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. The majority 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: the Content Hub.

Most marketers get introduced to the concept of a Content Hub through a DAM (Digital Asset Management) project. DAM is now an established category and, as a consequence, marketers often label projects in their back office as 'DAM projects' without diving into the underlying business case, use cases, and specific requirements. More often than not, the project then takes a different turn.

While a DAM is usually present in some form, we often find that customers are dealing with serious challenges around content marketing and omnichannel delivery. This is far beyond the traditional scope of DAM. By the time the RFP is released, the project has been locked in the DAM mold. Short lists have been made of DAM vendors. Budgets have been matched to DAM implementations. Internal stakeholders, sponsors, staffing, and governance are all expected to match a DAM business case.

Marketing content is all over the place. Literally. It can sit on hard drives. In Excel files. We have even helped clients who were not certain about the physical whereabouts of the server. But mostly, bits and pieces of marketing content can be found in platforms that are, or are not, owned by the marketing organization.

The Usual Suspects

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems hold financial and logistical information but are generally unsuited to accommodate typical marketing information. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems support product development and contain technical specifications. Product Information Management (PIM) leans toward marketing but creates an awkward DAM-PIM coupling. DAM is generally owned by marketing and holds media files, while Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platforms support the overall marketing cycle. Agencies are, surprisingly, often an important and organized source of master data.

Having identified the different places marketing content lives, we need a plan to bring it together. In order to carry out our plan, we need to introduce an idea that is central to our way of looking at marketing content: The Domain Model.

The Domain Model is a concept built around Entities and Actors. Actors are the different types of users that touch your marketing content. Entities are the structuring concepts around which your business is organized. What's important here is that we skip domain models that are imposed by technology. We are designing the way we want information to be structured, searchable, and linked based on the way you do business, not on how the vendor database was designed.

Now that we have established our structure, it's time to get some content in. The plan for fleshing out the Content Hub has four important steps:

1. Aggregate Existing Content

Content from different platforms is aggregated in the Content Hub. Master data ownership for aggregated Entities typically stays with dedicated platforms. These Entities are aggregated as proxies, a live-linked instance.

2. Enrich Existing Entities

Entities that are proxies can be enriched with additional data or metadata. Consider, for example, translated benefits for a product. This is a typical case where the Content Hub will enrich an existing proxy Entity with additional data.

3. Define New Entities

If new Entities are defined, the master data ownership can be assigned to the Marketing Content Hub. This is a flexible scheme that allows for an unobtrusive architecture while permitting the planning of changes without risk.

4. Document Relationships

Once we have aggregated, enriched, and defined new Entities we can also document and articulate relationships between these Entities, relationships that were not available or visible before. This is one of the strongest features of establishing a central Content Hub as it not only brings content together, it also allows you to see and explore the relationships of that content.

Content does not end with the content you own. Imagine you are an upmarket food retailer, and your central strategic marketing organization is setting up seasonal campaigns. The upcoming campaign for next summer is all about vegetables. You probably own some content about your products, maybe more mature in the content marketing game, you'll have some content available on that small family-owned farm in upstate New York that supplies you with local produce.

But when it comes to inspiring all of those marketers, agency creatives, copywriters, photographers, and that group of freelancers who operate far from your strategic cell, there is more out there. This might include Wikipedia information, recipes from food blogs, artwork from stock photo suppliers, Pinterest, blogs about local events, and more. All of this turns your DAM-gone-PIM-gone-marketing portal into a mood board of sorts.

Bringing content together and enriching or creating new content is a process. Having a place to store that content and make it available is paramount. However, supporting and streamlining some of the underlying processes is equally important.

To a certain extent, the marketing professionals and their creative suppliers we meet have one thing in common: a deep-rooted aversion to procedure, rules, and structure. It's the last stronghold of stylish anarchy in most corporations. But there is growing pressure. With CMOs that want insight into their operations, structure is becoming inevitable.

Lots of clients ask us for the remedy of workflow to fix the diagnosis of chaos. That's the type of medicine that might cure the disease, but is sure to kill the patient at the same time. Workflow, in the sense of a fixed sequence of events hardwired into a defined flowchart, is something fit for a factory, not for a marketing team.

Instead, we believe that the notion of project management should be central when looking into creative and marketing processes. The project manager brings the main theme of experienced human judgment that we can complement with tools to support both the project manager and the team. Tools for the project manager should focus on the ability to add structure and to gain insight. Marketing users and their external suppliers who participate in marketing content creation can be supported with productivity tools focused on collaboration.

A second, outer layer around the marketing content repository is the marketing portal. This site is not the final publication channel for content, nor a consumer-facing site. It is the marketing portal that is targeted at the extended marketing community of strategic and production marketers, agencies, product managers, sales staff, and anyone who works on or around marketing content.

The marketing portal serves two main purposes. First, where the marketing content repository deals primarily with structured data, the marketing portal allows you to add other types of data. It adds editorial content and context. A good example of context for structured data is a conventional brand or corporate identity guide. Instead of just providing company and brand logos, visuals, and graphical devices, they are introduced through their conceptual background and accompanied by instructions on how to properly use them.

The second purpose is to set up a dialog with your marketing community. Now that you have a channel where marketing people gather, you should use it. The dialog can be very practical, but we prefer to focus on the more inspiring aspects. This is the place where we can challenge and inspire marketers and agencies that operate far from the central marketing organization to benchmark their work and learn from peers.

Now that we have all of that beautiful, consolidated, enriched marketing content available in our Content Hub, it's time to put it to good use. Making it available through the marketing portal UI is one way. This covers human users that can browse and download information and potentially supply it manually to other users or processes that consume this information.

Next up are structural integrations to systems, platforms, and processes that are subscribers to the Content Hub. When publishing to downstream systems, the first part of the puzzle to solve is what set of content needs to go where, and in which formats. Typical downstream systems can include ecommerce, websites, CRM, and apps, as well as external sites or processes. This is handled through channel management.

Key to the Content Hub concept is that it should have a can-do attitude when it comes to connecting. The primary feature for connecting other platforms is an API. We have set the standard at a full CRUD, Hypermedia, Richardson level III API. This means the API supports both reading and writing entities or data to the repository, and the data in the repository is fully discoverable through the API.

We may not always find the CMO in the same place, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the CMO is always where the value is. Now, let's figure out where the value is in the Content Hub.

For starters, simple return on investment (ROI) optimizations are most likely to be found in marketing operations. In marketing operations, the number of parameters you can influence is not overly complicated. As with many processes, it comes down to cost, quality, and speed. Together, they make up what we usually represent as a triangle to emphasize the correlation. This triangle is the foundation for influencing ROI and eventually value.

Quality

Although quality seems like a parameter that's harder to quantify, let's look at some examples. Better briefings, more efficient review and validation rounds are easy paths toward better quality and higher effectiveness in marketing deliverables. On another level, more accessible brand guidelines and assets, well-defined localization processes, and access to validated marketing content and source files prevents improvisation and leads to a more consistent end result.

Speed

Time to market is the operational parameter that reflects the agility of your marketing organization and the ability to turn innovation or market insight into revenue. The Content Hub supports, streamlines, and structures the entire marketing creation process with tools that organize your strategic marketing efforts, production, and publication.

Cost

Cost is the most direct and visible parameter when ROI comes to mind. With tools to take the friction and inefficiencies out of your marketing processes, both internal and external costs are immediately reduced. After the initial production, costs are again reduced by providing a place to efficiently store, find, distribute, and reuse valuable marketing assets.

After exploring what can be done and what benefits it brings, the remaining question is, how does all of this translate into a business case?

The Traditional DAM Business Case

From a functional point of view, a typical DAM project will cover a relatively manageable scope of use cases: upload, store, and add metadata to files; review and validate; manage the lifecycle; search and preview; transform and distribute. When we look at the value it brings, there is certainly a clear and undeniable ROI in a DAM project. But the scope is too narrow to catch all of the value. And what's worse, it misses most of the strategic value.

What the DAM Business Case Is Missing

There are three main categories of concern: dealing with content marketing and omnichannel; making collaboration more efficient; and creating and setting up a dialog with a marketing community. The scope of content marketing obviously goes beyond media files. It is about all kinds of content, both file based and non-file based. On top of that, primary marketing content is usually scattered throughout the organization, and marketing has a tough time finding a place to store new content.

This is where the Content Hub's capabilities kick in to aggregate content, enrich it, store new content in a client-driven domain model, and document relationships between all of the Entities. Entities themselves are channel agnostic, which helps to create cells of content that are well-structured and classified, but generic enough to be reusable.

Finally, we are ready to formulate a case for the Content Hub. We believe this is a business case that can build on the traditional DAM business case in many ways and eventually replace it altogether. What is important here is that there is something that aligns with the perspective and responsibilities of every stakeholder.

Operational Marketing Teams

Operational marketing teams are empowered with tools and best practices that provide guidance. Their work will become more effective and their daily jobs will become a bit more fun at the same time.

Marketing Management

Marketing management will be able to deliver straightforward optimizations, value and success in strategic projects. Management will also be able to measure and report all of this to leadership.

Leadership

Leadership will have the insight to make decisions with the knowledge that management will be able to execute them. This puts marketing in a position where it can be part of the solution when dealing with strategic challenges.

IT

The selected platform leverages proven yet modern approaches and technologies, has a convincing scaling and integration model, and can accommodate corporate standards for hosting either on-premises or in the cloud.

We strongly believe the Content Hub business case is a good baseline for most clients in industries involved in marketing and creative production. One of the concerns we hear voiced a lot is about change management and how all of this will impact your organization.

As a parting thought, we'd like to address that question. Introducing a Content Hub can be a catalyst for change, one that doesn't impose or snub your marketing organization's operational teams, management, leadership or IT, but instead facilitates, empowers, and points the way toward operational excellence. And that, in the end, is the type of impactful change every stakeholder can rally around.

To learn more about how Sitecore Content Hub can streamline your content marketing operations, contact AgencyQ. As a certified Sitecore partner with deep expertise in content hub implementations, we can help you build the business case and execute a successful transformation.