November 19, 2021 | Aprimo Blog
This article originally appeared on CMSwire.com
According to Gartner’s latest CMO spend survey, marketing budgets are rapidly dropping. As a percentage of company revenue, they fell from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021 — the lowest it’s ever been since Gartner has fielded the survey. But despite the drop in budget and resources, content and creative teams are facing more demand than ever. Creative agency work is being in-sourced, digital continues to skyrocket, and content-driven customer experiences are hot again (get ready for the “content is king” resurgence!).
The pressure is on for today’s content marketing and creative teams. They need to scale up content to meet personalization, localization and omnichannel needs with fewer resources than ever. This has put an intense spotlight on refining content operations practices. We define content operations as the set of processes, people, and technologies needed for strategically planning, creating, managing and analyzing omnichannel content.
In the past, content operations was often a fairly cumbersome activity. It reminds me of what an IT group might call a waterfall development process: a long content strategy and planning process, followed by painstaking content development and long review cycles and content activation in specific channels. After content has been out for a long period of time, if we’re lucky, we look at metrics and try to optimize that content. This entire process is very linear, requires a lot of deep expertise, and ultimately, takes too long for the demands of today’s marketing organizations.
Modular content is critical to successfully solving these major content operations challenges. Modular content is defined as:
The process of creating, managing and distributing content in its smallest, reusable form to speed up time-to-market across brands, channels, regions and customer segments.
Modular content approaches don’t mean you always have to start from the smallest piece of content and build from there. It instead means that content can be created from any form of content, including:
Taking this type of tiered, start-from-anywhere approach to content operations has many benefits to a modern marketing organization. It will help streamline content operations and get to market faster by:
These are big benefits that have the potential to transform and upend current marketing organizations. Modular content isn’t just a singular tactic that one group can take, but rather they have the opportunity to upend the way entire marketing and digital teams deliver customer experiences today.
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