“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Bibhakar Pandey, vice president of customer experience and marketing services at Capgemini.
A content assembly line is exactly what it sounds like: a series of progressive steps to create and distribute content effectively.
So instead of creating one-off, bespoke pieces for only one channel or consumer segment at a time, marketers can produce targeted, personalized content at scale, quickly and easily.
Collecting and managing content in this way enables marketers to deliver personalized content across different channels, create templates using various digital and non-digital assets, and then mix and match depending on campaign needs. Using this model with the right content management system (CMS) helps provide a core, templatized foundation that simplifies content creation, management and distribution.
Getting started: go modular
A brand’s content studio should be designed with a series of modular content components to create a baseline. These components can include everything from ebooks, white papers and articles to display ads, emails, social posts and more.
For each campaign, they should build out the supporting assets for online and offline marketing, whether it’s on a website, an app or in-store. Every touchpoint should be aligned with a personalized message, creating an omnichannel customer experience. Also important is to define and implement a seamless workflow across all stakeholders.
Mix and match
The baseline of modular assets results in dynamic content templates that can be easily adapted, repurposed and reused, which not only reduces development time but also helps maintain brand consistency across platforms. With this approach, marketers can mix, match and deliver content across channels depending on an individual customer’s preferences, demographics and behaviors.
The content should be built in a way that serves the respective channels and is also relevant to different functions across the enterprise, such as sales, service, commerce or customer engagement.
Build a searchable library
Once a brand has a large volume of content and digital assets, it’s essential to tag each piece and store them in a content library. Creating an efficient tagging system helps catalogue and track different content types and topics, making it easy to retrieve and deliver at the right time, to the right audience, on the right channel. Add in an efficient workflow for review and approvals, and you have a productive content factory.
Building a content machine isn’t always a smooth path, however. There are some challenges marketers must watch out for. For example, companies must take care to comply with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, California Consumer Privacy Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. These days, users have never been more hyperaware of what information they share and how organizations use their personal data. However, they may be more inclined to share their information with brands they trust as long as they’re getting a personalized service and benefits in return.
Another challenge is understanding how to measure content performance, setting benchmarks and properly tracking results. Many organizations will simply track the data without really digging into their KPIs from start to finish to see how the content is truly playing into those results. If brands aren’t focused on measuring the content production process and its effects, the system will ultimately break down.
Define your metrics based on your organization’s needs
Once the assets, organization and tools are in place to scale then it’s time to define key metrics and KPIs. While there are no good or bad metrics for an organization, they should be tied directly to business goals and objectives, and all content marketing activities must be designed around achieving them.
While measuring these end goals, it is important for organizations to continuously enhance the quality of their content, design it based on user segmentation, continuously drive toward the newer form of content consumption channels and measure the usage in each channel while maintaining agility and scalability.
The next level
The availability and wide range of choices for content can be a possible boon or bane at the same time; scaling it to the next level is the biggest challenge. And many organizations are driving the exponential scale through a full-service content studio with a factory kind of setup.
When you’re building out your content strategy, it’s essential to identify and understand your audience, design your strategy with the end goal in mind, measure every step along the way and choose the right technology platforms to achieve those goals.
Doing this work upfront will help brands continue to produce personalized content at scale that enhances the customer experience well into the future, no matter where its customers may be.
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