Make the Most of Your Tech for Content Success

How do you define content success? For the customer, it is undoubtedly content that inspires, satisfies, and brings convenience.

For the business, however, success is often defined as having stimulated customer desire and generated revenue, and a lot more besides. A fruitful content strategy gets the most out of every asset, not only for the customer’s benefit, but also to allow employees to work to their full potential. And we are not talking just about production here, I mean really enabling employees to deliver on their creative and intellectual potential, because they have been given the time and freedom to do so through efficient and productive working processes.

More companies are discovering the power of automation, remote working, and collaboration tools – an upshot of a challenging 2020 – as well as the potential for growth which can be delivered by an effective digital transformation. But, if 2020 was about bootstrapping solutions and rapid experimentation to respond to a crisis, we may be allowed to hope that 2021 will be a period of review and consolidation – and not just when it comes an organization’s choice of technology.

From Technology to Strategy: Shifting Focus

When responding to a crisis, the focus is often placed on keeping the wheels turning, on just “getting through it”. There is barely time to think, let alone refine. But as the crisis continues and the emergent state of affairs settles into a more long term prospect, there is time to step back and ask: what comes next and why?

Technology, of course, was and still is the immediate answer for many businesses in need of adapting fast – whether an increased use of an existing tool or the purchase of a new one, Zoom’s rocketing share price and the megabucks acquisition of collaborative platform, Slack, are just two proof points among many. But technology is only as good as its users, and 2021 may be the year where we see talent stepping up to innovate with the tech we have available to them.

This won’t necessarily be about technological competency, but instead a search for success through exploring how to make the best use of the technologies at a company’s fingertips. How can product information be used to enhance the customer journey? How are content assets best used to tell the brand story in a way that supports both an engaging experience for the customer and a profitable one for the company?

Take BSH Hausgerate GmbH, for example. The company sells 10 major white goods brands across a global market. To make sure it connects with customers, its content and the story the brand wants it to tell has to adapt to a variety of cultural and regional needs, and everything from the ads to the product content has to tell that story. It even comes down to subtle differences in the way a cooker might be staged in the home.

But BSH is able to construct these stories in a way which engages its consumers, thanks to a holistic and integrated approach to its content and the assets surrounding its products and brand. Of course, bringing best practice product information and digital asset management functions together in a single technology is the first major step towards achieving this, but it is the way that this technology is received and used by the organization itself which releases its full potential. For example, breaking down content silos and departmental barriers to house all product data, content, and digital assets in one central solution.

It is then this centralization which allows content for the consumer to be accurately and efficiently created in the context of all its related product and content assets, making it the as engaging and useful to the consumer as possible. “Attractively-presented products turn shopping into an experience and have a lasting effect on purchasing decisions. This applies to both the real and the digital world,” states Joachim Reichel, CIO at BSH. Technology such as censhare’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) solutions can help companies to organize that information, but it is down to skilled marketers to understand the insights, construct the stories, and develop the winning content.

The Holistic View

Upskilling employees on content strategy is not the exclusive purview of the marketing team. In fact, exclusive research from censhare and London Research – The State of Universal Content Management 2020 – reveals that leading organizations make it the responsibility of a wide range of functions. They place much less emphasis than mainstream companies on content belonging to the marketing (42% vs 59%) and editorial teams (20% vs 35%) and instead are more likely to also involve the product team (30% vs 21%) and regional markets (26% vs 16%).

For an integrated content strategy like this to work effectively, employees need to understand the strategic direction of the company, how to access customers across a range of channels and platforms, the composition of the customer journey in key segments and yes, how best to deploy the technologies and resources at their fingertips to achieve this.

Across 2021, there will most likely continue to be widespread investment in companies’ martech stacks, particularly in automation both in supporting customer service and information generation tool. But success will still come down to the capabilities and talent of employees. How they decide to implement and deploy those technologies to best respond to customer needs and deliver exemplary customer experience will be key.

There are of course many brands already leading the way in this regard, using Universal Content Management as an integrated approach to support their customer experience and digital transformation projects, and deliver a wide range of impressive business results along the way. Explore their insights and innovations on our website, or contact us if your business is ready to join them!