Organizations are now understanding the role content plays in supporting business objectives and fueling growth. Content is arguably the most important asset that is used to engage audiences, turn prospects into customers, and nurture existing customers to sustain trusted long-term partners. But are organizations considering a Smart Content strategy? And do they understand put into context what Smart Content really is?
With organizations creating and publishing so much content, they may lack knowing whether content created is actually achieving desired outcomes. Specifically, the necessary insights that explain if the right content is reaching the right audience at the right time and via the preferred device for optimal consumption. This has resulted in a seismic shift in the way organizations create and distribute content. Content creators must be equipped with tools to deliver personalized, high-value, and compliance-controlled content faster, with more accuracy, and at a lesser expense to the business than ever before.
But how do you support this shift within your content ecosystem? It boils down to infusing “smarts” into your content processes. This is part one of a three-part blog series that peels back all the layers of Smart Content – What it is and why organizations need it, how to put Smart Content into practice, and how to measure ROI from Smart Content.
The evolution of content
There still remains a market for print documents. However, the current digital demands of consumers coupled with their ‘anytime-anywhere’ mindset has resulted in external audiences taking control of what content they want, when they want to view it, and on their preferred device. The “old way” of producing content across the organization – from conception to execution – was a daunting experience, typically anchored by manual, error-prone processes associated with writing, reviewing, approving and delivering content to intended audiences via a variety of channels.
A much-overlooked step was determining if any, or even parts, of that content was adhering to regulatory compliance and yielding the desired results. In other words, the “old way of content creation and delivery” lacked the necessary insights to know if content was up to date, personalized and was the content your audience actually wanted.
For content strategies to be successful and support business growth, organizations today must adopt smart practices to the content creation and delivery process. Automation technologies are the crown jewel to removing content creation silos across enterprise lines of business, bolstering collaboration and supporting a faster time to market with personalized, valuable content. Automation also supports your ability to infuse metadata into content components so subject-matter experts (SMEs) can concentrate on sharing knowledge without getting hung up on technicalities. It supports your organizational ability to create “Smart Content”.
What is Smart Content?
Smart Content is what we refer to as XML-based authoring and automated publishing of business-critical content. It allows organizations to create and reuse content, supporting their ability to benefit from dynamic publishing. The underpinnings of Smart Content are technical but understanding its value is simple.
Smart Content is about getting your organizations to re-think how they create content. It’s about reducing content complexities and giving your content teams the power to easily share knowledge and create reusable content components that can be identified fast, tagged and used for any digital output. For example, with contextual content components, authors move away from creating ‘static’ content to creating high-value content that is infused with metadata that captures not just the words to be read, but the meaning and purpose of those words.
Content creators can also search and easily tag the most up-to-date, compliance-controlled content from a central repository, and feel confident knowing that the most accurate, personalized piece of content is delivered fast and for any media channel. It supports a successful omnichannel publishing strategy by giving you the power to COPE: create one, publish everywhere.
Stay tuned for my next blog that discusses how to put Smart Content into practice within your organization.
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.