Content is getting the attention it deserves and is now viewed as a key contributor to business ROI. Organizations across all industries are creating enormous amounts of content to meet internal and external stakeholders, fueling a reputation for content as being a key enabler to engaging target audiences and sustaining lasting customers. However, the content lifecycle – from planning and creation to publishing – comes with a fair share of challenges, with content compliance and content complexity at the core. If not addressed, this will impact not just your relationship with your customers, but your brand reputation.
Your customers’ buying habits and consumption patterns are evolving and your content must evolve with it to support this trend. A piece of content that influenced a prospect two years ago very well may not influence a new prospect today. Add to this the importance of content meeting regulatory requirements. The risks associated with not meeting content compliance requirements are particularly high for organizations operating in highly regulated industries such as pharma, financial services and government entities. Failure to adhere to these requirements can prove costly.
We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to sponsor a recent fireside chat discussion with Compliance Week on ‘How to Cut through Content Complexity to Create a Culture of Compliance’ featuring guest speakers Kathleen Pierce, Principal Analyst with Forrester and Gareth Oakes, Chief Project Officer at GPSL.
What was uncovered is that organizations face many technology challenges in their content ecosystem. And most are on different paths to content maturity. During the discussion, Kathleen emphasized something we at Quark have said many times, which is the importance for organizations to treat content as they would data. After all, content is the consumable form of data. Organizations long ago upgraded their operations infrastructure to better manage and gain insights from data, enabling data-driven decisions to support business growth—but many still labor under the burden of manual content technologies and processes that are years out of date. Organizations are now at a crossroads and it’s time to invest in content operations infrastructure to address content compliance and content complexity in general.
Start this journey with a plan. Take stock of the people, processes and systems in place and ask the tough questions about what you need your content operations systems to do. This could be about knowing when to reuse or retire content, publishing content that is personalized and multilingual, and importantly, adhering to compliance requirements without slowing down or stopping the business.
Gareth observed that during his work with organizations in highly regulated industries, many are wrestling with content maturity as they navigate digital transformation pressures. He noted that content creators are frequently challenged by legacy tools and inefficient processes. For example, a common content development process is to create a document and then have different delivery teams transform that document into other formats such as web or mobile. It could even be the case that the delivery teams need to manage and pay for regional translations. This results in multiple regional variations of the same content that could potentially include out-of-date and worse, non-compliant content components. He, too, emphasized the importance of starting your content operations journey with a plan that begins by looking at internal processes and tools and identifying priority areas for technology adoption to eliminate time-consuming, expensive, manual processes.
The common theme discussed is that it’s time to invest in content operations infrastructure. It’s a short-term investment that has long-term business advantages. It eliminates error-prone content review and approval cycles and allows your subject-matter experts across multiple lines of business to create compliance-controlled, dynamic, reusable content at scale.
Your content creators and contributors will be most efficient when they have a productive set of tools and processes. This includes templated workflow and integrated collaboration environment. You could evaluate systems and look for opportunities to leverage content automation technology that replaces a static document creation process with a dynamic one. This will eliminate error-prone silos of communication and ensure content not only reaches the right audience, but is personalized, up-to-date, accurate, and compliant.
Quark knows content and has a long history in delivering tools that help enterprises modernize their content operations infrastructure to win in their target markets. We took our 40+ years of understanding content complexity and infused it into Quark Publishing Platform NextGen. This platform automates all of the complex content management processes so organizations in any industry can achieve their most important objectives – from digital transformation and customer satisfaction to regulatory compliance and revenue growth. Deep investments in AI enable enterprises to automate key areas of the content lifecycle journey: from accurate creation, collaboration, and assembly to the power of delivering personalized, compliance-controlled content and knowing how that content is consumed.
Watch “Virtual Fireside Chat: Cutting Through Content Complexity to Create a Culture of Compliance” to learn how compliance leaders can leverage smart technology to navigate content complexity and ensure that the content used across all departments—and published externally—meets legal and regulatory standards.
To learn more about Quark Publishing Platform NextGen, you can request a demo.