Content For Everyone: How To Build Fluid Experiences

Fluid experiences for fluid customers

Fluid experiences for fluid customers.

Your customers lead busy lives. Always on the go, they’re constantly changing devices and channels to make it easier to get what they want, when they want it.

And their choices continue to expand - 5.5 million new smart things are connected every day, and by 2020, Gartner predicts there will be 20.8 billion connected things worldwide. For marketers, this makes adapting quickly to where your customers are and delivering consistent, personalized experiences a challenge.

What’s more, even as the ways in which customers can connect to brands continues to multiply, so too do customers’ expectations. No matter where they are, your customers expect you to be there too - offering fluid experiences that are consistent and connected across all channels and device.

To meet these expectations, you need to nimbly deliver cross-channel campaigns in near real-time speeds that are personalized and memorable. But achieving such a feat requires more than just your marketing prowess - it requires a content management system that has the built-in flexibility and capability to manage omnichannel experiences with speed, intelligence, and scale.

76% of marketers agree that personalization is driving increased need for more assets.

Source: IDC

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To rise above the crowd, you must get there first.

According to IDC, the majority of marketers say they are under pressure to deliver campaigns faster. So being agile isn’t enough. You must be able to quickly discover, manage, create, and deliver great content for each interaction. However, most organizations fail to achieve this goal due to challenges such as content silos, complex tools, and an inability to easily reuse or analyze content on different endpoints.

Synopsys, a leader in design tools and services for silicon chips, faced many of these challenges. With terabytes of assets spread across siloed systems, even making minor changes to their website could take hours and involved multiple teams. Additionally, the marketing communications and creative team couldn’t make the changes themselves. Instead, they would create the content and then email it to a web team who would upload the content into SharePoint.

But once Synopsys made the switch to a CMS that provided a central repository for all its digital assets and incorporated a self-serve model where content creators could develop and manage web assets themselves in real-time, content publication rapidly increased.

“Our process and productivity has increased 40-fold,” says Dave DeMaria, corporate vice president of corporate marketing at Synopsys. “On the old platform, restructuring content would have taken a team two weeks.” Now, two people can do the work in two hours.

Still, there are additional hurdles that can slow the delivery of content, so finding the right CMS for your needs is essential. But the answer isn’t always simple. While many traditional content management systems (often known as coupled CMS) allow you to easily publish to a single channel, such as the web, they aren’t designed to manage content for multiple channels, such as mobile, chat, and social, where content presentation is vastly different from just a responsive site. To address this issue, “headless” content management systems have become popular because they allow developers to build custom presentation layers for any channel. This provides developers flexibility to create unique experiences while reusing content on different channels even if they require different rules or code. But most marketers don’t have the required technical expertise to make use of a headless CMS. This means the process to create, preview, and publish content requires IT involvement - adding to the cost and time of creating, delivering, and managing content for experiences.

To solve this, some companies use hybrid content and experience management systems, which combine the best of both worlds. It provides a user-friendly environment for marketers and creatives to author and publish content for one channel - for instance, mobile web. Yet it also makes it easy for developers to take the same content and syndicate it in any format - such as JSON - so it can be reused on any end point, such as mobile apps, single-page applications, IoT devices, or even for chat and voice channels. Marketers can keep contributing toward experience creation for emerging channels or end points, while developers get access to content in a headless way - bringing both teams closer and increasing development speed.

Smart content requires a smart system.

In a digital world, content is dynamic - reusable and changeable for the different types of experiences you’re trying to deliver to your customers. Yet curating the best content and composing experiences that can adapt to your customers’ personal preferences remains a challenge. You may have thousands or even millions of digital assets you need to sift through to find the right content - and that eats up precious time when you need to deliver your content in near real time.

With intelligent tools that use sophisticated algorithms embedded in a CMS, you can rapidly optimize your content by automating many of the steps involved in creating content across all lifecycles - including discovery, management, creation, personalization, delivery, and performance. This will help you build more fluid experiences for your customers.

For Informatica, a data management company, dynamic tag management provides flexible metadata control and reporting to identify content by type, product, solution, industry, and strategic value. Accordingly, content producers internally and from outside agencies purposefully tag every asset, whether it’s a white paper or a data sheet, and whether it’s used at the top, middle, or bottom of the sales funnel.

Dynamic tag management also gives Informatica the flexibility to manage web content easily from companies they acquire. For instance, some had legacy platforms for live chat or live agent interaction on legacy pages. However, because each page has unique tags, Informatica can maintain a legacy live-chat platform to support products acquired from one company while also providing live agent interaction on another segment of pages.

Similarly, using smart tags makes it easier to search and manage the thousands of digital assets your organization owns. And, for content creation, an intelligent CMS allows you to easily automate creation efforts like changing colors, removing objects, or identifying different themes. Intelligent delivery tools can also help automate the content publication by identifying and automating the formatting of the content to fit different screen sizes or pixel requirements based on the device or channel.

Not only do these AI- and machine-learning-driven tools speed the creation and scale of content published, they ensure that the experiences you deliver are relevant and compelling for any device or channel.

Content that’s right for the context.

To support all the different channels that are now out there, marketers say they need to create 10 times as many assets according to Adobe. Given that most organizations can’t increase their resources or budgets by 10 times, marketing teams are frequently overburdened and overwhelmed trying to get more content out faster to more channels - all while optimizing the content to fit the context. To succeed, marketers need a CMS that will allow them to easily and rapidly automate and scale content to specific campaigns, sites, or regions in ways that are personalized for the audience and for the channel.

For UBS, a leading financial institution, the ability to achieve contextual and personalized content was a key selection criterion for their CMS. On UBS.com, UBS uses their content management systems’ flexibility to display 10 different interfaces, depending on visitors’ locations and needs. News and blogs can also be dynamically assembled and presented based on personalized customer interests. The site is also fully responsive so UBS customers can access financial information on any device.

“The ability to tune and personalize our Internet and intranet sites very quickly gives us more flexibility and more opportunities to acquire customers and keep our employees more productive,” says Manuel Niess, executive director of head digital channels within group marketing and communication services at UBS.

What’s more, because UBS’s CMS can use data such as an employee’s location, job profile, and role, it not only allows for greater personalization - providing the ability to tailor news based on what is relevant to specific employees’ needs - it also affords greater security. UBS can provide access only to appropriate web pages and restrict access to others.

In a world where the demands on marketers’ and IT’s time and resources continue to rise alongside customer expectations, delivering personalized content for each channel or device type is essential for keeping up as well as getting ahead. Doing it without burning out or burning up resources is even better.

Let your content flow.

Your customers are expecting exceptional experiences at every point of their journey, and when you don’t deliver, they’ll move on to your competitor. To let your content flow to your customers no matter what channel or device they’re on, you need a content and experience management system that can span organizational silos, enable collaborative and smart systems, and deliver connected experiences across channels and devices in real time. With these capabilities, your content won’t just flow out, your customers will also flow in.

“The Big Data Advantage,” Adobe customer story for Informatica, 2017.

“From Silicon to Software,” Adobe customer story for Synopsys, 2017.

“Gartner Says 6.4 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2016, Up 30 Percent From 2015,” Gartner, November 10, 2015, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3165317.

Michael Stoddart, “Content Velocity - Bringing Marketers and Creatives Closer,”

Adobe Digital Dialogue, July 22, 2016, https://blogs.adobe.com/digitaldialogue/creative-business/content-velocity/.

“Proving the Value of Digital Asset Management,” IDC, June 2015.

“UBS, Delivering Superb Customer and Employee Experiences Online,” Adobe customer story for UBS, 2015.