Create a framework for content and collaboration that drives personalization at scale

The velocity of content growth today is staggering. In one of our recent Adobe Summit sessions, “Welcome to the Era of Personalized Content at Scale,” Alicia Preston and Todd Brownrout of Deloitte talked about how over 500 million pieces of content are created by marketers every single day. It’s a deluge of information coming at a time when attention spans are waning. So how do you make sure your content resonates?

Dial up your personalization at scale strategy.

With many organizations driving toward personalization at scale, your ability to deliver the right information at the right time to all customers rests on how quickly and effectively you can create, manage, and distribute quality content. An optimized content production workflow — one that also makes collaboration a key part of the process — can help you launch personalized campaigns more effectively, enhancing digital experiences and ultimately increasing your ROI.

Content and collaboration roadblocks
While working toward creating personalized content for all of your customers, you may encounter some common roadblocks, especially around siloed teams, tech platforms, and repetitive content workflow processes. As you assess your organization’s personalization at scale readiness, ask yourself some of these questions:

• Is it difficult to create content at the pace and scale needed to support all channels and segments?
• Is your organization struggling to find, repurpose, and share digital assets across your different teams?
• Are you dealing with separate content systems that are, in turn, driving high developer costs?
• Are customer experiences disjointed because content is not optimized across their journey?
• Do you lack visibility into content production process and/or experience misalignment among internal teams?

Inefficiencies create added costs and customer churn
If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you’re not alone. Slow, inefficient, disconnected content production processes typically mean time and money are wasted — and you’re likely not creating the personalized customer experiences you’re aiming for.

Inefficient teams and workflows typically lead to higher costs and resource investments. Time and money are wasted on unnecessary asset duplication and creation across different teams. Your content developers who are trying to manage content delivery are also not as efficient as they could be.

It’s something that organizations must get a handle on. “We’re entering an era with cookieless advertising, where every brand wants to own first-party data,” said Brownrout, managing director at Deloitte. “And so we’ve gone from brands needing to produce hundreds of thousands of pieces of content to potentially millions of pieces of content. And that’s going to create new demands on organizations that are oftentimes ill-prepared to handle.”

The good news is that Adobe has the technology, tools, and know-how to help you optimize content production workflows — to improve collaboration, accelerate content development processes, and distribute relevant information effectively to all of your customers at the right time.

Take control of your content
With a solid strategy, the right platform and tools, and a committed effort across teams, you can create a content production workflow that encourages collaboration and delivers personalized experiences at scale. While it’s not something that you can change overnight, you can take concerted steps to move toward personalization at scale.

1. Create and deliver personalized content by audience or user segment
Start your process by leveraging insights through business-user-friendly reporting and visualization to inform your content creation efforts. Customers are often short on time and have little patience for information not relevant to their needs. Your ability to adapt content to customer preferences quickly can help you connect with your customers quickly across every channel.

In fact, you may want to consider blending rules-based approaches with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve your content selections continually for each individual customer. Using AI dramatically reduces the amount of time and effort required to deliver personalized content. And by combining AI with modular content, you can even build personalized content on the fly.

2. Increase content velocity
Another data point highlighted in “Welcome to the Era of Personalized Content at Scale” is that 85% of marketers are under pressure to create assets and deliver campaigns more quickly. It’s challenging to move fast when teams have to hunt down the right asset from disparate systems. Time and money are wasted, and less time is available to spend on strategic, revenue-generating activities.

Ensure that creative and marketing teams can collaborate effectively on content creation and leverage a review process with tools that allow them to create content once, house it in a centralized location, and reuse it across any channel. Improvements that enhance content velocity put you in a better position to capitalize on conversion opportunities while the experience is still relevant and fresh.

3. Optimize content delivery to any channel at the right moment
Your customers expect fast, compelling content on all devices and across all channels in their path. In turn, you must be able to dynamically tailor and optimize content based on where it is being delivered and what audience is consuming it.

Adobe offers tools that ensure optimal content performance based on device and channel. Herriot Stobo, director of omnichannel innovation and product at HP, has spent the last several years consolidating the different platforms of HP to improve the commerce experience. “One of the major areas we've been focused on is personalization and delivering one-to-one experiences for our customers across multiple touchpoints,” she said. Adobe “allows us to optimize our experiences at scale, far more quickly than we could do in the past because we now have consistent libraries for content and style. That means we can run experiments. We can be data-driven in our approach. And we can deploy at scale.”

4. Streamline cross-functional collaboration
Creative and marketing teams should collaborate on content creation and accelerate the process by automating review-and-approval cycles and establishing a single source of truth for all content assets.

Collaboration on content development and approvals with cross-functional enterprise teams ensures critical stakeholders are involved where needed to satisfy demands for quality and compliance. Collaboration and context are ideally integrated across the creative, storage, and delivery of the content that powers customer experiences and digital businesses.

Turn content and collaboration into effective personalization

It’s more important than ever to engage your customers meaningfully. Focusing on content and collaboration within your organization can help enable positive customer experiences and drive competitive advantage.

By relying on a dynamic content production machine to create, manage, and deliver relevant content at lightning speed — and at scale — your organization can operate with greater agility, bring campaigns to market faster, and increase your ROI.