5 ways financial institutions can unlock faster content deployment

In our increasingly digital world, there’s an opportunity to bring customers more of what they’re looking for. Businesses can deliver experiences that are faster, more convenient, or something customers have never seen before. But as opportunities pop up, businesses can also end up competing for attention in the same digital spaces. According to the Content Marketing Institute, many B2C marketers (43%) say it’s become increasingly difficult to capture audience attention over the last year. And for industries like financial services that need to adhere to strict regulations, it can take even longer to create content that people are going to find valuable.

Creating content is a crucial step in building personalized experiences. But, according to Deloitte, 85% of marketers say they are under pressure to create assets and deliver campaigns more quickly. Just as important is deploying those experiences at the right moments to make an impact. Financial institutions that are looking to deepen their relationships with customers can’t be held back by disjointed tools and assets or rely too heavily on manual IT processes to build new experiences. Instead, they need to invest in their content supply chain.

What is a content supply chain?

A content supply chain (CSC) captures the journey of content from internal intake to planning and creation. It covers reviewing and approving the content, delivering it out to customers, making sure it's personalized to each individual customer, and then measuring its effectiveness. Summed up, the five main stages of a content supply chain are strategy, planning, producing, deployment, and measurement.

A content supply chain encompasses all processes for all teams within an organization that would touch that content. It also includes the end results of your delivered campaigns — as well as the end results of your internal processes. By covering all these stages, a CSC helps you focus on transforming your internal teams and how they work together so that you can deliver the best possible financial experiences to your customers.

Defining your role as a financial guide

The amount of content that financial organizations — like banks, wealth management firms, and insurance agencies — are expected to create is incredibly high. And because of the nature of the industry, it can be extremely complex. As customers are becoming more active in the digital financial space, they’re looking to these organizations as a way to learn about financial responsibilities, like how to invest or create a savings plan.

It’s up to financial institutions to step into these roles as trusted advisors. Marketing teams can help by understanding what content customers need and delivering it at the right moments.

Invest in content deployment

At the deployment stage, marketers build financial content into relevant, personalized experiences. But between collaborating with creatives, building sites with IT experts, and getting reviews and approvals from legal, this stage has multiple moving parts to manage.

Often, teams follow a fragmented and labor-intensive process that delays content from getting out the door efficiently.

Explore 5 common challenges marketers face

Financial institutions now have an opportunity to grow their digital experiences. Explore common challenges marketers face in the deployment stage and technology solutions to deliver more relevant experiences to customers — faster.

1. Organize your assets for safe keeping

To build relevant financial experiences, you need to start with great content. You're likely leveraging third-party agencies or a separate in-house agency to support your creative efforts.

With this organizational structure, content is often created in a vacuum and stored in disjointed locations. Instead, you need one central repository to store all your creative assets. To make finding those assets easier later, be sure that your digital asset management (DAM) platform can automatically tag assets with the right metadata. If you’re managing highly regulated content, you can also set permissions for external agencies so they can only see specific campaigns or assets.

While you’re organizing your DAM, also be sure that you’re establishing version control processes. If you have creatives from different teams all making different versions of the same asset, your marketers need to know which asset is the most up-to-date and has been approved by legal before putting it into an email campaign or website.

2. Integrate systems for streamlined deployment

While a unified DAM makes finding assets more efficient, creatives and marketers often also waste time toggling between tools in both the production and deployment stages. In fact, financial services organizations identify poor integrations between technology systems and workflow issues as two of the top three challenges when it comes to their ability to react to customer information.

By integrating your DAM and creative tools with a work management platform, you can track the edits, reviews, approvals, and metadata of each asset through every stage of the content creation process. This not only gives everyone — from creative to demand — a more efficient and consistent process to follow, but it also makes it clear which assets are the most current. Marketers can then search for assets in the DAM and pull them directly into email templates without having to move between technologies or triple-check they have the right creative in use. Once those campaigns are created, you can deploy them right from the same platform.

3. Trade manual processes for modular content

Because of the complexity of digital experiences, marketers rely heavily on IT resources to build many of them. While IDC says that content authoring and site ownership falls primarily on technical teams, only 40% of financial services organizations say their marketing teams collaborate successfully with technology or IT teams. With the sheer volume of assets that need to be deployed, the manual processes that many institutions use to create these experiences can become a major setback.

Instead, you need a content management system that is going to support that volume. Creating modular content is an efficient way to cut down on the time and resources it takes for IT to build site experiences — and even offload some effort onto your marketing teams. Instead of planning out entire experiences, marketers and IT can create individual content components that can be stacked together and reused for faster deployment.

For example, Westpac struggled with managing the immense amount of content they needed to personalize experiences across their 13 million customers. By arranging reusable templates and components in different combinations, the publishing team at Westpac now has the flexibility to create web pages across different channels and journeys while maintaining a consistent brand experience. As a result, Westpac saw a 159% increase in sales performance and is now able to produce and manage experiences in a quarter of the time it used to take them.

4. Apply data from your content engagement

People’s interests within the financial services space are constantly changing. For example, EPAM found that about one-third of adults worldwide now look to their bank when they’re trying to get educated on what it means to be financially healthy. Customers are looking to their banks and other financial institutions as thought leaders on how to spend, save, borrow, invest, and plan their finances.

It’s up to you to consider what content your customers are clicking — and whether they’re actually reading it once they do click — so you can keep tabs on how customer expectations change. Having these insights into who customers are, where they are on their journey, and where they’re going next is critical. When insights are provided in real-time with the right technology, they can provide your team a constant feedback loop that helps when deciding what content to deploy or how to adjust your content selections. That way, you can be sure to deliver experiences that are both relevant and useful.

5. Stay alert to audits

While organizations within other industries may be churning out content, you have a lot more going on behind the scenes to get content reviewed and approved. When these processes are stored in different systems, it can require extensive manual processes to meet audit requests — and take time away from deploying new experiences.

By tracking your workflows through a work management system, all your teams — including marketing, brand, legal, and compliance — can work seamlessly together right within the platform. You can assign reviews to creatives in their creative tools or to marketers in their DAM and still have one unified audit trail for every single change that has been made to the content. Creating this backlog then makes it simpler to retrieve files during audit cycles. Rather than scrambling when a regulatory audit comes up, having an integrated work management system allows you to download the trail and nimbly submit it to the corresponding agency.

You may also need to validate that specific regulatory requirements were met for internal audit teams or outside regulators. Having a work management system that’s integrated with the modular content management capabilities of your DAM allows you to archive campaigns and content for an extended period — and then seamlessly access those same materials and approval trails upon request.

Cash in on efficiency

As more people look to their financial institutions as thought leaders, delivering relevant and compelling content is what will build and keep their trust. By focusing on organizing your workflows within a content supply chain framework, you can bring customers more of the content they’re looking for — right when they need it.

For marketers, these efforts are about more than just deploying the right content in the right moments. They’re about exploring what’s possible with modern technology to increase the accessibility of financial education. By building meaningful digital connections, marketers can shift finance from being a black box to an approachable topic that people can learn about and gain confidence in — all with their financial institutions guiding the way through engaging, relevant experiences.

Explore how rapid content deployment fits into your customer personalization efforts.