Over the past few years, nearly every business that was not already digitized began the digital transformation process, and transformations that were already underway accelerated. Collectively, they redefined the customer journey: Physical stores added online and social storefronts, streaming video flourished and virtual events attracted millions of visitors.
The multiplying ways and places brands must engage with their customers are driving a relentless increase in demand for effective content. In a recent Adobe study, 88% of brands said content demand at least doubled over the last two years, and two-thirds expect it to grow fivefold over the next two years. The top drivers of this increasing demand are customer expectations for personalized experiences, hybrid customer journeys and new formats including 3D and immersive content.
The same study also identified the top challenges that block brands from effectively scaling content: Companies lack the right technologies, do not have enough people to do the work and have broken processes. And these challenges have real impacts on both productivity and morale.
Our professional services team recently met with the creative team at a large brand that confirmed they spend around 60% of their time looking for content in the brand’s digital asset management (DAM)—what a waste of creative talent.
Work-around solutions don’t scale
While some companies have mastered the ability to scale content production and delivery, even most of those routinely spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on content with little visibility into efficiency or ROI.
In the past, companies added creative head count or agency support to keep up with rising demand. But modern economic and workforce realities have made it impossible for brands to scale—efficiently and effectively—in the absence of a more strategic, automated and collaborative approach to content.
Whether brands are making content for marketing, media or virtual worlds, their content supply chains—the process for producing and delivering content—are likely inefficient tangles, spanning siloed creative, marketing, finance, project management and compliance teams. Only the right operational structure, technology and data frameworks can help brands deliver content that fuels effective personalized experiences and achieves the right business outcomes.
By following these three steps, executives can help their teams build efficient and effective content supply chains that achieve experience-led growth:
1. Treat content creation and operations as a strategic function: Content is the lifeblood of customer experiences. Without the ability to consistently plan, produce, deliver and analyze the right content, organizations will be less able to compete for attention and engagement. Despite content’s critical role, many executives relegate it to the tactical domain of creative and marketing teams.
Just like manufacturing or enterprise resource management, content should be valued as critical, with a technology infrastructure that connects people, processes and data. The right solution will provide operational rigor through workflow management across the end-to-end content lifecycle, and centralize content into a common repository.
This strategic approach optimizes both content process and performance, and gives leaders the visibility and data they need to manage risk and make smarter decisions.
2. Design for collaboration: Successful content starts with creative teams that are empowered to work seamlessly. Collaborative workflows connect creatives and other stakeholders across complex review and approval processes, providing access to central resources and contextual campaign information, all while enabling them to stay productive within the tools they love.
Designing for collaborative systems and processes enables content operations to move with speed, accuracy and agility, keeping creative and marketing teams engaged and productive on the most important work.
3. Embed intelligence and automation: Scaling modern content operations to serve the vast range of formats, geographies, channels, and segments without automation and intelligence is simply not possible. Embedding generative AI and automation across workflows will reduce administrative strain on employees and increase speed and efficiency.
Attaching the right metadata across the content lifecycle ensures assets and components can be easily found, repurposed, deployed, and measured. This also provides intelligence so teams can identify and solve bottlenecks to stay on time and on budget. When brands treat content not as digital objects, but rather amalgamations of rich data on a full range of projects, usage, and performance, content can become a source of both intelligence and creative action – including the ability to autogenerate new content at the “edge” of experiences – resulting in even faster, more relevant customer interactions.
Today’s companies face tremendous pressure to meet customers where they are with the right experiences in a fast-changing and uncertain macroeconomy, so the ability to deliver effective content at the speed of experience has never been more important or challenging. Taking a strategic approach to scaling content operations unlocks creative capacity and delivers on key outcomes, including cost efficiency, scaled personalization, and greater employee engagement. The result will address short-term uncertainty, and ultimately enable companies to develop the long-term competitive advantages that will ensure their future success.
