Ways of working and thinking are changing
You have been assigned to promote and support a new product launch. You have one month to roll out a campaign in multiple countries and languages. Most probably, some localization is also needed to make the message relevant to the target audience. The product is targeted toward a B2B audience, which means that there are several decision-makers and influencers involved. This means that further modifications of the campaign messages and images are needed to match the various personas.
Your company's marketing function is organized in accordance to the different marketing channels, and content production is managed separately for your website, social media, corporate communication, product collaterals and leaflets, brand communication, events and reseller marketing.
When you start creating the campaign, you begin your process by searching for USPs and argumentation related to the product. You might check the old image bank, which is full of various images and a few videos. You create a draft of the campaign or receive a proposal from your advertising agency. This proposal is then circulated in the organization for feedback and comments. Eventually, when the campaign is ready to be published, your deadline has almost passed and you haven't had time to localize the messages.
After all the hassle you've been through and all the sleepless nights, you realize once again that your company's marketing processes aren't connected and optimized for global marketing operations.
Bring the content out of the channel silos
If you want to create more effective marketing processes, the first step is to bring the content out of the channel silos. This means that you should identify what content is common for all channels. Your company's website and collaterals surely share a lot of common elements and content pieces, for example. The next step is to think through where you get the raw data from, and if it can be enriched and further utilized. For example, you might have product information in a product information management (PIM) system, and this data is probably not tailored for marketing purposes. You might also have data in an ERP system or in manual systems that are kept up to date by the product management or sales departments. When you have identified all the places that are holding data, you can start massaging and enriching the data.
Modularize content and plan content governance
In order to use the content across different channels, you have to identify content pieces that could be used across the various channels. When you have identified those content pieces, you have to adopt a modular approach to the content: what content can be used across various channels as it is, what content needs to be localized, what content can be used across different target groups, etc. When it comes to B2C content, you might only need to change promotional price tags, but when it comes to B2B content, you might have to divide it into various levels and modules, depending on usage.
After you have created a map – a modularized content table – you can start planning governance practices for the content. It might not be marketing that owns the content – it might be product management or even sales. It's important to clearly define who is responsible for the content and for always keeping it up to date.
