I recently talked about a published Frost & Sullivan white paper Content Automation: The Essential Ingredient for a Successful, Agile Content Lifecycle Management Ecosystem that underscores why organizations must transform their content ecosystems to meet today’s digital output demands and to better measure the ROI of their content strategies.
A key pillar to a successful content management strategy is understanding how your content teams work together on how content is created and knowing that the content going out of the door is hitting goals and objectives. With enterprise content today vastly evolving from print to support all things digital, challenges have inevitably surfaced for the teams responsible for creating, managing and publishing the content. As audiences today control what content they want, it amplifies the importance of ensuring content created is fit for purpose and reaches the right audience via their preferred device for optimal consumption.
Enterprises typically have multiple subject-matter experts (SMEs) that are all too often working in silos. In many cases, content is being developed in duplicate forms, contains outdated information, and doesn’t meet regulatory requirements that differ by industry and geography. One of the biggest downfalls of creating content in silos that can result in your business delivering content of no value to your customer or prospect. Pride comes before a fall, so don’t just think ‘We love it, it’ll work!’ Without a centralized publishing platform, more often than not it might work in one format but not in the others.
If you want your content strategy to succeed in today’s digital era, it’s time to take control and improve efficiencies in your content creation processes.
SMEs want to focus on what they do best, authoring content
Your SMEs are constantly researching and distributing valuable knowledge to support your business objectives. But too often, individual SMEs have their own way of working with many developing it autonomously in silos. This is problematic for the enterprise content production process because it involves multiple departments, users, content types, file types, collaboration processes, content consumers and content consumption devices. Content automation allows your SMEs to graduate from creating static, ‘one-off’ documents in which content is locked within a PDF to a structured and modular authoring approach. This allows them to use their familiar Microsoft Word application, to instead develop content that supports omnichannel publishing. They can impart their knowledge by creating reusable content components that can be used for any digital output fast.
Low-code/no-code structured authoring: The easy button to creating content at scale
Low-code/no-code technologies improve content creation workflows and eliminate time consuming, error-prone manual processes. SMEs can easily create reusable content components in Microsoft Word that are tagged with XML metadata and kept in a central CCMS repository for version management.
Content creators now have more control taking a structured XML-based authoring approach and don’t have to get bogged down with technicalities because no technical skills or training is required. When authors need a specific piece of content, they can search for it easily using the tag to pull the most up-to-date, compliance-controlled content. Structured content components also dramatically improve author efficiency and reduce the risk of publishing outdated material. Content components also support omnichannel publishing. Authors can create a content module once that is simple to personalize, regionalize and deliver across print, web, mobile and additional digital outputs for optimal consumption.
To achieve organizational content strategy success, you must first empower the success of your content teams. Automation technology is the key to success. It streamlines workflow efficiencies and empowers content creators to control the content they produce. Organizations can accelerate their time to market with the peace of mind in knowing the content delivered supports their global business objectives.
To learn more about the benefits of low-code/no-code to your enterprise content strategy, go here.
To read the whitepaper, Content Automation: The Essential Ingredient for a Successful, Agile Content Lifecycle Management Ecosystem, go here.
To learn more about Quark Publishing Platform NextGen and how it can help get you on your path to content lifecycle management, you can request a demo.