Removing conflict and bottlenecks in Content Management Systems

Enabling content creation at scale can only happen when there is alignment with marketing and the business teams.

In many organisations, tensions exist around content creation and distribution.  

Teams often need content rapidly with impossible deadlines, this includes personalised content, which is inefficient to produce, but often necessary to maintain relationships with customers and keep sales prospects interested.

At the same time, Marketing/Compliance teams need to ensure that the right data is delivered. This can be brand content and outlines, commercial terms, and approved content modules. If these are not correct this can lead to poor commercial outcomes like brand dilution, compliance charges and incorrect content fragments.

To meet the needs of their jobs some Business Teams create unapproved content or content that is incorrect and opens the company to unnecessary risk.  

To overcome non-compliance, Marketing/Compliance teams create processes that result in bottlenecks which in turn, make it impossible for teams to successfully execute their jobs.

Not solving this conflict or prioritising one group over the other is not an option. The only option is to find a balance for these needs to achieve success. This becomes more important as content creation happens at scale.

The need to act too achieve balance is becoming increasingly important. Clients are more data-driven than ever, this drives more demand to communicate at scale, and if your company is unsupportive of efficient and effective content creation at a team level, they will be increasingly unsuccessful.

So how do companies achieve balance, overcome this conflict and get rid of bottlenecks that prohibit quality content production at scale?

First up, get rid of the red tape needed to create content. Provide your teams with a content system that is set up to enable efficient selection and production of content without the need for back-and-forth approvals and hurdles. This will mean that the normal steps that drive non-compliance or poor commercial outcomes are redundant. In some cases, these steps can take 80% off the time taken in a workflow and result in improved time to market.  

Next, ensure that the system is dynamic, can be universally updated and can empower content owners to manage their own data and make it directly available to teams.  The outcome is content created and made available is organised, and easily updatable, giving content owners in the business the ability to maintain their data sets.

Finally, measure the content use, completed artworks or communications and commercial outcomes.   Analytics that can show you where content is being created, by whom and what the resulting commercial outcomes are is the best way to shine the light on the importance of high quality content in the delivery of business objectives.

In summary for content owners, letting go is hard and irresponsible without the right content delivery tool. Marketing teams need to be able to continue to use their “expert” systems, for example, Adobe for design and ideation, Compliance teams need to be sure that the right data is presented, for example, the correct legal term or interest rate, delivery systems need to be used to protect client data or distribute content in the right form.  

The content delivery system is the glue that ties this together to enable teams to leverage the expert content designed, create meaningful communication and then have it distributed on the preferred distribution system.

Technology can enable rather than disable the content management process.