Content at scale for enterprise teams targeting global markets

Opera singers spend years, sometimes decades, training their voices. When they’re ready for the stage, they’re able to control every aspect of their vocal performance, modulating it as the libretto requires and delivering a musical experience that reaches every member of the audience, in every corner of the theater. 

Why are we talking opera? Well, content is the digital voice of your brand —  but, more than that, it defines your presence on the commercial landscape. Content shapes the way that customers find you, how they understand you, and how they engage with you. 

And, like opera singers, you’ve worked hard on crafting that voice; you’ve connected with customers; seen your business succeed and grow. If that’s the case, you know your message is resonating, but it’s important to remember that (unlike opera singers) you’re not going to be able to sing the same songs, to the same people, forever.  

If you’re going to continue to drive growth, you’ll need to find a way to turn up the volume of your digital voice, modulate it, and extend its reach — to carry your message to new markets, new regions, and new customers. You need to be able to scale your content. 

In this post, we’ll break down how enterprise organizations can scale their content — from reaching bigger audiences and expanding into global markets, to uplifting and accelerating the content creation process itself. We’ll cover what content scaling means, and share strategies to grow your content offering with Contentful. 

Ready to turn up the volume? Let’s dive in.

What does content scaling mean?

In the broadest sense, content scaling is about expanding your content offering to meet increased demand, while maintaining the quality and consistency of your brand’s voice. 

In most cases, that will mean increasing the volume of content that you create, but may also involve adjusting both your content marketing platform and strategy to support that content for a larger target audience.

For enterprise organizations, scaling content could take many forms: adding pages to your website, engaging customers in new global locations, launching an app, developing content for wearables or new touchpoints, and so on — with each project putting some new demand on your content and development teams. 

Content scaling doesn’t necessarily mean you need to expand the resources that you dedicate to content creation and management — the more efficiently you scale, the greater the relative impact of your content, and the better it will be for your bottom line. For many organizations, it means making adjustments to their content management systems (CMSes), in order to unlock new workflow efficiencies, or add new functionalities. 

In other words, it’s not what your brand says (or not just what you say) to your target audience, but being smarter about how you say it. 

Why is content scaling important?

Enterprise organizations understand that their success is predicated on the relationship they have with their customers — and the need to cultivate that relationship over time. 

The problem is, the message and voice that worked when your brand was a disruptive start-up with a niche customer base, isn’t going to work as well now that you’re a multinational organization with thousands of customers, spread across multiple demographics, in different parts of the world. 

Aside from the fact that they might not even speak your language, these customers will have a different relationship with your brand, and you’ll need a way to talk to them to keep them engaged. 

It isn’t just customers who change, either. Products and services change. Markets change. Technology changes. Any one of countless commercial and environmental factors can end up impacting the way you engage with your audience.

Scaling allows you to control the consistency and impact of your brand voice in order to meet growth challenges — and ensure that what you’re saying continues to resonate. 

The key benefits of scaling content

To summarize, effective content scaling delivers the following key benefits. 

Maintain brand awareness

Effective scaling amplifies your brand voice, without diluting your message — so that it continues to resonate, not only with your existing audience, but with the expanded audience that you’re trying to attract. It's a way to expand the delivery of high-quality content without fragmenting or degrading the message.

Improve SEO 

By expanding your digital content profile, you’ll make your content more visible to search engines. You’ll not only be producing more relevant, localized content that integrates the relevant keyword research and metadata, but demonstrating to search engines that you're a living, breathing brand working to cultivate its digital presence. 

Enhance the digital experience

As you adjust your tech stack to manage your scaling requirements, you’ll integrate more features and functionalities that not only help you streamline content workflows, but have a direct impact on the experience that your audience has when they engage with your content. 

Drive engagement

While you’re scaling to keep pace with growth needs, by expanding your reach and your presence across the digital landscape, you’ll be meeting customers where they are — creating opportunities for engagement and conversions that wouldn’t have emerged otherwise. Launching a new website in a foreign language, for example, will likely expose your content to receptive customers that you haven’t (yet) factored into your marketing strategy. 

Overcoming tech limitations

If you’re ready and willing to start scaling your content, you need to be confident in the technology you’re using to get that job done. In other words: you’ll need to be using a CMS that’s capable of powering your expanded content requirements. 

Many enterprise organizations rely on legacy CMSes that tightly couple frontend content presentation with backend technical administration in monolithic architecture. While monolithic CMSes work well as all-in-one content solutions, they typically limit scaling efforts because they make it more difficult for marketing teams to work with content in the front end without support from development teams.

Not only is it slower to upload and edit content in monolithic CMSes, but formatting requirements often mean you need a different CMS for each digital channel, and need to meticulously copy and paste content between environments. 

Eventually, those issues will start to affect your content workflows, degrading the quality of your brand voice, increasing the possibility of inconsistent messaging and fragmented browsing experiences, and ultimately, confusing your customers. 

With that in mind, for many organizations, it makes sense to leave legacy systems behind when they need to start scaling content, and opt, instead, for a headless CMS. 

Headless scaling possibilities

In a headless CMS, there is no front end (head) — brands build out their front ends themselves in a code-agnostic environment by leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs) to handle data transfer requirements with backend services. 

By eliminating the coding complications of their monolithic counterparts, headless CMSes give marketing and content teams the freedom to upload and edit content themselves, with no need for developer intervention.

Now, content need only be created once and stored in a single CMS, and can then be used on any front end, with no risk of format incompatibility. That means creators and marketers can spin up new pages, new features, and new campaigns faster than ever before — building new blog posts, articles, product pages, and so on, from existing content, and without any tedious copying and pasting between environments. 

Scaling content production with Contentful 

The prospect of scaling content can be daunting, especially at enterprise level where content teams may have to deal with a busy publication schedule, catering to audiences around the world. That’s why supporting your content strategy with the right tech stack is so important.

As part of an expansive digital experience platform (DXP), the Contentful headless CMS provides developers and content teams with an array of powerful scaling tools to push their digital content experiences further, without sacrificing the quality or consistency of their brand voice. 

How does it achieve that? Good question. Let’s explore Contentful’s content scaling advantages. 

Structured content

In Contentful’s headless CMS, content isn’t hardcoded to a specific template or layout. Instead, it’s broken down into its structural components: body text, images, headers, author bio, and so on. Content teams can use those structural components to build new content models quickly: an author’s bio, for example, can be added to new blogs at the click of a button, rather than being copied and pasted between different articles. The modular possibilities of structured content boost content production efficiency, but also help brands efficiently address other scaling challenges, such as personalization and translation.   

Reusable content 

Contentful streamlines content production by leaning into its content-agnostic API architecture. In this environment, content can be created once and then used anywhere within the digital ecosystem, without risk of incompatibility. That means you can reuse entire content pieces (blogs, product descriptions, etc.) or specific content elements (headers, images, logos, etc.) in order to meet scaling demands. 

Omnichannel marketing

Scaling often means expanding content to new digital channels — from desktop to mobile app, wearable, internet of things (IoT), store display, and so on. Where monolithic CMSes typically require a level of technical expertise to publish content across channels, and a dedicated CMS for each channel, Contentful enables brands to store all their content in one place, and publish it to any channel as part of an omnichannel marketing approach. 

Collaborative workflows

Contentful boosts the collaborative potential of technical and nontechnical teams. With APIs facilitating communication between frontend and backend services, developers can work on adjusting the tech stack to deliver new digital experiences, while marketers and creative teams focus on creating content and launching the next campaign.

Extensibility

As part of a DXP, the Contentful CMS provides a composable software architecture that can be adjusted quickly and easily as business needs change. That means brands are not vendor-locked and can, instead, add new features and functionalities to meet their scaling needs, developing an ecosystem of microservices to shape their digital content experience down to the smallest detail.  

AI automation

The Contentful headless CMS has an array of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to automate content management workflows. From eliminating manual processes and generating metadata, to automatically rewriting text content, our AI Actions represent a game-changing advantage for efficient scaling. 

Global localization

Extending the scaling potential of Contentful’s native AI toolset is the capacity to apply global locales to each new piece of content created. The Locale-Based Publishing feature enables content teams to quickly adjust content for different territories and languages, from within the Contentful CMS, at the click of a button. 

Scaling now and in the future

From enterprise organizations to start-ups, Contentful helps brands address scaling challenges with powerful automation tools that deliver immediate workflow impact. But it’s important to remember that scaling isn’t a one-and-done exercise to get your brand past its next KPI: your market, your customers, and the technologies you use to deliver your services will continue to evolve — which means you’ll need to be ready to scale again in the future.

The extensibility of the Contentful platform means your tech stack is future-proofed against its long-term scaling challenges. However your voice needs to grow or change over time, Contentful can provide the flexibility and support to maintain its quality and consistency, protecting both your message and your brand, and helping you to reach new audiences across the globe.

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