To keep up with the need for relevant content across channels, marketers need a tech-enabled approach to creating content. With a finite number of hours in the day, it’s not always feasible to hire more creators, and endless hiring isn’t the best use for tightening marketing budgets.
The most effective way to scale content operations is to maximize what you already have available by empowering it with technology. While many teams approach the need for more content by adding headcount, modular content allows you to leverage technology to understand your content impact, easily reuse and repurpose content, and gain a 360-degree view of the value in your assets.
Modular content is one method of streamlining and automating the content creation process. It helps marketers maximize the use of their current assets while addressing some of their biggest challenges: speed to market, risk mitigation, scalability, and digital waste reduction.
How does the modular content approach work, and what other benefits does it deliver for busy marketing teams growing brands?
This article covers everything you need to know to move your content operations to a modular model:
- What modular content is
- Why the modular approach is important
- How modular content works
- The benefits of using modular content
- How to implement modular content management
What is modular content?
Modular content means assembling assets into pre-approved content blocks (modules) that can be used and reused across multiple channels, formats, and devices.
Rather than starting from scratch with every new asset, creative stakeholders combine modules into different experiences and deploy them for use on websites, in social media posts, in print and online collateral, and more.
For instance, say you have an informative infographic. You can pair the graphic with text that works across any application. This content block can then ?plug into? your website, a social media post, a white paper, or a newsletter with equal impact. These content modules pair together easily to create a cohesive customer experience.
Why is modular content important?
Enabling the fast, streamlined production of repurposed content solves the biggest challenge creative teams face: doing more with less. By eliminating the need for redundant content creation, stakeholders save hours, deliver more consistent results, and optimize the content development process.
Modular content offers marketers a distinct advantage over the traditional approach. 67% of companies surveyed by Forrester aren’t looking to create more content but would rather learn how to deliver and reuse the content they already have. The modular content approach goes beyond putting out more content by delivering relevant content and customer experiences.
How modular content works
Modular content works on a tiered system of assets. While every file is an asset, combining assets using modular content methods builds content and experiences quickly and easily. This is the tier structure for modular content:
- Content blocks: Single, pre-approved assets (files) used for a content piece or a campaign. This could be individual files (such as an image or a piece of text) or small content components comprised of different types of files (for instance, an image with included text).
- Content sets: Content blocks combined into larger, complementary asset arrangements. These can be used separately or together across multiple channels to deliver an on-brand, omnichannel experience without similar or duplicate assets that work within individual channels.
- Content experiences: Content sets as they are experienced ?at the glass??meaning on a website, social media platform, kiosk, etc. Customers may encounter separate but complementary content experiences.
For example, a customer may encounter different content sets on a brand website, made up of the many content blocks available to the marketing team. The customer interacts with the content and moves on in their web search. This is one content experience.
Later through retargeting, the customer may encounter a different content set through a Facebook customer experience. It features the same or similar products and images delivered on the website, this time through an ad or sponsored post. These content experiences appear across channels but feature similar content to reinforce the experience and drive desired behavior.
Using a digital asset management (DAM) tool allows you to create and deliver these experiences with the ease of a modular approach. It offers the most flexible and granular options for searching, creating, remixing, and delivering content in unique but consistent experiences.
Benefits of modular content
Marketing teams grow larger and more complex every day. In 2021, nearly half of respondents (47%) to one study reported they have over 20 people involved in marketing-specific content operations. Redundancy, logjams, and compliance issues increase with a team of this size.
The security and flexibility of modular content allow teams to deliver faster results with less effort, saving time and money while scaling digital content operations. This content marketing strategy offers a range of benefits:
- Improves personalization and localization: Compliant, modular content allows non-creative stakeholders like marketing teams, agencies, and end users to create localized and personalized content while maintaining brand consistency. This could include manipulating content in pre-approved ways or using fillable templates to create regional and local content.
- Boosts scalability: Scaling content across channels is a common challenge for growing brands. The ability to quickly iterate and remix content modules allows brands to scale their messaging and remain channel-specific.
- Reduces duplication: Redundant content clutters up the asset portfolio. This slows down the production and delivery of new content and initiatives. Modular content reduces redundancy, saving time and money.
- Speeds up creativity: When content creators don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every new piece of content, they can build new assets quickly and easily. This speeds up time-to-market and increases responsiveness to market changes.
- Increases brand consistency: Modular content allows brands to deliver diverse customer experiences across channels while using the same compliant content every time. This allows brands to create consistency without needing to compliance-check and approve individual assets, boosting compliance without sacrificing speed.
- Improves campaign performance: Consistent brands perform better than their less-coordinated counterparts. By building a streamlined content process, campaigns deliver higher returns and better engagement from customers.
- Boosts ROI and ROE: Your digital assets can generate revenue, but only when they’re fully utilized. Modular content maximizes the ROI of every asset. It also improves the return on effort (ROE) by reducing manual content production.
- Reduces risk: On-brand content reuse with a modular content strategy reduces regulatory and brand compliance risks. With a modern DAM with digital rights management (DRM) capabilities, teams can deliver the right content with confidence.
How to implement modular content
Using modular content to drive your content operations enables users and unlocks the potential of your digital assets.
These five steps are essential to transform your content management with a modular approach:
- Centralize your content: Bringing content together in a dynamic repository and search tool allows you to store all business content and assets in one place.
- Reduce risk through technology: Successful use of modular content relies on having the correct structure and information for assets. Automated content security and management tools ensure compliance with licensing and brand standards.
- Distribute content confidently: Data security and risk mitigation are essential components of content operations. Secure encryption and role-based access control enable users to interact with assets from any location. Integrations broaden the usefulness of tools and allow users to work in a familiar software environment.
- Incorporate strong governance: Using modular content to enable localization and personalization requires governance. Employ metadata and DRM to ensure users know usage instructions, license parameters, brand guidelines, and best practices.
- Measure and refine: Getting content into the world is only the beginning of the content journey. Using advanced tracking and metrics features, marketers measure the outcomes of their efforts and adjust strategy to maintain high performance.
Start a modular content approach with Aprimo
Using a robust, modern DAM platform like Aprimo as the foundation of your content management strategy enables teams to build content blocks, sets, and experiences from every available asset. DAM addresses the challenges of adopting a modular approach, powers decision-making, and speeds approvals to deliver high-quality, compliant content at scale.
DAM is the heart of the modular content approach, allowing teams to take advantage of a flexible, dynamic, and secure content operations tool and deliver fast results with lower risk. If you want to implement a digital asset management tool with robust features and best-in-class integrations, try Aprimo DAM for free.