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. That’s why 97% 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—we call it a “content hub.” In this guide, we’ll explore the case for this solution and explain how it can help you supercharge your marketing operations.

Most marketers get introduced to the concept of a content hub through a digtal asset management (DAM) system. It’s now an established category and, as a consequence, marketers often label projects in their back office as “DAM.” That is, at least until we start digging 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.

But in scenarios like this, a seemingly minor mislabeling can have major consequences. 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.

Around the time larger organizations began replacing their “starter” DAM platform with a second-generation solution, attention quickly turned toward the other end of the marketing operations chain. Analytics and user-experience management were there to expand the expectations and aspirations of Web Content Management (WCM) systems.

The most interesting development to emerge was that, for perhaps the first time in marketing technologies’ history, the chief marketing officer (CMO) began paying attention. At long last, customer-facing technology offered a means to measure the impact of all those expensive and complicated marketing production processes. In this age of cost efficiencies and struggles to secure investment for digital transformation, quantifiable metrics were precisely what the CMO was looking for.

To turn the ideal of content marketing and omnichannel into reality, we have to connect the dots of fragmented infrastructure and martech applications that create disjointed digital experiences.

Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are owned by the older, more serious and well-established layers of the organization. They are designed primarily to hold financial and logistical information. ERP platforms are generally unsuited to accommodate typical marketing information, such as commercial product benefits in 17 languages. And in the rare cases ERP systems are able to accommodate such information, a release cycle of 12 months is usually a poor match for a marketing organization that needs to respond swiftly to ever-changing conditions.

Nevertheless, with respect to best practices in master data flow, ERP is the origin and owner of some pieces of marketing content that must flow downstream to ultimately end up in a publication channel. Typically, you will want ERP to provide product structures (e.g., brands, product families, SKUs, organization of products in a catalog) and the availability of products to markets or retail customers.

Product Lifecycle Management

Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems support product development from R&D to industrialization, version management and changes to processes or specifications, down through the phase out. PLM systems are often smart, relatively complex systems that form the backbone of many of the industrial processes in product-oriented organizations. From a taxonomy and data model point of view, there is definitely something to be learned here. PLM systems usually have technical product specifications that we can leverage, including technical documentation.

Product Information Management or Product Content Management

Product information management (PIM) or product content management (PCM) is PLM’s smaller and more frivolous brother, and leans toward the marketing organization. Although it fills a very real need in product-oriented organizations, we’ve always felt that the DAM-PIM coupling was a very awkward and artificial thing—but more on that later.

Digital Asset Management

DAM is generally owned by the marketing organization, and the scope is roughly that it holds media files, including product images. DAM is one of the most mature, and therefore most valuable, repositories for marketing content in most organizations.

Marketing Resource Management

Marketing resource management (MRM) platforms, also known as campaign management platforms, are a special guest here. These platforms are generally used to support and measure the overall marketing cycle—from strategic planning around budgeting, media planning, creative, review, and annotation, to execution, dropping final materials into the DAM and measuring impact in the publication channels.

In reality, unfortunately, most implementations we encounter are poorly executed. At best, the MRM platform gives insight into the marketing calendar and brings some structure to the high-level process. But more often, we have seen clients use MRM platforms for small sub-processes such as regulatory approval or even creative review.

Even in an organization where processes are mature and implementation into the MRM platform is elegant, there is usually still a major element missing: the way content—both data and files and the associated metadata—is handled, stored and made available downstream.

Creative Review

Creative review tools cover the upload of drafts of creative artifacts such as layouts or video, and annotation, and commenting by stakeholders. This is a very useful and well-defined scope of purpose that lends itself perfectly to a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

This category is of particular interest because it is usually one of the first places where marketing departments go rogue—there are so many good and relatively affordable offerings out there that take away all the hassle with just a small investment. It allows marketers to become involved in all sorts of misbehavior, like avoiding capital expenditure (CAPEX) procedures and investment freezes, and not going through the IT department for procurement.

Agency

Agencies are, for a number of clients, an important and surprising source of master data. In our experience, some—though not all—agencies are better organized than their clients. Those agencies tend to keep track of the marketing content they create or apply and store it in their own internal libraries or platforms.

The traditional business model for agencies used to be to take a fee on media space buying and cover up operations in the guise of a creative studio. After the advertising crisis, some agencies have rethought their added value. That’s the type of agency that has silently stored and organized your content for you. The downside is, it’s their added value and client retention tool, so letting go will be either expensive or ugly.

Building the Skeleton

The domain model is a concept taken from the IT world. It is built around entities and a ctors . Actors are the different types of users that touch your marketing content. Entities are the structuring concepts around which your business is organized.

If we look at the source platforms that bring marketing content to the table, we find clues to entities. DAM will traditionally bring media assets and layout; PIM or PLM will bring market, product family, product and SKU; MRM will bring campaign, project and activity; ERP will bring brand, region, business unit and customer.

On top of that, there may be some entities missing—stateless entities that currently have no dedicated platform on which to live. We’ll accommodate them—season, model, channel, agency and whatever else turns up in the way you discuss your business.

Entities are data, not just metadata. They have content of their own, can turn up as both search criteria and search results, and can have their own detail page.

Aggregate:

Content from the 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, so to speak.

Enrich existing entities:

Entities that are proxies can be enriched with additional data or metadata. Oftentimes, an entity is owned by another platform, and it is perfectly logical to keep master data ownership with that platform. However, from a marketing point of view, additional content on that entity may be required. Consider, for example, translated benefits for a product. This is a typical case where the content cub will enrich an existing proxy entity with additional data.

Add new entities:

Entities can be aggregated and enriched based on proxies. 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 at the same time permitting the planning of changes without risk, such as the introduction of new platforms and the phasing out of others.

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, for example, 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 – think heirloom tomato salad with a balsamic vinegar dressing. You probably own some content about your products, maybe some recipes. If you’re already a bit more mature in the content marketing approach, 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 Bing Food & Drink, artwork from stock photo suppliers, Pinterest, blogs about seed swap events and farmers’ markets that nicely complement your offering. All of this turns your DAM-gone-PIM-gone-marketing portal into a mood board of sorts.

How’s that for inspiring your marketing community?

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.

Marketing content project management and collaboration tools are the first supporting layer that is added to the core asset repository functionality.

Workflow

Lots of clients ask us for the remedy of workflow to fix the diagnosis of chaos. Frankly, it’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 creative process.

Creative Project Management

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.

A second, outer layer around the marketing content repository is the marketing portal. This is our most attractive asset. Essentially, it is web content management (CMS) functionality that allows us to embed the application in a website.

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.

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 user interface (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.

The DAM Business Case

The DAM business case we encounter with most clients looks more or less like this:

• The content hub supports and guides your marketing organization to reach operational excellence.
• Operational excellence provides practical and tangible benefits in your marketing operations ROI.
• Optimizing the triangle of cost, quality and speed creates the conditions for your marketing organization to add value to the company.
• Apart from these incremental benefits, the content hub can help your marketing organization develop insights that allow your leadership to make informed decisions and realize strategic goals for the company.

What is important here is that there is something that aligns with the perspective and responsibilities of every stakeholder. Operational 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. 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. Information Technology 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.