Become A Content Speed Demon
Customer expectations for brand experiences are rising exponentially. You need to engage customers quickly and seamlessly across every channel and screen.
Accelerate Content Velocity To Electrify Experiences
Customer expectations for brand experiences are rising exponentially. You need to engage customers quickly and seamlessly across every channel and screen. But with the right content management platform, you can meet and exceed their expectations. Capabilities for a content management platform include scaling securely, maximizing impact with data and intelligence, and generating contextually relevant content continually and quickly. A critical part is how quickly and efficiently you produce personalized content at scale. Let’s take a closer look.
Every time you flip the switch, it’s there: the steady flow of electricity that powers your world. The electrons skitter along from a power plant miles away and through the grid to your home, office, or factory. When they arrive, they quickly adjust depending on what you want them to do — from heating, cooling, and lighting to cooking, computing, and charging the Tesla (you wish) in your garage.
But there’s a hitch. Utilities can’t stockpile enough electrons to supply all users, so electricity must be produced as it’s used. That means the grid must respond to ever-changing demands and continually generate and route power to where it’s needed.
More than ever, the flow of content from your brand also needs to be always on, like the continual flow of electricity on the grid. Marketers today are under pressure to create, manage, and deliver massive amounts of personalized content to meet customer expectations. With these distinctive experiences, you attract, engage, excite, and keep customers true to your brand.
Keep content flowing to power experiences.
The demand for even more content for fluid experiences is due, in part, to the explosion in the number of connected devices. Brands today grapple with how they can support this explosion with rich services and relevant content at scale.
Not only does the extraordinary number of experiences jolt marketers, but so does the form they must take. They must fit the context of the customer interaction — such as location, recent purchases, past behaviors, and social shares — and adapt to the device being used. For example, if your customers have already researched product features, you need to be prepared to captivate them with a new experience when they’re ready. Maybe that’s a product comparison or review or a special offer delivered promptly to the customer’s desktop, mobile, tablet, or other device.
So experiences must be fluid — and rapid. Marketers need to pare down the time it takes to create and deliver from months and weeks to minutes — or even milliseconds. But right now, there’s a mismatch between the sluggish pace at which brands generate content and the accelerating pace of customer expectations. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, customers expect content to reflect the minute-by-minute changes in the world around them — especially on mobile. And in some cases, marketers need to operate in real time. For example, brands that use Snapchat to engage customers know their content will disappear in 24 hours — so they must go through a complete cycle of content generation and distribution each day.
Transmit content at speed to avoid brownouts — or blackouts.
You can’t afford for your flow of content to be slowed or stopped, even temporarily. If you haven’t posted, tweeted, snapped, emailed, or updated your app or website recently, your customers might think you’ve gone dark and look for a brand where the lights are on. To meet the increasing demand for high-impact, personalized content that your discerning, always-connected consumers want, you must drive content velocity, which is the ability to discover, manage, create, personalize, deliver, and measure performance of content at scale and speed.
Your organization’s content must supply experiences all along the customer journey — across every device and channel, for every interaction. But doing that right now is a challenge for organizations of every size. To succeed, you must break down the barriers impeding content flow.
For many, the urgent need for personalized, compelling content isn’t met with a compelling budget. You need to demonstrate to the C-level that time to experience is critical and that marketing and IT need ample budget for staff and technology. You can start by showing them some of the case studies discussed in this guide.
Without streamlined processes, you might also run out of time. To create a big bang, marketers need to push out content quickly and simultaneously to several channels. Content must be available everywhere at once. But siloed teams working one after another can take double or triple the time to create the same content as teams working simultaneously. Still, when different teams work on the same assets, lack of coordination on versions often results in rework. Reviews can take forever — or seem like it — when everyone from creative and marketing to stakeholders and legal must approve each iteration. When created, the lack of a central place to store and access content can make it challenging to find and repurpose.
To test and improve content, marketers need to ask the right questions and get fast answers —preferably on the fly when you can have the most impact. After you’ve invested the money and time in a campaign, you also want to evaluate its success and the return your brand will see, and then use the lessons learned to fine-tune the next circuit.
In its role as enabler, IT also scrambles. To promote cost and efficiency, content repositories might be scattered across regions, departments, and lines of business and built on disparate, disconnected systems. Content is often trapped in inflexible systems, and unlocking them requires IT to build complex integrations that ultimately have limited functionality. Creative, marketing, and sales teams might all use different, disjointed platforms. IT must be careful to align initiatives with business goals and limit access to systems and assets to only those with a genuine need — for instance, only creative staff and marketers working on a new product introduction. Leaks of product specs and features can destroy a product launch. Security remains paramount.
Fire up your content grid.
The power management system ensures that electricity generated from various sources — coal, gas, wind, water, solar — flows down miles of transmission lines to meet the ever-changing demands of devices and appliances from residences to industries.
You need a content management system with similar capabilities to deliver fluid experiences. Think end-to-end rather than investing any further in siloed technology. The right CMS gives you one place to quickly discover, manage, create, personalize, deliver, and measure the performance of digital experiences across scores of devices. With it, you can make those devices — websites, mobile sites, on-site kiosks, in-venue screens, apps, point-of-sale systems, Internet of Things things — global in reach yet personally relevant and engaging.
Marketers can develop sites and pages that adjust responsively to all of a customer’s devices, taking the burden off IT. Drag-and-drop capabilities let you reuse content across channels and edit it in the context it’s being used. Context doesn’t just reflect the stage of the customer journey but also other elements, including previous online behaviors and current location. And changes are consistent across channels — you can update the content or experience just once for everything from web to mobile app.
A team organized around a central content strategy, with connected workflows across channels and an easy way to manage thousands of assets — plus a unified content management platform — supports several advantages.
Promote consistency.
You cA unified library of content that can be easily reused business-wide gives you a faster way to ensure a connected experience and consistent look and feel across channels and campaigns. You’ll find that in digital asset management (DAM). DAM gives you one place where everyone — creative professionals, marketers, IT admins, outside agencies — can find what they need. With a robust DAM, you can keep every channel updated with the latest copy, images, and video. And for the greatest impact, integrate it with your CMS.
Hyatt distributes content creation while centralizing assets.
Hyatt stores approximately 70,000 approved images from properties worldwide in a central location. Having all image data in one place gives thousands of company-wide content creators immediate access to branded, quality images. By tagging uploaded assets using detailed metadata, content creators can easily identify pictures of their hotels or lifestyle images designed for specific website pages.
Deliver with agility.
One unified interface lets everyone quickly deliver personalized experiences across different screens, geographies, and channels. Hyatt, for example, was able to distribute authoring responsibilities across the company while maintaining a branded look. Content authors can publish pages with just a few clicks, eliminating the need to coordinate with developers or IT. And small changes that once took weeks can be completed in just minutes, providing customers with up-to-date information.
Gain real-time insight.
Before you go live with content, preview it to see the experience customers will get. Then test different versions to find what works best in your marketplace. With everything moving at hyper-speed, you need real-time insights to see which content resonates and creates compelling experiences — and ultimately produces the best ROI.
Electrify your experiences.
Efficient power management relies on the ability to readily use electricity sourced from anywhere on the grid to fill the needs of locations and devices all along the line. Likewise, managing experiences depends on the ability to use content created for any channel to meet the needs of customers and devices anywhere along their journeys.
Ultimately, your goal isn’t content velocity at all — it’s experience velocity.
When you can generate content and comprehend data at high speed, you can deliver unique, all-encompassing experiences that power your customers’ lives and your business success.
*“The Deloitte Consumer Review: The growing power of consumers,” Deloitte, 2014, *
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“Gartner Says 8.4 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2017, Up 31 Percent from 2016,” Gartner Press Release, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917.
Gina Casagrande, “Let the Crowd Fuel the Demands for Optimized, Personalized Content,” Adobe Blog, September 27, 2017, https://theblog.adobe.com/let-crowd-fuel-demands-optimized-personalized-content/.
“Global Trust in Advertising,” Neilsen, September 28, 2015, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2015/global-trust-in-advertising-2015.html.
“Hyatt: Enriching customer journeys,” Adobe partner story, 2016, https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/customer-success/pdfs/hyatt-case-study.pdf.
International Data Corporation, “Proving the Value of Digital Asset Management for Digital Marketers and Creative Teams,” June 2015, http://www.brandkit.io/assets/pdf/Proving-the-Value-of-Digital-Asset-Management.pdf.
“News Corp Australia: Sharing the wonder of Australia,” Adobe customer story, 2017,
“Zebra: Smart and connected businesses,” Adobe customer story, 2017,
https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/customer-success/pdfs/zebra-case-study.pdf.