Three key takeaways on multichannel management from London Tech Week 2021
Despite 74% of digital leaders believing their CMS is capable of making any task at hand more efficient, just 34% of content creators agree, according to findings from the largest survey of CMS users. “I think that means about 40% of leaders are in for a shock over the next few years,” says Jamie Bolland, product marketing manager at Contentful. Jamie was joined by Harry Jeyarajah, enterprise solution engineer, at London Tech Week 2021 to discuss how the right content platform helps brands, and the content teams that support them, thrive in a multichannel world.
If you missed their session, you can watch it below. Here are a few of their key takeaways.
Jamie and Harry shared a holistic approach to content management that relies on three pillars: people, playbook and platform. The third pillar, platform, brings everything together. By selecting the right content platform, you’re able to empower your team members to build using the tools they prefer. With these tools, they’re more equipped, eager and productive in carrying out the strategies in your playbook. When digital teams are not confined by how they deliver content, they can take a step back from focusing on technology limitations and bottlenecks. Instead, they have the mental space to think more holistically about creating the best content experiences for customers. Here are three steps the duo shared as part of a holistic approach.
1. Bring together agile teams
Before you jump into creating a digital strategy and securing the technology to support it, you have to find the right people to carry out your newfound strategy and turn the technology you choose into a tool that carries out your brand’s mission and vision. Digital builders are these people — they are developers, designers, content creators or any other member of an organization that participates in dreaming up and carrying out great customer experiences.
For optimal success, brands must curate a balanced team of digital builders pulling from those with technological talent, creative talent and everything in between. When teams from different areas work collaboratively, new ideas emerge and great customer experiences are created. A content platform that’s customizable to each team’s unique needs supports collaborative efforts by allowing teams to work in parallel. In eliminating traditional waterfall workflows, builds and launches can occur in record time.
Learn more about building agile teams including the roles and responsibilities of key contributors.
2. Organize content
We’ll let you in on a secret — your customers don’t care where your content comes from. What they do care about is consistency. For brands striving to create multichannel experiences, content responsibilities often span multiple teams. Product and marketing are an example of two teams within larger organizations that usually have a hand in content creation and management. Content stretched across multiple teams using different CMSes creates silos that lead to experience inconsistencies for the customer. A content platform unifies content in one hub making it easier for cross-functional teams to collaborate and work toward shared content goals.
Celonis, a global leader in execution management, is a prime example of a company that benefited from a platform approach to content management. While the company helps businesses manage data and intelligence on a daily basis, it was in the dark about content management. One thing they were sure of was that their original legacy CMS was hindering productivity. It demanded manual maintenance from developers and offered few options for omnichannel delivery and cross-functional collaboration. In preparation to scale their brand and improve how internal teams worked together on content, Celonis turned to Contentful. In adopting the platform, Celonis team members have become strategic collaborators and experimenters. Content creators are now able to write, edit and launch with confidence in asset consistency (but without developer support). Through governance rules, teams previously not included in content creation, publishing and editing — like demand generation and customer success — can contribute to creating new and better digital experiences. Since incorporating Contentful in their tech stack, Celonis has launched thousands of new web pages — in multiple languages, reaching new marketing and attracting new customers.
3. Use the tools your builders want
Content management tools help teams work smarter, or at least that’s the goal. However, many all-in-one suite-style CMSes end up restricting rather than enhancing what builders are able to do. Remember the stat from the start of this blog? 74% of digital leaders believe their CMS is capable of making tasks at hand more efficient while just 34% of content creators agree. To help brands reach their multichannel content goals, adopting a CMS that helps teams create more productively is crucial.
Today, digital builders want three things from their CMS:
Low technical support when publishing content
One content platform that delivers to all channels
A future-proof, easy-to-use stack
For all-in-one small business marketing platform Mailchimp, every feature was a “must” while shopping for its new content platform. They knew it was time to mature their content management technology when a content audit revealed a confusing and ill-managed sprawling web of knowledge base and marketing websites. Contentful was an easy option for its familiarity and ability to deliver on all digital builder needs within the organization. Members of the Atlanta-born, founder-owned company’s content team wanted autonomy to deliver on their ambitious goals (which included generating 10x more content) on their own timeline. Mailchimp developers demanded multichannel speed and reliability — they knew their customer base, which seeks self-service answers 98.8% of the time, wouldn’t settle for downtimes during content migration or launches.
With Contentful, Mailchimp authors and editors have greater reign over all things creative and that relate to maintaining content consistency. Developers barely broke a sweat during setup and there were no downtimes in sight. With aid from Contentful experts and an extensive App Framework supporting microservice integrations, Mailchimp was able to templatize its needs and launch quickly. The ease that came with that first build and launch is something Mailchimp developers and creatives still enjoy to this day through instant deploys and quick edits.
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