The Three Rs of Content Automation

From creation through consumption, a content transformation is underway

A dramatic content shift has occurred. Long gone are the days of static content; now it must be dynamic - personalized, rich with interactivity, and accessible anywhere, anytime and from any device.

To meet these expectations - and stay competitive in today's digital era - organizations are changing how they create, manage and publish content. Automation is at the heart of this transformation and ensures content ecosystems are future-ready to meet the omnichannel needs of content creators and consumers alike.

To appreciate the value a content automation platform provides, you first need to understand how content has evolved. Not that long ago, print was the primary communications channel, so organizations invested heavily in print‐centric content processes and systems.

But they can't keep pace with current content consumption patterns. For example, "Insider Intelligence" reports that the average U.S. adult will spend "a staggering 4 hours, 35 minutes per day consuming media on mobile devices" by 2023.

Digital has revolutionized content. First, it has empowered the audience. Consumers can control how they shop and search for information and entertainment like never before, on their terms. And digital platforms enable organizations to reach their audiences without geographic and linguistic boundaries, expanding their reach, influence and growth potential.

But digital transformation opportunities also create challenges. With more options and more power than ever before, the three Rs of content automation are critical to content creation and consumption - and all the stages of the content lifecycle in between.

We're talking about the right content in the right place at the right time.

The right content complies with industry regulations, accurately engages your audience(s) and helps achieve a successful outcome. This could be correctly disclaiming a product or turning a prospect into a paying customer. As such, the content you produce must be personalized, comply with unique corporate and compliance requirements that vary by industry and geography, and deliver the information your audience wants and in the format they want to see it in. Vast amounts of content in various formats exist within your organization - from white papers and e-books to data sheets and banner ads. The key is knowing what piece of content is most valuable and consumable for your target audience.

The right place is about knowing your audience's preferred engagement channel to optimize the receipt and consumption of your content, so you can deliver it via the right device and in the right format to generate the fastest and most immersive response. This is no small feat with changing habits of content consumption and the myriad of platform choices - print, web, mobile, radio and TV. The right place is having the ability to develop one piece of content that can be tailored and published through all print and digital channels. In short, it's delivered to the right devices. This speeds time to value with content creation processes and makes it easy to reuse the same piece of content for different channels.

The right time is both knowing when your audience is most likely to engage with and consume content and having the agility to accelerate the velocity at which content is created in response to market or regulatory changes. Audience expectations for timely and accurate information are at an all-time high, so your content must be instantly accessible when your audience is likely to consume it. Successful organizations also deliver insightful content in response to a timely industry movement, such as a major security breach, to help inform or educate customers and prospects.

Measuring the three Rs

Organizations can assess where they are on their path to successfully delivering on the three Rs by adding intelligence. Content intelligence and analysis is the key to supporting an organization's ability to keep up with the velocity of content creation and consumption across all print and digital channels.

From an internal perspective, content intelligence using XML metadata tagging on content components makes it easy to aggregate, curate, recommend and share enterprise content assets and leverage data to personalize those assets and meet compliance requirements for specific audiences across specific industries and verticals.

From an external perspective, content intelligence takes the guesswork out of the value of your content by infusing data-driven insights so you have confidence that content delivered will reach and resonate with your audience. Also, organizations gain insight into specific consumption metrics as to how audiences engage with content down to the component level, so you can see what sections of the content are of significant interest and should be reused or repurposed elsewhere, while understanding when content has reached the end of its lifecycle and should be retired.

Implementing the three Rs

Is your organization living up to the three Rs? Companies like Apple in the B2C world have set a high content bar, one most B2B companies have difficulty meeting. As I mentioned before, legacy, print-based processes and systems can't support the three Rs. According to Forrester's 2022 State of B2B Content Survey, "Only 24% of enterprises are currently digitally advanced and only 10% of B2B organizations cite advanced content engine maturity."

But a modern, content automation platform can satisfy the three Rs and more. For example, it provides the ability to:

• Author structured content components that are modular, metadata-driven and compliance-controlled
• Establish role-based workflows for reviews and approvals
• Design properly branded, visually appealing content templates
• Manage and assemble components and templates from a repository that can be trusted as a source of truth with the most accurate, up-to-date and relevant versions
• Publish omnichannel content at the optimal times
• Analyze performance and cost to fine-tune content strategy and execution

With these capabilities, your organization can actually measure and increase its content ROI - that's the fourth R of content automation. And Quark can help you optimize all of them.

Quark Publishing Platform (QPP) NextGen automates every stage of the content lifecycle: creation, collaboration, assembly, omnichannel publishing and analysis. With QPP NextGen, you'll have an end-to-end, closed-loop approach to operationalizing your content strategy.

See for yourself. Request a demo of QPP NextGen.

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