Importance of integrating a content hub to enhance marketing operations

Marketers today are facing the overwhelming challenge of meeting the demand for more and more content for their various consumer channels. The challenges in generating this content are brought to the forefront by marketing departments using multiple tools, disjointed systems, convoluted processes with the inability to collaborate, plus poor visibility into how the content is performing.

It becomes worse since the content that is generated, and this dysfunctional process is replicated in multiple areas of the organization. The Web team, social media team, product/merchandising team, advertising department, print media, and other teams are all creating their own “content” – sometimes duplicating and seldom reusing content. The difficulty in generating all this content, coupled with its huge demand, has led to today’s content crisis.

With the volume and expectations being sky-high, it has become clear that most content production is not very streamlined or optimized, and hence scaling becomes problematic. You can’t just solve it by working harder - you need a plan, process, and technology to help you deliver.

This crisis is manifested in several areas:

Even though you may have lots of content lying around in the organization, it’s hard to find what exactly you’re looking for, when you need it, in the right format for the channel it is expected for.
When content is created by different groups in silos who work on their own, it is hard to maintain brand consistency across all the published content.
Several simultaneous campaigns in motion all need their versions of the content for different audiences and touchpoints. Marketers struggle with the process of prioritizing and allocating resources - this is about what content to create first, for which campaign, and for which audience, etc.
The process of creating content, and collaborating through the review and approval process can be tedious. There are multiple tools, disjointed systems, and convoluted processes that hinder creativity, making it challenging to come up with a quality finished product when needed.
When assets are created or purchased, these have to be controlled, as to where and how they can be used. Marketers struggle with enforcing property rights and risk exposure when using the wrong asset or piece of content unknowingly.
Finally, just the sheer volume of content needed to support personalization efforts across channels and touchpoints elevates this situation from mere annoyance to a full-blown crisis.

The need for a content hub

In many organizations, marketing content is everywhere but still nowhere. There are so many different files and components across several workstreams in various formats and locations. With a content hub, you have a center for all your disparate content; it is a platform that streamlines, speeds up and simplifies a marketer’s job. It also offers intuitive, collaborative features that reduce the complexity and adds high value.

What is part of the content hub?

These are the components of a content hub:

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

You might be thrilled to have a large volume of content, as a brand, but it’s pointless until you need to access it. You might have photos on a laptop, packaging artwork on a USB flash drive, layouts on an external hard drive, and videos in the cloud.

Of course, you know it is stored somewhere, but this results in sheer waste of time, effort, and resources. Plus, it also leads to duplication in efforts, which is not the best thing to do. This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) helps you tackle this problem.

The highlight of a DAM platform is content storage, in a location where users can access and manage all their content and share it with others. If you use it properly, the DAM offers more than just primary storage. It should be fully equipped to handle elaborate digital asset management scenarios, including complex metadata, security, and digital rights management.

Content Marketing Platform (CMP)

What do you have to say about these questions - do you have all the content you need to support your marketing efforts? Where are the gaps in content? What types of content do you need to create? When you have a content marketing platform, you can answer these questions with ease, and plan your content strategy in the right manner. With this tool, it’s easy to plan what content needs to be created, assign resources, collaborate, review, and approve these content pieces for publication across different channels.

Product Content Management (PCM)

As the name suggests, Product Content Management (PCM) is a system that stores information related to products in PCM systems that focus on customer-facing product information, such as commercial descriptions, benefits, translated content, and media.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

These platforms support and measure marketing operations - be it strategic planning, project management, or measuring impact. MRMs are solutions that have a broad scope of capabilities - right from marketing calendars, creative reviews, approval management, performance dashboards, and more.

When you have a content hub, all these components blend in and replace traditional silos. It acts as a home base for all your digital assets, as well as for collaboration and creative project management tools.

The bottom line

A content hub works well for a company - it supports both the project managers and the creative team, such as dashboards, calendars, task lists, and more. These tools give project managers insight and help them add structure to the creative process while keeping milestones and KPIs insight. All in all, it’s a win-win situation!