Global retailer smashes performance goals with latest release of Content Hub

Sitecore product marketer, Jose Santa Ana, interviewed the IT Director of a top-10 global sportswear brand on how the latest release of Content Hub 4.0 transformed their digital marketing.

Q: Thank you for taking time to share your wealth of knowledge as an experienced digital marketer in the retail sector. First, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your business?

A: My company designs, develops, and markets several brands to a diversified sales mix, and has centers of operation around the globe. I manage technology solutions that help our marketers be more effective in delivering the best digital experience to our customers across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C.

Digital sits at the heart of all our marketing efforts, and technologies like Sitecore Content Hub are essential to our marketing capabilities that help us deliver the best possible experiences to our customers. A snapshot of Content Hub activity during 2021 shows how important it is to us, with over 700K assets, 1.2 million downloads, 150K uploads, 40K logins, and 4K users.

Q: As a retail digital marketing proponent, what were some of the trends and drivers in the market and your own business that first led you to look at Content Hub?

A: You don’t need me to tell you that retail is one of the toughest business environments. Margins are tight, competition is stiff, and customers’ likes and dislikes change almost daily. There’s also the constant threat of nimble new players that spring up and eat market share. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these challenges and drove the evolution from brick and mortar to digital sales and marketing even harder and faster.

As a global business we are constantly reviewing, evolving, and adapting how we address those challenges. To do that, we rely heavily on innovative and inspiring marketing to drive sales. Having the ability to create interesting and engaging content and get it out to the market quickly is essential. This is where Content Hub has proved invaluable in overcoming both market pressures and other challenges we faced related to digital content, specifically around outdated legacy technology.

We had multiple siloed systems where enriching and maintaining assets was done manually. Very few of those assets were centralized which, in a multi-brand, multi-product business, made it difficult to find and distribute the right content. Critical assets were dispersed across these numerous and disparate systems.

Q: So you made the decision to deploy Content Hub. What was the impact on your business in addressing some of the challenges you highlighted?

A: Content Hub has become the bedrock for how we manage all our digital assets. It is hosted in the cloud and integrates seamlessly with several complementary business systems and applications to build a powerful digital marketing solution. Although we’ve evolved and grown the platform since, when we first deployed Content Hub it gave us global access to over 500,000 digital assets. It consolidated disparate content silos into a single, centralized hub and opened easy access to digital marketing content for downstream global enterprise applications that addressed both our consumer and B2B needs.

Over 4,000 users worldwide now have secure access to restricted content, including external sharing and collaboration. Content Hub has been central to our digital transformation. Over the last several years we have benefitted from the core benefits of centralizing digital assets so that we can effectively plan, create, collaborate on, manage, and deliver content across our entire portfolio of products.

Q: Jumping to the present day, would you share how the latest release has built on and extended those benefits?

A: The initial deployment of Content Hub was transformative for the business. Moving to Content Hub 4.0 has been another game changer on that evolutionary path. The latest release of Content Hub brought significant performance improvements resulting in decreased download times for individual and bulk downloads of assets from our global digital asset management system. Average download speeds in Japan are close to 70% faster, with those in the US averaging around 30% faster.

We’ve also seen many improvements in usability, flexibility, and collaboration. Accessing and finding relevant digital content is easier and faster and the variety of content types has increased with items such as seasonal catalogs, social influencer content, and marketing video content. There are new content manipulation features like video trimming, more image cropping tools, and flyout asset value buttons against content items. Security improvements also ensure users only access content they are approved to use.

Moving to Content Hub 4.0 was aimed at leveraging new features around delivering and publishing content, specifically content as a service (CaaS). Like many retailers we have a huge and complex mix of products across several brands, so it’s critical for us to be able to continue to make content delivery faster, easier, and more flexible to achieve faster time-to-value. Better variation management also makes it easier to repurpose a single asset for multiple uses. And finally, we’ve been able to enhance collaboration and asset sharing both internally and externally.

Despite all the challenges that we and all in retail have faced over the last two years, we managed to deliver a host of successes to support our growth, transformation, profitability, and brand awareness. This progress is testament to the collaboration, commitment, and talent among our people and the transformative impact of Sitecore and Content Hub.