By Paige O’Neill, CMO, Sitecore
As even more of our lives move online, digital engagement with brands is becoming a crucial part of commerce. Personalised content is at the heart of a customer experience (CX), which makes it integral to business success.
According to research by SoDA around trends in personalisation, organisations have been aware of this for a while, with almost all (95%) ranking producing and publishing personalised digital content more quickly and cost effectively as a major priority.
The challenge for organisations is to produce enough content to provide the level of personalisation that today’s digital-first customers expect, across an ever-increasing number of channels. In fact, 44% of senior marketers believe they can’t produce content fast enough to power personalised marketing, which is a must-have to meet the expectations of today’s customers.
Because personalisation is the foundation of CX it must be a priority. Lack of budget or talent is not an excuse, and neither is legacy software and systems. Thankfully, it is possible to meet the need for high volumes of content without breaking the bank. Here are the steps that businesses can implement to take control of their content:
- Move: Marketing teams often have trouble managing and sharing their assets because their content exists in siloes. To build a solid content foundation, organisations must get assets into a central location, such as Sitecore’s Content Hub, where all teams can access and edit all content.
- Define: Determining starting points and priorities requires that the milestones of the content lifecycle be broken down and defined. This can be a useful exercise to align content needs to customer journeys, allowing organisations to understand when and where assets are required and implement existing content where it can be most effective.
- Automate: Research from SoDA found that 39% of senior marketers believe their processes are too manual to meet content needs; automating content creation and management increases efficiency and productivity. This technology investment enables marketers to achieve true end-to-end content lifecycle management and improve workflows, while also reducing costs.
- Determine ownership: Finally, once content is stored in a central platform for all users to access, the organisation must determine who is responsible for the management of different assets. Separate teams can then manage, edit and personalise content with ease across marketing, HR and social channels.
Star Cooperation is one example of where taking control of content, by managing it centrally and reusing it effectively, has borne impressive results. The company, which services a number of luxury automotive brands, needed to help one car maker serve differentiated content about a range of car models, to a many different personas, across a variety of channels. This required content to be created quickly, mixed and matched for different purposes, and organised effectively. With Sitecore, Star Cooperation supported the carmaker to create an end-to-end content management system, that can connect and merge all content, making it easy to adapt and translate assets for different markets as and when it is needed.
Through the implementation of a content hub, Star Cooperation has helped the customer create millions of pieces of content per year, and to significantly reduce the time it takes to create them. What is more, because content is stored centrally and can be easily adapted across markets, the brand has seen faster time to market and increased sales, as well as better and more consistent brand communication across all channels.
Serving personalised content is a powerful way to enhance CX, but creation and management at scale is a problem faced by many marketers who have seen most if not all of their business move online. Overcoming this challenge requires that they determine their starting point based on the ideal outcomes for the business.
This could mean ensuring that the business team for a priority function has enough content to use, or centralising all content to ensure widespread access and maintain brand consistency. This in turn enables customer interactions to be personalised with the right content served at the right time and place.
This personalisation allows customers to make informed decisions regarding their purchases and can make CX a business driver for online-first customers.
