How to Overcome the Top Three Obstacles to Scaling Content Operations

One-fourth of marketers say accelerating the digital experience is their #1 goal in the coming year, according to the State of Content Operations report. 21% will try to produce higher-value content, and just as many are targeting customer personalization improvements. To accomplish these goals, marketers need to scale their content operations. But the reality is today’s brands across all industries are struggling with scaling content across channels, regions, and customers due to a combination of challenges, including:

  • Decentralized operations
  • An inflexible technology ecosystem
  • Lack of process automation

Scaling content operations requires a combination of people, process, and technology. Successful digital content operations creates a framework that unleashes the power of content and enables it to reach its full potential so that your enterprise can seamlessly deliver personalized customer experiences that deliver bottom-line results. Leveraging AI and automation, content operations speeds up content creation, management, and delivery by breaking down silos between teams that can slow down every content process. With content operations, you can create a well-oiled marketing organization that fully aligns with business goals to increase profits, attract new customers, enter new markets, and continuously innovate.

If this sounds unattainable, just think back to when marketing operations came on the scene and required a whole new set of processes, teams, talent, and emerging technology as well as change management. Those elements have become the very fabric of how marketing does business. That same burst of innovation is now coming from the content operations space ­– indeed content operations is the new marketing operations. Forward-thinking organizations are starting to realize that the next step is to invest in foundational solutions that can centralize, automate, and “compose” and “orchestrate.” In today’s fast-paced, digital world, customer demands, and expectations will not only grow but significantly evolve in the wake of constant innovation. As a modern marketing organization, you need the flexibility to quickly and easily adopt new technologies that will help you deliver the great experiences your customers crave. That requires a composable content stack that empowers you to orchestrate the entire content lifecycle on a single platform.

But to get to this level of content operations excellence, there are people, process, and technology challenges that must be addressed. Let’s dive into the specifics of each obstacle and discuss what you can do as a modern marketing organization to scale the digital experience.

Decentralized content operations

Content operations is usually decentralized within an organization. This means different teams are creating content in a bubble, often duplicating efforts, managing reviews and approvals manually, and even re-creating content because they don’t know the content already exists or because they can’t find what they need.

 In Forrester’s 2022 State Of B2B Content Survey, researchers found that “B2B marketers continue to manage a broad range of activities and deliverables across the content lifecycle, with an ongoing emphasis on planning and production. Though content has become the primary way to engage buyers and customers, it remains trapped in silos and fails to deliver its desired business impact.” Just take a look at some the challenges those surveyed are dealing with:

  • 50% of marketers use many different calendars owned by different teams
  • 73% maintain 2-10 repositories for marketing content
  • 58% say their organizations don’t have a universal taxonomy
  • 65% of B2B marketing organizations struggle with content waste

Additionally, in the recent State of Content Operations report, 63% of respondents admit to using file repositories (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive) to manage content, and one-third are using file stores (e.g., hard drives, EFSS, repositories). This disjointed approach to technology and process creates chaos and bottlenecks, significantly impacts productivity and the user experience, and ultimately causes marketers to feel frustrated and fatigued.

Ready to learn the importance of boosting your content ops? Download the State of Content Operations whitepaper.

Inflexible technology ecosystem 

To scale your content operations in this age of rapid digital transformation, you need the ability to create the best technology ecosystem for your business needs. You also need the flexibility to quickly and easily integrate or swap out technologies to optimize your operations and take advantage of new opportunities. Finally, if you are a global business, you require the ability to easily localize and distribute content. But monolithic platforms lock you into a single technology architecture, making it extremely difficult, costly, and time-consuming to adopt solutions from other vendors. This limits your ability to create and distribute content, innovate, and differentiate in the market.

Aprimo powers extensible and open integration for agility and flexibility

It’s impossible for today’s brands to fully standardize with one vendor for their entire omnichannel stack. Your content operations, with DAM as the core, should be composable, which requires an approach that is omnichannel-centric, technology-agnostic, and well-integrated. With a best-of- breed DAM, you gain the independence to unify and scale your customer experience across every channel via extensible and open integration.

Aprimo is a technology-agnostic DAM serving omnichannel needs across any CMS, multiple CMSs in parallel, and virtually any channel type and ecosystem configuration​. We provide the agility and flexibility to connect to the tools you already know and love, leveraging an open integration framework and 80+ connectors – including more than a dozen CMS solutions, APIs, services, and more, in our marketplace. And, with Aprimo QuickConnect, customers can connect to any web-based application in minutes vs. the months it takes with platform solutions.

Aprimo delivers some of the world’s largest DAM deployments

Building a content stack with composable architecture gives you independence from any one ecosystem or platform, providing the freedom to make future state technology decisions that are best for their teams while also enabling faster and lower-cost deployment than all-in-one platforms. You can add or remove components, scale efforts up or down, and continuously improve your content operations as your business needs evolve

Lack of process automation 

Managing the necessary orchestration of process, technology, and people while cranking out the volume, quality, and variety of content required has outpaced any manual-based processes, with 51% of respondents from a recent survey reporting that content takes too long to create. Your teams need to continuously create omnichannel content that is personalized and localized quickly, easily find content to accelerate time to market, and they require the flexibility and agility to reuse and update content. All these capabilities need AI-powered automation to streamline all aspects of downstream and upstream content management activities.

Capabilities your DAM needs to deliver performance at scale

Scaling content operations requires a combination of people, process, and technology. To optimize and scale operations across the content lifecycle, you need:

  • A technology-agnostic DAM that provides extendable and open integration for agility and flexibility
  • Intelligent automation so teams can fast-track content operations, automate project management, improve asset findability, and maximize content reuse
  • An approach to metadata that powers a modular content strategy, which is critical to successfully building personalized customer experiences at scale, and allows brands to build strategic, curated experiences that customers demand quickly and efficiently.

Coming up, don’t miss our final blog in this series where we’ll discuss our vision for the future of content management, which is rooted in the concept of Content360°, a 360-degree understanding of what goes into content creation, usage, and performance. 

Download our eBook, 5 Essential Elements of Modern Content Operations, to learn more about how you can unleash the power of your omnichannel content.

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