We’re living in an experience-driven economy, where lasting, meaningful experiences can set you apart from your competitors – and be the key to unlocking success. This is more vital than ever in a post-pandemic, digital world where customer expectations are at an all-time high and the quality and availability of digital offerings has a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Personalised experiences are no longer a pleasant surprise, but a necessity.
B2B businesses must now be omnipresent, show up in real-time and personalise messages, at scale. But the complexity of presenting customers with personalised experiences –getting the right content to the right place at the right time– is becoming harder.
This is causing businesses to juggle the large number of assets required to fulfil the delivery of content, which is placing a significant burden on content teams. In fact, a recent study by Sitecore revealed how only 28% of decision-makers agreed their organisations can deliver against the content needs of their customers. Here are four areas to focus on when improving your content:
1. Collaboration between internal stakeholders
IT and marketing decision-makers are usually the key stakeholders responsible for the complex process of creating and deploying content – but the department taking the lead can vary from one organisation to the other.
Unfortunately, with each department working solely with its own technology, siloed asset management systems can arise. And because assets are commonly shared across multiple systems and accessed by users with varying needs and levels of expertise, a standard view of all content becomes almost impossible, deeming collaboration equally as impossible.
In response, it’s essential that both IT and marketing decision-makers are able to work together to access, create and deliver an optimal customer experience. Yet 81% of ITDMs wish marketing understood their team’s needs better, and 84% of marketers say the same about their IT counterparts, according to a report by Wunderman Thompson.
By making strides to bridge this divide between marketing and IT, while harnessing technology that supports greater collaboration, this can be an essential step to realising effective B2B content management.
2. Bringing other parties on board
The pandemic catapulted us into a new era and, according to McKinsey, as of May 2020 we had already “vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks.” This meant that almost overnight, work, shopping and life itself transitioned to the digital realm and businesses had to adapt, pivot and embrace new channels, all while customising experiences to customers at scale.
Beyond internal stakeholders, there are also digital teams such as creatives and production specialists, brand teams, and third-party agencies that play a role in an organisation’s successful online presence. So, effective collaboration between these parties is also vital when building experiences.
The ability to efficiently provide content to distributors, wholesalers or marketplaces is essential. Just over half (58%) of the businesses in the report said they would like to see the agencies they work with be more involved in their content workflows, and a third (33%) reported that their third-party suppliers currently struggle to input content into their DAM system.
To get the best out of partners in the content supply chain, businesses should consider sufficiently onboarding them into their processes and tools.
3. DAM to the rescue
The global market for DAM alone is forecast to reach $15.4 billion by 2027, according to Global Industry Analysts. But these are not the asset libraries of the past – because not only are they unifying content and assets to serve multiple channels, they’re also more advanced in fuelling dynamic experiences. Ultimately enabling businesses to achieve personalisation at scale and deliver on seamless, omnichannel customer journeys.
Furthermore, this new breed of DAM combines the capabilities of DAM and CMS to enable multiple stakeholders to collaborate on work in progress within the platform, as well as serving as the single source of truth for asset renditions for every market and channel.
But the benefits don’t end there. A strong DAM solution, with the right access and security controls, will ensure agencies consistently adhere to the brand, tone-of-voice and style guidelines when creating content and assets. Plus, having customer data, social media and marketing automation platforms plugged into the ecosystem can also support the multichannel strategies that will bring about personalisation.
It’s likely for this reason, as the experience challenge gets more complex, that DAM as a solution is growing with high investments from retail businesses (72%), manufacturing (65%), financial services (61%), and information technology (54%).
4. Partner enablement
It’s important to highlight that together with DAM, the people in the content supply chain are a key component in managing the challenge of personalisation – which is why partner enablement is an essential part of the transformation journey.
To get the most out of technology, B2B teams and partners have to be empowered to manage change, communications and the upskilling necessary to bring about success. And organisations, agencies and distribution partners have to all embrace more embedded ways of working together to maximise the efficiencies and benefits technology can bring, to deliver the personalisation expected by customers.
