Why a Content Hub Is a “Must-Have” Technology

Working as a centralized platform for your end-to-end content lifecycle, a content hub helps you drive digital transformation and tackle digital fatigue.

Content has long been a critical driver in any business’s relationship with its customers. The quality, frequency, and speed of content production can have a tremendous impact on whether businesses survive or thrive in today’s current digital climate.

Over the last year, we’ve seen organizations rush to cope with a vigorous shift towards digital with the help of technology. The term digital transformation has gone from what some might consider an overused buzzword to reality, seemingly overnight.

According to a survey by Dell Technologies, of the 4,300 global business leaders polled in the summer of 2020, around 80% of them have fast-tracked at least some digital transformation programs in recent times. And for business leaders today, more content is needed , fast, to support this accelerated digital transformation.

While pursuing digital transformation, brands need to decide which technology they will integrate to help meet this content demand, answering how can we prepare for the challenges that digital transformation presents and the growing notion of digital fatigue?

We’ll explore how a content hub is a “must-have” technology and provides the necessary support to alleviate these challenges. 

The growing problem of digital fatigue

With so many brands undergoing digital transformation at scale, customers who once benefited from a seemingly endless yet easily searchable ocean of content, now struggle with being bombarded by too much of it.

Web users once welcomed this access to choice, as it enabled them to research options, find reviews, shop around for the best deal, and find out more about the product or service under consideration. However, with the heavy shift to digital, there has been increased exposure to digital content, causing many people’s online behaviors to be impacted and driven by the effects of digital fatigue.

Entire companies experienced the forced shift to a remote working model, for example. The popular digital conferencing tool Zoom reached 300 million daily meeting participants as virtual meetings and conferences became the norm. As a result, many people are on their devices for not only work but also to connect with friends and family and find entertainment while they are off work. Simply producing more digital content is no longer going to cut it.

Engaging customers with personalized content

In this new era of digital fatigue, brands need to engage with customers by quickly connecting them with valuable, personalized content across distribution channels. Your customers are more likely to abandon your content for a competitor if you’re serving up a low-quality experience, such as these:

1. Presenting customers with content not relevant to them. This indicates that you didn’t take the time to learn more about your customers and tailor content specifically to their needs.
2. Inconsistent across touchpoints. Customers today are accustomed to accessing content from their favorite brands on multiple devices and interacting with them, in the same way, each time.
3. Making customers wait too long. Customers hate to wait for content to load on pages and frequently abandon a website if it takes too long.

Personalization can provide the experiences that customers love. Tailoring content to what’s relevant to them can make an experience memorable, and it requires a consistent level of high-quality content production.

Implementing a personalization strategy requires a unique approach that will differ from company to company, as every audience and sub-audience is unique. Consequently, a cookie-cutter personalization strategy that relies on small additions to generic content will likely bring underwhelming results when compared to a strategy that can pick and choose from a plethora of pre-approved and audience-specific content blocks.

Fuel digital transformation with a content hub

A content hub houses all of your digital assets and provides a complete overview of those assets, unifying the planning, scheduling, and organizing of content production. It is the “must-have” technology to fuel your digital transformation efforts and combat digital fatigue by providing the necessary resources to handle the following:

1. Streamlined content production: Speed and quantity of content creation are assured with a content hub. Also available are analytics, which can provide details about content effectiveness. This enables your marketing team to focus on only creating effective content, and eliminating effort on content that “doesn’t work”.
2. More content variations: It facilitates content planning and strategy, so that you can segment your audience and alter content to address specific personas when required. Having variations of content is essential as it enables you to only produce relevant content that appeals to that specific audience.
3. Consistent messaging and branding: With one master content view, content can be repurposed for different channels instead of being created from scratch every time. Not only does this provide another means of reducing wasted effort, it also helps in enforcing compliance with brand guidelines.
4. Unrestricted content delivery: With a content hub, brands can leverage headless omnichannel delivery, which enhances distribution to multiple channels and speed. Headless content management and delivery is essential to an effective omnichannel strategy and prevents inconsistencies across touchpoints.

It’s time to take control of your content

Managing digital assets centrally, rather than in silos across numerous platforms, is a “must-have” for any brand seeking to streamline content marketing operations. Specifically, Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP) provides the functionality necessary to take granular control of the entire lifecycle of every piece of content. Sitecore Content Hub also provides easy findability for content reuse and repurposing with Digital Asset Management (DAM), which enables your brand to have the right piece of content ready at the right time.

It also simplifies the management of a distributed work-from-home workforce and fosters better collaboration, keeping your entire team in sync with Marketing Resource Management (MRM). Furthermore, when paired with Sitecore Experience Edge, the cloud-based headless content delivery platform, brands can easily publish their content through high-performing graphQL APIs to any touchpoint.

See how you can generate excitement and get C-suite buy-in for your content hub.

Jose Santa Ana, Product Marketing Director, Sitecore

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.sitecore.com/blog/content/why-a-content-hub-is-a-must-have-technology