Conceptial Connect
The Case for a Marketing Content Hub
Your customers expect memorable moments at every brand touchpoint. And when you have websites, social pages, blogs, and mobile content to consider, it can feel impossible to deliver everything with quality and speed. That’s why 97% of marketers say producing enough content to meet their organization’s needs is their biggest concern. Yet, stitching together the systems, data, and processes needed to manage content creation and delivery at scale across channels is a daunting task. And with today’s content personalization mandate layered on top of this work-stream, the daunting task becomes a full-blown crisis. Incremental improvements in efficiency and scale with legacy tools are no longer a viable solution. New thinking and paradigms are called for, and nothing short of a marketing transformation built on a new class of systems and processes is needed. This new foundation has a simple name, yet its power is transformational—we call it a “Content Hub.” In this guide, we’ll explore the case for this solution and explain how it can help you supercharge your marketing operations. To turn the ideal of content marketing and omnichannel into reality, we have to connect the dots of fragmented infrastructure that create disjointed digital experiences.
We can help you identify where content is hiding by determining some of the usual suspects that hold pieces of content used in content marketing, such as:
- ERP: Owned by the older, more serious, and well-established layers of the organization.
- PLM: These systems support product development from R&D to industrialization, management of versions, and changes to processes or specifications, down through the phase-out.
- PIM & PCM: It is a smaller and more frivolous brother and leans toward the marketing organization.
- DAM: Owned by the marketing organization, and the scope is rough in that it holds media files, including product images.
- MRM: Also known as campaign management platforms, they are a special guest here.
- Creative review: These tools cover the upload of drafts of creative artifacts such as layouts or video, and annotation and commenting by stakeholders.
- Agency: Agencies are, for some clients, an important and surprising source of master data.
After establishing the structure, it’s time to flesh out the content hub. We do this in four important steps:
- Aggregate
- Enrich existing entities
- Add new entities
- Document relationships