Creating a content supply chain that will stand the test of time.
Digital channels are seeing a huge surge of content, as the need to create personalized digital experiences is growing every day. There are more channels, markets, and formats to deliver content than ever before — and a greater need for seamless digital experiences.
Every company has processes to create and activate content, but many are inefficient and incomplete. The good news is that these processes can be managed with clear roles and responsibilities, complete strategies, and integrated AI, technology, and data.
Enterprise content is expected to increase to 155 exabytes by 2026, compared to 47 exabytes in 2021.
Source: IDC
What is a content supply chain?
A content supply chain is an end-to-end business process that every company needs to deliver the content required for their marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences. Even if they don’t call it a content supply chain, every company has one. It can range from a few people in the creative process to a large, global enterprise encompassing marketers, creatives, external agencies, executive stakeholders, and operations teams.
With customers demanding more and better experiences at an increasingly faster pace, it’s important to get your organization’s content supply chain running smoothly to break down silos and unify the workflows you need to plan, produce, manage, deliver, and measure content quickly. This helps boost efficiency and engagement with customers to get more value from your technology investments.
What’s breaking your content supply chain?
Most content supply chains are broken due to the cross-functional nature of content lifecycles. Lack of uniform workflows, poor resource tracking, or disjointed communication are just some examples of ways that the content supply chain can break down. Unfortunately, when these chains break, they can create internal misalignment, drain budgets, wear out employees, and slow the velocity of delivering key messages into the market.
Source: The Future of Creative Experiences
The five building blocks of a healthy content supply chain.
Let's look at the five core elements of the content supply chain and what needs to happen in each to automate and accelerate every aspect of your content lifecycle.
1. Workflow and planning.
A smooth content supply chain requires a work management solution that allows centralized creative review and collaboration between teams to connect projects to planned, data-driven outcomes. This tool should empower your marketing team to prioritize work strategically and communicate those priorities to your creative team.
From there, the creative brief, content asset versions, and feedback should be connected across applications within each project — so your team doesn’t have to search through old emails to find what they’re looking for.
How Adobe marketing approaches workflow and planning.
We start by taking in hundreds of content requests from cross-functional teams across the business and prioritizing them against our quarterly goals and key tasks. A content request intake dashboard in Workfront provides transparency so we can align with our stakeholders and quickly get sign-off across our marketing, creative, web, and subject matter expert teams on upcoming content creation plans. When the brief and Workfront requests are created, we capture the necessary metadata to keep content organized and searchable right away.
In the workflow and planning phase, we create a record of what we’re committing to, which also provides advanced visibility to marketing execution teams for how to plan their work and programs. We give our creative and web teams visibility into the total request volume so they can plan for resourcing as early as possible. Plus, managers can easily monitor their team’s workloads and understand how long it takes to create different types of assets.
Our goal in the workflow and planning phase is to continually optimize our processes, encourage collaboration and visibility into content plans, and keep content governance centralized in a single place.
2. Content creation and production.
For creative teams to produce the volume of content required for one-to-one personalized experiences, their processes must be streamlined. That means creatives use generative AI to speed up content production, automate simple asset updates, and brainstorm new ideas. Another important part of the creative process is simple, real-time collaboration. This allows for faster feedback in a centralized review and approval process to reduce revisions, maintain better version control, and conduct seamless handoffs.
How Adobe marketing approaches content creation and production.
As we start the content production process, approved requests turn into projects that provide more detail to our creatives, including creative briefs, web landing locations, and promotional requirements. Our creative teams develop content for every channel, market, and audience with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing and the generative AI features in Adobe Creative Cloud applications — all while maintaining alignment with our brand guidelines.
Our goal in the content creation and production phase is to enable our teams and agency partners to move quickly through creative tasks without sacrificing the quality of their output.
3. Asset management.
With a digital asset manager (DAM) that’s integrated with tools across the content supply chain, your team can easily find, use, update, and repurpose relevant assets. The right DAM improves asset findability, streamlines distribution, and speeds up time to market by automating asset tagging and asset variation development. For enterprise businesses, DAMs play an important role in content governance and digital rights management by setting clear access, permissions, and controls.
76% of companies cannot easily find and store assets.
Source: Adobe
How Adobe marketing approaches asset management.
We use Adobe Experience Manager Assets as our DAM to store our assets in a central location and maintain a repository of ready-to-use content. And we rely on Workfront’s Adobe Experience Manager integrations to cut our publishing time in half.
A key element of asset management is metadata. This information is attached to each asset to make asset retrieval easy for stakeholders across the business. We use pre-established naming conventions and processes for adding the metadata to ensure consistency across all our creative and marketing teams.
The metadata added in the first phase or during the creative process is inputted to the DAM and automatically maintained. This helps automate repetitive work to give our teams time back to focus on creative work.
Once assets are ready for review, they can be automatically shared for approval, so review requests don’t get lost in email inboxes or Slack threads. After assets have been published to the DAM, we’re constantly considering how they can be reused and repurposed for future projects.
We’ve also started tracking user journeys within our DAM. We can see when someone goes in, what they’re looking at, what they’re searching for, and what they’re downloading. This helps us identify highly leveraged or underutilized assets and areas of top interest from stakeholders for future content creation.
Our goal in the asset management phase is to maintain a repository of assets that anyone in our organization can find and reuse in a way that aligns with our brand and compliance guidelines.
4. Delivery and activation.
When it’s time to deliver your content, your DAM helps with cataloging, tracking, and locating assets with metadata tags. Your customers want to move quickly, so your team needs to move even faster — finding videos, infographics, photos, messaging, and more in a few seconds.
Your DAM should be able to automatically resize images, manage version control, and avoid duplication across geos while integrating with your entire tech stack. And with the power of AI, you can automate content variations based on customer location, interests, and actions.
Next, you need a platform for distributing content to all your digital outlets, so you can meet your customers on whichever channel they’re using. It’s a bonus if this platform can also auto-generate and publish assets optimized for each channel, including creating new sizes, formats, resolutions, aspect ratio, or effects. This lets you test enough content variations to find meaningful insights to inform future interactions.
How Adobe marketing approaches delivery and activation.
When our content has been finalized and is ready for delivery and activation, we upload our offers, assets, and promotional content to Adobe Experience Manager Assets, which syncs with Adobe Experience Manager Sites. In addition, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics integrates with Adobe Experience Manager to give us visibility into how assets have been used within customer journeys — so we can get insights directly within the DAM.
We rely on Adobe Experience Manager Sites to publish quickly across the correct channels and platforms. Within Experience Manager Sites, we can rapidly test multiple versions of content to optimize for key performance indicators and drive our desired business outcomes. Experience Manager Sites also simplifies personalization across different audiences.
Our goal is to use the integration of generative AI to make updating content a straightforward, automated process where making changes to a webpage is as easy as editing a Word document.
5. Reporting and insights.
The final step in the content supply chain is measuring content performance and impact through analytics, engagement metrics, and lead scoring. Once content has been published, you can continuously test variations and placements to maximize impact and allow the marketing team to collect further insights about your customers. This data can then inform future content and strategies and drive continuous improvement.
When you have intuitive dashboards and reporting, you get a real-time view of how your content is performing. Using integrated tools throughout the content supply chain gives you insights down to the most granular element, from page-level insights to asset-level insights, to attribute-level insights.
How Adobe marketing approaches reporting and insights.
Because our tools are seamlessly integrated, we can produce specific reports to track and analyze how our processes and assets are performing. We can understand how individual assets within a campaign resonate with certain audiences by looking at performance at a granular level, filtering for audience segments and other groupings.
Our goal is to use insights we gather to help leadership make better decisions and allow our teams to maintain consistency and cohesiveness in our content and the processes behind it.
Build your content supply chain with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
Optimizing your content supply chain unlocks increased efficiency, consistency, and quality in your content creation and publishing process. A streamlined content supply chain is the first step towards delivering personal experiences that appeal to your customers — wherever they may choose to engage with you.
Adobe GenStudio is an integrated set of best-in-class products to help companies automate and optimize their content supply chain through each of these core elements.
We can help you take the next step, whatever that looks like for your business. Learn more about accelerating and simplifying your content supply chain with Adobe GenStudio.
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