Your beautiful mobile apps, agency-designed websites, conversational bots, world class analytics platforms and AI-powered customer engagement solutions are tantalizing toys with limited potential unless they are supported by a robust content backbone. Content is foundational to digital and organizations that are committed to creating winning digital customer experiences should plant content firmly at the core of their strategies. They must 1) create impactful content, 2) Unleash content delivery channels, 3) Empower the machines, 4) enable the larger content team 5) ensure the right content architecture, 6) Design a new way of working with content 7) Select and maximize the correct content management tools.
Create Impactful Content. Creating and managing content is expensive. It follows therefore that if we make the investment to create it, we should also take time to ensure that the content we create is impactful. What is impactful content? It is simply content that is effective by affecting how the targets think, how they feel and what they do. Ultimately, it is content that delivers your business objectives. To maximize the impact of your content, 1) anchor your content creation efforts on well-defined business objectives. 2) Create different content for the different segments of your audience. 3) Maximize engagement by increasing content freshness, variety, quality, usability and interactivity. 4) Think beyond the ordinary and fully engage your customers’ senses by extending your exploration beyond text, images and video.
Unleash the content delivery channels. After investing in the difficult work of creating potent and impactful content, it would be utterly wasteful if this content was then imprisoned within only one delivery channel (presumably your website). In order to reap maximum rewards from your efforts, you must: 1) Expand delivery channels and deliver content to where your customers engage. 2) Ensure that your content delivery channels are personalization-ready. For example, they should have flexible user interfaces that can adapt the type or sequence of content presented to different users.
Empower the machines. AI has the potential to transform the content arena in at least three ways.
Increasing engagement. Tools (such as chat bots) could be powerful vehicles for improving customer engagement and experience. Instead of hunting for information within a website, mobile app or other experience touch point, customers interface with a conversational bot that interactively serves up content.
Content personalization. AI solutions can continuously learn user behavior and dynamically personalize content to meet desired business objectives.
Content generation. AI solutions can play a meaningful role in content generation by taking over routine content creation work and intelligently assembling content fragments to create new content.
To achieve this potential, AI solutions will need investment in at least three things. 1) ready access to personalization data, 2) access to compliant content fragments with the appropriate metadata. 3) Mechanism for collecting content performance data. Ensuring the right content architecture will enable these bots to more effectively combine content fragments to deliver a winning experience for visitors
Enable the larger content team. An effective content strategy must ensure the effectiveness of the larger content team. 1) Authors- Provide authors within your organization the flexibility to easily manage, create, find, assemble, reuse, repurpose and publish content to a variety of targets. 2) Agencies & Partners– Streamline collaboration around content between internal teams and external agencies / partners. 3) Passionate customers- Free content from customers is often more effective at activating other customers than costly content produced by entire marketing teams. Shouldn’t you have a mechanism to enable these passionate customers to easily contribute content (with the right controls)? 4) Machines. As discussed, AI solutions could be a potent source of differentiation especially in content generation. However, you must provide the necessary content, data and integration foundation. 5) Content Governance. Expanding the number of people/machines within and outside of the organization that can generate or interact with content, inevitably increases risk. Content created may not conform to your brand and worse, it may present costly compliance and legal risks. Your content strategy must anticipate these issues and accelerate the ability of your governance teams proactively detect and rapidly manage risk.
Design a new way of working with content. After elevating content to its rightful place in the organization and enabling a larger team, we must now re-imagine how we work with content to ensure that this larger team can actually be effective and efficient as complexity increases. To achieve this, we should do three things: 1) redesign business processes to streamline how content is created, accessed, governed and published. 2) Shift to a content-performance approach that actively measures and visualizes the effectiveness of content. This way, we can learn what works and avoid expending efforts on ineffective content. 3) Shift to an agile way of working with content focusing, on failing fast, rapid iteration and delivering incremental value.
Ensure the right content architecture. When you are creating a simple website for a single organization, content architecture is probably not a topic of concern. However, with an expansion in the number and types of content delivery channels and a multiplication of the number of entities (people/machines) collaborating on the content, a simplistic view of content is no longer sufficient. It becomes imperative for organizations to begin a serious conversation about content architecture. At a minimum, organizations should 1) organize, model and classify their content, 2) separate content from delivery and presentation platforms. 3) manage content as smaller reusable and composable fragments 4) design effective content work flows for content users. 4) Design and enable mechanisms to enforce security and governance across the full content workflow. 5) Design a mechanism to enable the flow and visibility content performance data to enable continuous content optimization.
Select and maximize the correct content management tools. Across organizations, content discussions begin with the selection or development of tools. Tools such as Content Management Systems (CMS) and Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM). Tools that seldom deliver the promised results and often end up as poorly managed, expensive to own and vastly underutilized. In response to this, organizations endlessly migrate to the next tool that promises better results as new leaders demand change or as influential vendors prevail against frustrated business users. How many times have we witnessed our organizations moving from one tool to the other before moving back to the original tool a few years later under different leadership or analysis? But this doesn’t have to be the norm. A thoughtful content strategy that possibly ends with tool selection (and fully considers the facets presented above) will better position us to fully harness technology investments to deliver digital transformation objectives.
Comments