Why Optimizing Content Lifecycle Management Matters

Delivering great customer experiences (CX) to market should be the top priority for any company. CX is what defines and differentiates you from the other players and voices in the market. It’s what keeps your customers engaged, inspired, and loyal to your brand.

But many organizations struggle with CX because of poor content operations. With marketers all working across different teams, systems and locations, controlling the omnichannel CX is incredibly difficult:

• Content and assets are stored in multiple repositories
• Searching for the right content is cumbersome, slow, and confusing—impacting your speed to market
• It’s difficult to identify outdated content or prevent duplication
• Maintaining version control is an ongoing problem
• Use of inconsistent messaging delivers a confusing, off-brand customer experience
• Teams don’t have clear visibility into who is working on what
• You lack visibility into the impact of your efforts

The key to turning this state of chaos into streamlined content operations is having control of the content during every stage of the content lifecycle.

What is the Content Lifecycle?

When we discuss content lifecycle management, we are talking about the ability to continuously manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your content across every process – content planning, creation, use/reuse, and distribution.

Every organization has its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to managing the content creation lifecycle. You may be great at planning and creating, but lack the insight to know if your content yielded ROI. You might have fantastic content for re-use across marketing and sales channels, but teams can’t find that content or be sure they have the latest version.

Content Lifecycle Management Benefits

With a fully optimized content lifecycle there is no gap between the content planning, creation, use/reuse, and distribution processes; your organization can:

• Plan with agility to seize opportunities
• Centrally manage content to easily find, localize and share
• Effectively create, approve, and use content with ease
• Understand who is working on what, and optimize workloads
• Ensure omnichannel content is always on-brand and compliant, with the right context usage
• Understand what you’re spending on, and how activities contribute to the bottom line
• Have a unified view into in-flight and in-market content, campaigns, and other experiences.

What are the Benefits of a Fully-Optimized Content Lifecycle?

Marketers are responsible for the cumulative experience audiences have across the customer’s journey. The full content lifecycle must be managed and scaled to ensure superior brand experiences.

• Break down siloes between brand strategists, creatives and marketers, giving them one place to diagnose content optimization opportunities.
• Improve productivity and efficiency by eliminating the work about work so teams can focus more time on driving high-value content and experiences into market.
• Produce higher value content and campaigns with insights into key factors like project bottlenecks, agency and resource time, goals and objectives, content usage, and content performance
• Get content to market faster by streamlining operations work and reducing points of friction.
• Get insights into the effort that went into creating content and understand whether that effort was worth it.  
• Reduce your brand, legal, and regulatory compliance risk without having to sacrifice marketing agility.
• Stay on top of localizing, replacing, and refreshing content without creating chaos by automatically moving content into creative queues to get content updates done on time.
• Get a unified view into in-flight and in- market content, campaigns, and experiences to reduce the possibility of missed projects and delivering inconsistent experiences in market.
• Ensure alignment between Marketing and the business by giving leaders an unprecedented level of transparency into their content operations to ensure all campaigns are aligned to corporate goals.

Where do you fall on the content lifecycle maturity spectrum? Take this self-assessment to find out where you rank and what steps you can take to fast track your ability to create, manage, and share exceptional experiences.

Take the Content Lifecycle Self Assessment