Modern Content Operations: Does Your Organization Have What It Takes?

Content operations used to be pretty simple. Your content creators aligned with your content strategists. They developed and executed on a calendar, getting the proper approvals along the way.

But as channels and customer expectations explode and the linear content lifecycle falls by the wayside, content ops get more complicated. Today, our partner Aprimo says, “Content operations is the set of processes, people, and technologies needed for strategically planning, creating, managing, and analyzing all content types for all channels across a business.”

That’s a fairly tall order. You don’t want to get left behind.

So, how does your organization move from the old ways into modern content operations? Aprimo argues that you need five essential elements:

#1: Integration

For modern content operations, organizations need a digital asset management (DAM) solution that can:

• Integrate into their martech stack (e.g., with MRM, CRM, PIM, and CMS solutions)

• Move past serving as a content repository to power planning and review

• Enable content automation that scales

That first piece is particularly important. As content operations grow, organizations can’t be locked into a one-size-fits-all solution or an all-in-one tool. They need customizability. As a result, they should seek out a DAM and other content management tools that can integrate with any other solutions they’re currently using — or may use in the future. With a technology-agnostic DAM, you unlock agility and flexibility.

#2: Intelligent automation

With the current state of the marketing industry, automation is all but assumed. But smart automation isn’t guaranteed. With AI-powered tools, you can get more of the work you like least off your desk.

This level of automation can help with everything from project management tasks to easy asset findability, boosting reuse. With it, you get to market faster, then see a higher ROI.

#3: User-friendliness

Aprimo calls this “metadata, findability, and experience,” but it all comes down to your team’s experience working with your content assets. Ultimately, can they easily get what they need when they need it?

As your content repository grows, features like automated metadata tagging become increasingly important. That’s even more true as content becomes more and more modular.

Fortunately, the historically burdensome task of tagging assets can now largely be handled by AI. Layer on smart fixes like metadata templates to make it faster and easier to tag similar types of assets and your team can work smarter, not harder.

#4: Scalability

Between decentralized content operations, inflexible technology ecosystems, and an overall lack of process automation, it’s no surprise that marketing organizations struggle to scale their content operations. To really drive the point home, consider this Forrester-reported statistic: 67% of surveyed companies would rather learn how to deliver and reuse existing content than create new content.

To see performance at scale, organizations need flexible, integrated stacks that deliver process automation while centralizing and streamlining content operations.

#5: Omnichannel orchestration

Getting to modern content ops means having full control over your content — from ideation to delivery and reuse — while staying close to your customer. To orchestrate omnichannel experiences, you need to lay the technological foundation that will align people, content, and process, giving you a full view of your content ops.

If you’d like to go into more details, download the Aprimo e-book on Modern Content Operations.