It is undisputed that organizations who adopt a Smart Content strategy will know if content created and published is achieving its desired outcomes. Content is fueling digital transformation, playing a critical role in supporting business objectives and ensuring you win in your market. As such, your content must be of interest, and reach the right audience at the right time and via the preferred device to support the customer journey and turn prospects into customers.
Smart Content is the next generation of content authoring and publishing and is essential to supporting the always-on, omnichannel, digital world that we live in today. And adding smarts to your content operations and processes is the only way to accurately measure the success or failure of your content strategies.
I’ve previously written about the fundamentals of a Smart Content strategy, including what Smart Content is and why organizations need it. I followed this up by sharing insight on how to make Smart Content real across your organization.
As I wrap up part 3 of this 3-part blog series, let’s look at the ROI of a successful Smart Content strategy.
Faster time to market
There are multiple people involved in the content creation process across your business. Likely, many subject-matter experts are creating content in silos, in multiple formats, and that contains outdated and non-compliant content components.
Adding smarts to your content operations drastically lowers the cost and effort associated with creating and reusing content. Infusing intelligence into content components allows authors to create content once via the tools they know and love, and search and easily find the most accurate, compliance-controlled content components from a single source-of-truth central CCMS repository.
Your team can now keep pace with internal and external stakeholder demands, eliminate a one-to-one effort and replace it with a one-to-many output strategy to support a faster time to market. Up-to-date, personalized and compliance-controlled content that meets brand guidelines is now easily available, in multiple formats, and can be published to any digital output with just a few clicks.
Streamline review cycles | Fuel content collaboration
For content that involves a high volume of revisions due to required input from multiple stakeholders, it can take weeks or months to get one piece of content fully approved. This is especially true for organizations operating in highly regulated industries where content can get held up in legal review for long periods of time.
A Smart Content approach improves productivity, supporting multiple, role-based workflows to be preconfigured so that authors and all required reviewers can work on their respective content components simultaneously. It increases the efficiency of the entire content creation process. Reviews and approvals are faster, reducing the content production cycle and eliminating back-and-forth communications and error-prone manual processes that are typical with a linear content workflow.
Increase effectiveness
One of the biggest challenges organizations face is lack of insights that tell them if content created and published is actually achieving the desired outcomes. For example, is a recently published standard operating procedure (SOP) being read by your target audience? Do you know what section of the SOP is of particular use or most widely read? Adding Smarts to that content type gives you answers to these questions and more, such as who has read the asset, if it was shared, how many times, on what device, and in what context.
This insight lets your business know what content is of most value, both to your audience and to your own business objectives. Importantly, it allows your content teams to adjust your organizations’ content creation strategy appropriately and discover new ways to improve the content experience, the digital experience and most importantly, the customer experience.
A Smart Content strategy has one end goal: empowering your organization to deliver valuable content efficiently to the target audiences where they engage with it the most. Your people, processes and technologies all contribute to a successful Smart Content strategy. Content is complex and businesses can’t afford to not look for ways to modernize their content ecosystems. If they do, they’ll struggle in today’s digital era.
Read The Beginner’s Guide to Smart Content eBook.
To learn more about Quark Publishing Platform NextGen and how it can support a Smart Content strategy, request a demo.