Creating a great customer experience is the competitive differentiator for your brand. Great content is how you create these experiences, how you interact with your customers, and how you engage them in omnichannel conversations. Your customers have high expectations for these interactions – they want them personalized, relevant and fresh. That means the pressure is on for your brand to continuously deliver relevant, engaging content to the right person, at the right time, on the right channel.
To keep pace with these digital demands, content needs to be understood as a strategic component to the business and operationalized in a way that drives strategy, inspiration, and collaboration. Brands are adopting content operations, a framework for how to create the content that powers customer experiences – across channels and platforms. Content operations involves a set of processes, people, and technologies needed for strategically planning, creating, managing, and analyzing all content types for every channel across a business.
No matter where you reside in the business – marketing, sales, HR, product strategy, R&D, etc. – everyone is affected by the content and digital experiences built through content ops.
Any part of the business that creates, consumes, or shares content is part of the broader content ecosystems, which is nearly every part of the business.
Digital asset management (DAM) is an essential component to achieving effective content operations. The right DAM serves as a foundational technology solution, giving you the power to streamline and orchestrate all the work it takes to create, organize, and deliver personalized content and experiences. However, not all DAMs provide the capabilities, architecture, and flexibility needed to support an omnichannel content operations strategy.
There are DAMs on the market that are part of a monolithic digital experience platform or DXP model, where it is just one tool within a bundle of other proprietary tools that may also include content management systems (CMS), personalization capabilities, CRM, automation, social media management, and more. These all-in-one solutions try to combine all that functionality into one platform, which is weighty and expensive and often not as agile or flexible as promoted. This monolithic model makes it difficult for brands to invest in other modern tools because they lack the power, agility, and flexibility needed to work effectively within a mixed ecosystem that is continuously evolving.
But today’s organizations need greater composability – the ability to build their environment with best-of-breed (or the “best-for-me” approach) solutions from multiple vendors. This approach gives your marketing teams the freedom to adopt modern, future-proofed tools with lower tech debt in the long run to keep your content operations cutting edge. A stand-alone, best-of-breed DAM can serve a brand’s omnichannel needs across any CMS, multiple CMS’s in parallel, and virtually any channel type and ecosystem configuration. As part of a composable environment, a best-of-breed DAM give brands the flexibility and elasticity to continuously modernize their integration across multiple downstream solutions.
Composability Underpinning all of this is a composable content architecture. It is the way forward for today’s modern brands as the demand for content continues to grow, new channels constantly emerge, and the pressure to create great, personalized content intensifies.
Composable content architecture replaces the monolithic, campaign & channel-specific limited purchases of the past with a focus on thoughtfully designed, end-to-end, integrated, best-of-breed, cloud-based heterogenous solution sets fine-tuned for companies’ specific need and differentiation points. As you build out your own strategy for creating flexible, agile content operations, there are three pillars to this approach that you can put to good use in evaluating your team and ecosystem needs, as well as vendor offerings.
Pillar 1: Supporting the full content lifecycle–from upstream creative to downstream delivery
Marketers are responsible for the cumulative experience audiences have across the customer’s journey. The full content lifecycle must be managed and scaled to ensure superior brand experiences. But with marketers, creatives and strategists all working across different teams, systems, and locations, controlling the omnichannel experience is incredibly difficult and often leads to chaos:
- Content and assets are stored in multiple repositories
- Searching for the right content is cumbersome, slow, and confusing – impacting your speed to market
- It’s difficult to identify outdated content or prevent duplication
- Maintaining version control is an ongoing problem
- Use of inconsistent messaging delivers a confusing, off-brand customer experience
- Teams don’t have clear visibility into who is working on what
- You lack visibility into the impact of your efforts
The key to turning this state of chaos into streamlined content operations is having the ability to continuously manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your content across every process – content planning, creation, use/reuse, and distribution. With a fully optimized content lifecycle, powered by a best-of-breed DAM, there is no gap between the content planning, creation, use/reuse, and distribution processes, so your organization can:
- Plan with agility to seize opportunities
- Centrally manage content to easily find, localize and share
- Effectively create, approve, and use content with ease
- Understand who is working on what, and optimize workloads
- Ensure omnichannel content is always on-brand and compliant, with the right context usage
- Understand what you’re spending on, and how activities contribute to the bottom line
- Have a unified view into in-flight and in-market content, campaigns, and other experiences.
Pillar 2. Using AI and automation to deliver omnichannel experiences at scale
Industry experts like Forrester Research agree that not all content needs to be created by humans – nor should it be. AI and automation can help teams eliminate the work about work, so they can focus their efforts on more strategic opportunities to move the brand forward.
With your oversight, AI and automation have the potential to help you optimize your content operations and help you better understand what makes for a great customer experience. They also can help reduce workloads and improve the return on effort (ROE) and return on investment (ROI) of your initiatives. Here are just a few examples of how AI and automation can fast track your content operations.
Automate project management
A best of breed DAM can implement AI-driven automation to streamline creative workflows, collaboration, reviews, and approvals so those teams can focus their talent and time on creating high-performance content at scale instead of being bogged down with mundane tasks. For example, AI and automation can route projects to the right resources based on a range of different attributes including expected skills needed, availability of resources given other project requests, ability to automatically flag if appropriate compliance needs aren’t met, and the ability to measure the actual performance metrics of the pieces in market.
Improve asset findability
A DAM solution with enterprise search capabilities and AI-driven auto-tagging can improve asset findability and help you reduce your average new content creation times and the amount of time your teams spend searching for existing content. This ultimately improves productivity and accelerates time to market for all your content and campaigns.
Maximize asset reuse
To make personalization easier, and to get better return on effort (ROE) for every piece of content your team creates, creative teams should strategically reuse the content they already have. Using AI, your DAM can suggest existing content to creators that can be repurposed to accelerate campaigns and reduce open requests and re-work.
Pillar 3: Supporting an integrated ecosystem
Delivering relevant, omnichannel customer experiences requires that organizations utilize an unprecedented level of solutions—and integration support for them – to better manage and connect their data, workflows, and content. Having the ability to connect your tech stack is essential for global visibility into all marketing activities so you can improve internal productivity and get to market faster.
Content operations need to be omnichannel-centric, CMS-agnostic, and well-integrated. A CMS-agnostic DAM can serve omnichannel needs across any CMS, multiple CMS’s in parallel, and virtually any channel type and ecosystem configuration. It becomes that universal content engine, independent of any changes you make to your CMS down the road. Instead of relying on a restricting set of tools that usually only “speak” with one another, an independent DAM, built on a composable content architecture, gives you the ability to easily work within a mixed ecosystem so you can accelerate time to market and conversion, and take control over the way you move your brand forward.
Brands who understand their reality of a mixed ecosystem and appreciate that flexibility is needed from their content operations solution will benefit from a more efficient, future-proofed, and effective capability that accelerates time to market and conversion.
Best Practices for the Road Ahead
We often hear, “we need an updated DAM strategy”. But there’s no such thing – if a company’s DAM doesn’t connect and orchestrate with PIM or legacy systems or any CMS or custom-built apps they are using, it will not get you to that level and your DAM will become just another data silo.
DAM customers and those looking for the DAM solutions need to be asking these deeper questions like: Why do I need metadata on my digital assets? What does that allow my ecommerce on content management systems to do? How is that going to help me capitalize on more sales or build relationship with my customers? How can I create a unified experience for my content assets, and for the customer journey as a whole?
Companies need to orchestrate data and systems and contextualize their content. The headless shift has driven interest in decoupling content and presentation and different parts of the customer experience stack – this needs to be seen in a more orchestration-oriented way by IT leaders.
It is unfortunately common for companies to have siloed implementations with little alignment between their tools and their DAM…and quite rare still for an organization to take an orchestration-based approach – where the way content moves, congruence and coherence, structure, and semantics, becomes the primary operative approach with the technology selection being secondary. That is the way to get to intelligence, start with coherence as the mandate – and then get the technology to conform to it. Don’t pick a vendor or stack to be committed to managing all the customer experiences.
This might sound like a lot but there are some things you can start doing now to prepare for this future. Invest in contextualized experiences – personalization is not a panacea – your brand being its best self is through a deeper understanding of the content:user relationship and how that context motivates customers to buy more, get to the store, know how and why the products and services provide them value.
Next, you need to dedicate time to actually managing your digital assets. This is so often missed by companies and therefore don’t set themselves up for success from the start. A DAM is nothing without its people – the teams that manage it breathe life into it, give it its power, and connect it to the brand’s presence in market. This means hiring the right people to maintain and contextualize your content. Hire a taxonomist with a library science background, or DAM librarian, hire from the IT side that knows information hierarchies and data architecture – these two roles work hand in hand to maintain your brand vernacular – its vocabularies, standards, principles, and practices.
All of this, from composable content architecture to a dedicated martech strategy is part of a commitment to digital experience transformation. From planning and orchestration to integrations and a modernized tech stack, unified data and content management helps content work for you and creates more coherence across your entire organization.
Tune in to Martech Cube Podcast for visionary Martech Trends, Martech News, and quick updates by business experts and leaders!!!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samuel Chapman, VP of Content Strategy, Aprimo
Samuel Chapman is a content strategist, brand builder, and storyteller. He is currently VP of Content & Communications at Aprimo. Sam has spent the last decade building data-driven content operations programs for hyper-growth startup, mid-market, and enterprise B2B tech organizations to help them translate their mission, vision, and values into meaningful brand narratives and content experiences.