If you’re feeling the strain of content deluge, you are not alone. Today’s marketing teams are working at breakneck speed to keep pace with the demand for great content that powers omnichannel customer experiences. In fact, 85% of marketers say they’re under pressure to create and deliver content more quickly. But the result of all this hard work is the continuous onslaught of content that has not only saturated markets but has also become unmanageable for organizations. What if you could harness the power of your content operations to be efficient, strategic, and optimized for every customer experience?
Reaching this level of content operations excellence is possible when teams unlock efficiencies and optimizations at every stage of the content lifecycle from upstream creative ideation all the way to downstream delivery. By adopting a content lifecycle that is agile and iterative and always-on rather than sequential, teams can shift their efforts from reactive to proactive, predictive, and prescriptive.
So, where should you start? Results from our recent report, The State of Content Operations, found that 63% of businesses across industries and use cases cite disjointed tech and processes, which create chaos and bottlenecks. Establishing an organizational capability for transformational change requires an investment in a strong foundation for supporting modern content operations.
From partnering with brands from around the world to address their challenges, we have identified similar issues affecting today’s modern marketing organizations and curated a series of best practices for optimizing content operations. Depending on where you are on your content operations journey, certain strategies and tactics may work better than others. However, if your goal is to elevate content strategy to the same priority as your customer experience or digital transformation strategy, then these five elements should be part of both your decision-making process when selecting technology, as well as your approach to building teams and processes to achieve these goals.
- Integration support for your marketing ecosystem
- Intelligent automation
- Metadata, findability, and experience
- Performance at scale
- Going beyond DAM
In this first blog of our five-part series, we’ll dive into Element 1, integration support for your marketing ecosystem to raise the ROI of your adjacent tech investments.
Technology-agnostic Content Operations
In today’s complex digital world, it’s impossible for brands to fully standardize with one vendor for their entire omnichannel stack. Therefore, your content operations, with DAM as the core, should be omnichannel-centric, technology-agnostic, and well-integrated. With a best-of-breed DAM, you gain the independence to unify and scale your customer experience across every channel via extensible and open integration.
Increasingly, brands are adopting a “multi-CMS strategy” to accelerate time to market and “get closer to their customers.” A technology-agnostic DAM can serve omnichannel needs across any CMS, multiple CMSs in parallel, and virtually any channel type and ecosystem configuration. This is impossible if your DAM is simply an add-on bolted onto a primary CMS vendor. A technology-agnostic DAM becomes that universal content engine, independent of any changes you make to your technology solutions down the road. Instead of relying on a restrictive set of tools that usually only “speak” with one another, an independent DAM gives you the ability to easily work within a mixed ecosystem so you can accelerate time to market and conversion.
Aprimo powers extensible and open integration for agility and flexibility
Aprimo is technology agnostic, so we know integrations better than anyone in the market. We have nearly 80 packaged connectors. including more than a dozen CMS solutions, APIs, services, and more, in our marketplace. Plus, with Aprimo QuickConnect, customers can connect to any web-based application in minutes vs. the months it takes with platform solutions.
The Benefits of Broad Connectivity Across the Ecosystem
- Independence from any one ecosystem or platform: you can make the future state technology decisions that are best for your organization
- Agility and flexibility to connect to the tools your people are already using and love
- Can experiment with new channels and strategies, which often requires new marketing technologies
- Attract and retain employees by providing the best technology available
- Flexible licensing – pay for what you need; can be replaced without incurring extra costs
In today’s fast-paced, digital world, customer demands and expectations will not only grow but significantly evolve in the wake of constant innovation. As a modern marketing organization, you need the flexibility to quickly and easily adopt new technologies that will help you deliver the great experiences your customers crave.
Read the second blog in this series to learn why intelligent automation is a top strategic imperative for organizations, and how it can enable you to:
- Streamline and scale decision-making
- Simplify processes
- Free up resources
- Improve operational efficiencies
Download our eBook, 5 Essential Elements of Modern Content Operations, to learn more about how you can unleash the power of your omnichannel content.