The secrets to a smooth content supply chain
Today’s digital first world has created more channels, markets, and formats to deliver creative content on. The pressure is rising, with customers demanding content that is bigger, better and delivers deeper experiences with increased velocity.
With an ever-increasing amount of people browsing social media and spending time in digital spaces, a common question that content and marketing professionals often ask themselves is ‘how can we make more things, for more people, without breaking our backs or banks?’.
That’s where a content supply chain comes into place. In an ideal scenario, the people, tools, and processes within a workplace would all work together to create a seamless end to end process to plan, produce, deliver, and manage creative content.
In reality, this content supply chain process is broken in many organisations, whether due to manual, disconnected workflows or siloed operations, disjointed communications or technology roadblocks when sharing and activating assets. In these situations, the process becomes expensive and time consuming, resulting in poor quality of work, employee burnout and can lead to a poor customer experience.
Today’s content creation challenges
Creatives and marketers are struggling to keep up with the rapid technological and digital innovation that drive customers to increasingly expect relevant, connected, and personalised experiences.
As the number of channels, markets, and formats for customers to engage with continues to grow exponentially, along with the increasing demand for more personalised experiences across these channels, brands must now increase the velocity of content creation and optimisation.
Beyond this, creatives and marketers face their own challenges, including siloed and fragmented teams and workflows, and flat resources and budgets. It’s no surprise that the pressure to create more content is putting a strain on internal processes.
Creating a smooth content supply chain
So, what does a great content supply chain look like?
For your marketing team, this means using a work management solution that enables cross-functional collaboration, helping the team to strategically prioritise their work and communicate with the creative team. Setting your creative team up with a digital asset management (DAM) system will help integrate creative and management work together.
When it comes to production, teams require a unified asset management solution that will sync content across all systems and help automate repetitive tasks. Having an integrated management solution also means your creative teams can both manage requests, workflows and reviews, and finalise content all within the same tools.
Finally, for delivering content, it is crucial that all team members can access the content they need. This is where your DAM can help you catalogue and track assets and manage version control across regions.
Planning, production and delivery with Adobe Workfront
One of the most critical parts to setting up a new content supply framework is to create a process for monitoring capabilities. By pairing Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager Assets, businesses can progress from ad hoc to managed, integrated, and eventually optimised work management across people, process, technology and information dimensions.
Creating a content proposal dashboard in Workfront helps plan and prioritise the content requests across the business, and provides transparency across the marketing, sales, web and creative teams. This transparency helps teams to plan for the quarter and monitor team workloads.
During production, plans become projects, where both stakeholders and creatives in Workfront are able to seamlessly review and approve content without multiple emails and unnecessary steps.
Finally, by delivering final content to Adobe Experience Manager Assets, content becomes available in a centralised location where anyone can quicky find what they are looking for.
If you’re ready to find out more, get in touch with Adobe Professional Services experts. We can improve your customer experience through future-proof improvements to the systems, strategies, and technologies your business uses every day.