In my discussions with content publishers of marketing firms, I could gather that there are two significant problems faced by many large organisations in the content space.

These are: 

  • Same or similar content creation from different departments resulting in duplication of efforts
  • Fragmented systems to enable identification of related content leading to operational inefficiencies

Today, marketers are in the process of creating a matrix of content versions, for each and every campaign, to effectively meet the needs of all marketing channels and consumer devices. For example, the content for a campaign in social media should target customer engagement while in-store campaign content might target consumer acquisition and requires a different version.

An already existing array of devices and arrival of new technologies like wearables will increase the combinations and complexities of content required. These problems are not just limited to few large companies targeting multiple customer segments but also applies to all companies irrespective of size and revenue. The question here is how to approach this problem?

Content organisation and Intelligence steps in…

This is where the important role of content organisation, which in turn leads to content intelligence, steps in. When firms start to organise and adopt intelligence around content, evolution begins and customer interactions traverses to customer experience.

But how to organise content?

The answer is simple – you need to have 2 ’S’s and 3 ’R's.

Add two elements to your content: structure and systematisation and three aspects: re-use, retrieve and revise. The two elements will in turn help stakeholders to effectively realise the three aspects. Ann Rockley, of Rockley group, also explains in similar lines that intelligent content needs to be structurally rich and semantically categorised, discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.

Structure…

Structure is to content as the skeleton is to the human body. Structure provides a self-guide to users during content creation and acts as reference in the lifecycle of content. This leads to efficiency and standardisation of content creation and management process.

This foundational aspect also acts as a door opener to value adds like automation and assembly lines. Once the structural template is established, it becomes easy to map and create workflows for multiple purposes and users. For example, if a video content structure captures the athlete name featuring in the video, then it becomes easy to populate this video in search results and provide all relevant videos to users who are interested in that athlete related information.

Systematisation…

Systematisation is all about Metadata. You must have a very detailed metadata for all types of content like articles, blogs, news, user-generated content, video, image  audio etc., yet only metadata will not suffice, you also need to have Shared Metadata.

Content Metadata is technical metadata pertaining to content only. While shared metadata is assigned in reference to other content and usage. Thus shared metadata is relative metadata. Only shared metadata will help marketers to utilise the content effectively across the landscape of the marketing organisation.

Retrieve, Re-use and Revise…

Once structure and metadata are established, content can be retrieved easily. If both structure and metadata follows a detailed taxonomy, then even specific content within large amounts of content can be retrieved quickly.

The mantra in reusability is to create once and use everywhere. Once content is created, it can be re-used in marketing collaterals, campaigns and products across multiple channels. Additional machine learning algorithms will help in interpretation of content and lead to automation.

The metamorphosis of content ends with adapting it to our needs – be it business or technology specific. Such revision can be achieved either through manual efforts or automation.

The above qualities are the aspirational states for content management activities and it is easier said than done, but companies must start thinking about organising their content soon, not only to maximise both top and bottom lines but also to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Coupling organised content with marketing automation systems and machine learning systems can unravel a galaxy of new ways for customer engagement and consumer adoption.

 

By Pravin Shanmugam, Consultant at Mindtree. 

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