Every organization understands the role digital transformation plays in successfully attracting and sustaining customers, and importantly, to remain a competitive, dominant player in your market. The enormous amounts of data jumpstarted the digital transformation years ago, and as content is the understandable form of data, content now is taking a front seat at the table as it plays a critical role in meeting internal and external expectations, delivering an exceptional customer experience and supporting business growth.
As organizations look inward at their content lifecycle strategies, they are asking themselves where to start to be successful in today’s digital era. With new requirements for critical content types such as standard operating procedures (SOPs), organizations should begin the process by determining what documents are fueling their digital transformation journey.
With more choices and power than ever, customers are self-navigating through the buying process and relying more on content to influence and progress through their purchase decisions. As organizations become aware of this, they too, are realizing they face challenges when it comes to their content strategies. Most are on varying maturity levels of adopting a full lifecycle content management strategy built for long term success. Many factors come into play, such as ensuring content meets regulatory compliance requirements and planning for it to be created once and distributed across multiple channels, ultimately being delivered in the right format and via the right channel in which your audience wants to consume it.
For example, take standard operating procedures (SOPs). These are essential for organizations onboarding new employees – helping them ramp up quickly and supporting the overall employee experience. A McKinsey report states that the average employee spends up to 1.8 hours per day just searching for the information needed to do their job. And for the banking industry, standard operating procedures (SOPs) documents require strict governmental and corporate regulations, policies and processes that involve input from audit, risk and legal experts. For both these internal and external facing corporate documents, a manual or “point solution” process will not accurately manage the authoring and review process, let alone give you peace of mind the content is up to date and compliance-controlled. This can result in several challenges such as missteps in process, limited user benefits to department-level only, error-prone review processes, template and tool inconsistencies and more. Automating the content creation process will digitally transform this content, supporting the entire process across each dimension and foster collaboration among authorized users and content contributors across the enterprise to eliminate inaccuracies.
Let’s take a look at regulatory compliance requirements. They vary by industry and geography, and don’t just apply to health, safety and manufacturing controls, but apply to content too. In highly regulated industries like pharma, your first focus may be modernizing your process for updating a compliance-controlled pharma label. According to Life Science Leader, it costs between $800 million and $1.2 billion to bring a new drug to market. Meeting regulatory requirements for that associated piece of content is a quarter of that cost. Large pharma companies often make more than 30,000 label changes throughout the year, so this complex label change could take more than a year if content automation software isn’t being leveraged. For these companies, your first focus should be on modernizing your approach for this type of document creation.
Content is the lifeblood for most marketing teams as they leverage it to support the sales funnel. A white paper, for example, is a key content asset that is used to influence the buyer journey, from sparking engagement, to fueling consumption, to retaining long-term customers. Do you know if this asset is having a transformation impact on your business? Infuse intelligence and analytics into your asset. This will allow you to know who has viewed it, how many times, if it was shared and more. You can gain the necessary insight about your content and see if it’s actually working and make necessary adjustments fast to improve the digital customer experience.
Content will continue to play a pivotal role in driving digital transformation. Organizations need the right strategy, processes and technology for modern content lifecycle management. Remember, it’s a journey, not a sprint. Begin by looking at content types that can and should be digitized, perfect those, then move on to the next.