Executive Summary

How Content Marketing Hubs Enable Exceptional Customer Experiences

For years, digital asset management (i.e., DAM, MAM, and BAM), marketing resource management (MRM), and other enterprise marketing solutions have helped agencies, corporations, and publishers streamline their marketing operations and get control of their assets and brand communications. By deploying these technologies, marketing organisations have made their production workflows vastly more efficient - and those efficiencies have gone directly to the bottom line.

But in 2015 and beyond, you need more than just production efficiencies if you want your brands to succeed and your company’s revenues to grow. With mobile devices and social media now ubiquitous in daily life, you need technologies that can help your brands connect with customers in meaningful ways, at exactly the right times, and across all possible digital touch-points.

Today, a sportswear company can’t simply launch a new basketball shoe through traditional media channels and standard pro-athlete endorsements. The company needs mobile and social marketing strategies as well - and it needs to be agile in order to take advantage of any marketing opportunity that may arise. For example, if an NBA player is wearing the shoe when he shoots a game-winning basket, the company’s marketing team must be ready to respond with a campaign that capitalises on the heightened consumer interest. They must be technologically equipped to immediately deliver a great customer experience around the shot and the shoe - via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, mobile apps, mobile ads, the web, and everywhere else.

Obviously, you can’t create dynamic experiences like this with a DAM or other down-the-line production tool. You need a powerful enterprise content management system (a.k.a. a CMS or a WCM) that facilitates organisation-wide communication and omni-channel content marketing. A single source of truth that provides the visibility and access needed for real collaboration, that enables more effective creative processes up front, and that facilitates all of the subsequent steps in creative execution and delivery.

DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT & CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

All marketing content and customer experiences start with business objectives. The right CMS can help your team more effectively develop a marketing plan to meet those objectives, and then create and deliver all of the content needed to support the plan. That’s because CMS acts as a content marketing hub that centralises and automates almost every aspect of the process.

Your content must be designed from the start to be search engine optimised and easily actionable across media and devices, with the longest possible shelf life and maximum shareability. And ultimately, you need to be able to personalise it based on variables including customer industry, social media profile, online behaviours, preferences, language, geographical region, and more.

CMS can help you get content right - and it can address every other stage of the omni-channel marketing workflow, including:

Marketing plan development - Your team can use CMS tools to author a marketing plan, collaborate on it, make it available to executives for review and approval, and make the final version accessible to all team members - internal staff as well as partner agencies - to ensure that everyone works in alignment with the plan.

Content creation - Content authors like writers, editors, and designers can contribute their work directly to the CMS. This gives stakeholders visibility into work-in-progress, and it ensures that all content elements come together to create a customer experience that supports the marketing plan.

Asset management - With CMS as your content marketing hub, your team can manage all of its digital content in a central system that optimises repetitive production processes, helps you deliver assets and campaigns faster, and improves the quality and consistency of your brand communications.

Ongoing team collaboration - The best CMS solutions facilitate enterprise-wide communication, offering a social platfom that your team members can use to communicate with one another. This further enhances collaboration, accelerates progress, and keeps everyone on the same page.

Scheduling, routing, and approvals - CMS offers tools for project scheduling as well as content routing, review, and approval. This ensures that projects move forward quickly, and also that content is properly vetted at each stage so you can avoid any deviations from the marketing plan, messaging, brand guidelines, or legal standards.

Translation - With CMS, you can automate much of your content localization process, making it easy to deliver content and experiences in multiple languages to customers around the world.

Production and publishing - CMS solutions enable mediaindependent production of content in all formats for all media channels - print, web, mobile apps, and social media. So you can be confident in your ability to create content once and then deliver it everywhere.

The marketing plan development and content creation stages are the most critical because, ultimately, it’s great customer experiences that drive awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty. When used effectively, content marketing hubs help you realise even more value from these revenue-generating stages of the content workflow - and they enable you to drive more of your marketing investment into them, too. Why? Because they eliminate common administrative issues that slow progress. They help you avoid errors and creative misfires that dilute marketing messages and weaken customer experiences. And they facilitate truly responsive marketing - content that’s always in the right context and the right format, delivered at the right time.

CMS can also integrate with your MRM solution to help you streamline planning, financial workflows, project management, and other aspects of your overarching marketing operation.

CMS and agency-specific challenges

While designed to meet the content marketing needs of enterprise marcom teams, publishers, and ad agencies alike, CMS addresses some agency-specific challenges.

Many agencies struggle to manage client services on a multiregional or global scale. They also lack the capacity to manage the localization of their content into multiple languages. As a result, many large corporations choose to work with a primary agency in their home country and then farm out regional content marketing work to local agencies in their markets around the world. When this happens, the primary agency loses out on revenue, the corporation has to spend more time and resources managing multiple agencies, and global brand expression and customer experience often lose consistency and focus.

By helping agencies more effectively manage client communications, and by giving them the tools to establish their own content localization workflows, CMS solutions empower agencies to become true regional or even global networks. In addition, agencies can use CMS to open new revenue streams - offering services based on the number of formats or types of channels to which content is delivered, or providing clients with overall efficiency, agencies are free to take on new clients and new work.

Getting started with CMS

By investing in content marketing and communications systems and integrating them with your existing systems and processes, your organisation can focus more time and energy on creative execution and the customer experience. That’s why it’s important to work with an experienced marketing technology consultant who understands the content creation process and can help you strategically navigate a complex technology landscape.