ongoing challenge for Beyond Blue and they are currently looking at software solutions to improve the efficiency of the publishing workflow.

Closing out the session, the panel shared learnings and advice from their respective digital transformation projects.

Janzen said “I think the true success factor is dedication, you don’t necessarily need the smartest people or the best programmers, or the most creative people, you just need a vision, and then you need dedication and then your vision will fly. The other thing is – whatever vision you have, don’t let people tell you that’s not realistic or that’s technically not possible, there is a way.”

Sharing Beyond Blue’s experience, Nelson added, “We had one of the most aggressive timelines I’ve ever worked with, and our content was about stress–workplace stress–and it’s very hard to crack the whip when the subject matter is of that nature. We really focused on progress over perfection, where we were kind enough to ourselves and protected everyone on the team and partners. We had everyone ensuring that we were looking after each other and we just ensured we maintained parity with people and experience, we made progress, we uplifted, and we really measured and celebrated those wins. It meant the whole thing became this very cultural, tribal thing, it meant everyone was working together for the same goal and all of that was achieved by prioritizing progress over perfection.”

Discover more about the content marketing lifecycle and how to unlock the power of content marketing for your organization.