If you're a marketer, you likely spend 20% of your time on creative work and 80% on copy-pasting and double-checking your content. A centralized content hub, like the one perfected by Kentico, can simplify this process, reducing repetitive tasks and allowing you to manage pieces of content across multiple sites, apps, and social media at once. Save time, nerves, and energy. Sounds great. Where's the catch? Although accustomed to "thinking outside the box" in the creative part of their work, marketers are often held back by terrible habits when working with all kinds of digital tools.
The thing about us marketers is that we adapted to chaos. We juggle dozens of tabs with various digital tools, sift through folders containing 30 versions of the same graphic, and navigate spreadsheets with constantly updated product and promotional information. We rely on our focus and memory to select the right, up-to-date content for various marketing channels to paste.
It's exhausting, but most marketing departments have developed informal processes to manage this chaos somehow. Such unstructured procedures can work in small teams or single-person departments. However, organized workflows are essential in large companies where marketing materials must pass through legal, financial, technical, and logistics departments before publication.
Additionally, with a large customer base, quickly updating marketing information across multiple channels—such as promotional microsites, mobile apps, and partner websites—is very important.
Content Items: The Solution for Multichannel Content Changes
One of our long-term clients is a large pharmaceutical company. Due to legal regulations, most marketing content requires support from relevant and up-to-date medical and market research. Each advertising slogan and product description must be accompanied by a footnote, and slogans in use become obsolete over time, needing withdrawal or a new footnote with the appropriate study number.
The Content Hub application, part of the Xperience by Kentico platform, can make content management extremely easy in cases like this. Let's assume each slogan, whether an advertising banner or text fragment, is a separate, structured content item composed of two elements: the slogan text and an appropriate footnote. By properly organizing our marketing channels within the Kentico platform, updating this content in one place ensures outdated slogans aren't left on promotional websites, product cards in partner stores, or mobile and digital applications.
Content Hub = One Source of Truth
The same content management strategy works well for most companies. Suppose you rent apartments and want to update the photos on all channels where the rental offer is available. In that case, you can do it with just a few clicks. That way, you avoid situations where customers find discrepancies between your offers on forgotten microsites and reality. It also eliminates the need to thoroughly check your digital assets when updating your marketing offer.
There are many examples of the usefulness of a content hub. For lending companies, an instant regular update of current interest rates ensures the new offer is immediately displayed wherever the content item is used at the page builder level.
The content hub app within your DXP becomes one source of truth, and every digital marketing channel you consolidate within your digital experience platform depends on it. You move from outdated web-centric thinking ("we update the website first, then we copy from there") to a modern multichannel approach.
How Does Content Hub Work in Xperience by Kentico
Another couple of things about us marketers are that:
- Let's be honest, we don't always plan far into the future, and sometimes we improvise.
- We like to have control over the appearance and context of what we publish, so completely detaching the content from the presentation layer doesn't sound appealing at first.
The content hub workflow in Xperience by Kentico addresses these points perfectly.
First, you define the structure of your content item by creating a Content Type. Content types are basically your molds for content, which you fill with text, images, and videos as you wish to present them.
In Xperience by Kentico, you have freedom in creating content types and defining their properties. You decide if a content type should be just a text fragment, a text fragment with an image in a specific arrangement, text with a footnote, and so on.
You give your Content Type a name and save it. Later, you use this content type when creating content items. The Content Items saved in the content hub can be used in the page builder or other editors for various marketing channels, such as newsletters and mailings, all consolidated in Kentico.
Depending on your preset design, the content will look different in the appropriate channels, ensuring proper display and preventing issues like photos blending with the background or cropped text fragments.
First, you define the structure of your content item by creating a Content Type. Content types are basically your molds for content, which you fill with text, images, and videos as you wish to present them.Why Drop Everything and Switch to a Composable Content Model
You may be used to your work rhythm—various mailing tools, social media hubs, support for distributed microsites, and organized folders with articles on Google Drive pasted into editors of different content management systems. We get it; we know how it is.
But consolidating tools within one hybrid headless platform and centralizing reusable content in your content hub with that platform offers several benefits:
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You'll save your company time.
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The time saved can be used for more innovative thinking instead of repetitive tasks and worrying about whether everything is updated correctly and whether customers are not seeing version 2.fixed.fixed again.webp instead of 4.final.final.FINAL.webp of your banner.
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Copying digital files may seem harmless, but duplicated content takes up real space in data centers and consumes significant energy.
If you want to learn more about what content and marketing management can look like with a true multichannel approach, as an experienced Kentico Partner, we would be happy to demonstrate the capabilities of the new DXP in relation to the needs of your marketing department.
Kentico upgrade coming up? We should talk.
