In today’s competitive landscape, marketers are facing growing pressure to produce high-quality, personalized content. To keep up with this demand, organizations must think of content production as a “supply chain,” which empowers their marketing team to produce custom, multi-channel content at scale.
This is the premise of the content supply chain, which has gained popularity over the past year. However, this way of thinking has been around for decades – and now, the technology is finally advanced to make the content supply chain a reality.
In fact, odds are that your organization already has the components of a content supply chain in place, but streamlining it requires thinking more operationally in terms of work management.
With channels, touch points, and consumer demands proliferating, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to synchronize reporting, resourcing, asset management, and reviews and approvals. Therefore, work management is a crucial component of the modern content production process. In fact, 70% of marketers time is spent on non-core work, managing manual tasks in disparate systems across roles (Adobe).
Leveraging tools like Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) creates a strong chain of content production, rather than scattered disconnected links.
Workfront and AEM: Core Elements of the Content Supply Chain
Workfront is Adobe’s work management tool that combines project management, resource management, asset management, time tracking, and issue tracking features while Adobe Experience Manager is an enterprise CMS and DAM.
Since Workfront and AEM are tightly integrated, organizations that leverage these tools together are enabled to deliver content in the frequency that buyers demand.
So what does a modern content supply chain look like with Workfront and AEM? Read on for the business goals that you could achieve.
#1 – Increased operational efficiency
For most enterprises, quite a few manual steps are involved in content production, whether it’s uploading assets, managing versions, reviews and approvals, or cross-team collaboration.
AEM’s native integration to Workfront streamlines the flow of assets post-creation, ensuring they are accessible to the stakeholders that need them. Being able to push an asset through to downstream systems for production and distribution while enabling connected data points along the way is key to improving speed of delivery.
Workfront also provides data on asset creation timelines and project execution, which improves the ability to inform campaigns and identify content to reuse. How exactly does Workfront do this? By accumulating metadata that can be transferred with the asset to AEM for ease of use and reporting. This also eliminates the manual aspect and more accurate metadata.
#2 – Improved speed to market with greater reuse of content
When the correct metadata is applied to the asset in Workfront, there's increased visibility into the assets used across campaigns. Likewise, identifying the specific campaign an asset was used for can improve searchability in the DAM, giving content creators a starting point for developing the next similar campaign, whether that’s year to year or evergreen campaigns, further streamlining the content creation process
It doesn't stop at just Workfront and AEM, either. Integrating other Adobe Products into the lifecycle (like Target) can help drive data distribution across channels to better support and inform the coming year's campaign goals.
For example, how well did a specific asset for a specific channel do in the market? If it didn't do well, you might not want to reuse that content. Imagine providing visibility into performance data in the systems that marketers use everyday.
#3 – Personalized content at scale
The maximum benefit of streamlining the content supply chain is unlocking personalized content at scale. So how exactly does Workfront and AEM support this?
Integrating Workfront and AEM boosts productivity and collaboration and enables user adoption. Streamlining the end-to-end process from ideation, creation and production to delivery (and automating handoffs between teams) is about connecting strategy and marketing outcomes to save time and money and ultimately, improving the end-customer experience.
Workfront’s dynamic system of records enables the production of content that is crucial to fulfill personalized touch points. Without Workfront, teams would be managing spreadsheets and wasting resources on manual work. Not to mention, Workfront also allows for data standardization and reporting to inform future business decisions.
Without Workfront, there is a level of personalization that is simply out of reach when using only manual processes.
Accelerate your Workfront and AEM ROI today
While technology plays a pivotal role in helping organizations meet their content production goals – it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Organizations must look beyond technology and optimize their teams, tools, and workflows to produce and distribute content at scale.
However managing these elements can be challenging – from content production and change management to the enablement of client teams, this can often set teams back.
To rise above this, organizations must understand their unique content production needs and team dynamics. Conducting a discovery to understand the current process as well as the future desired state can help. Learning about marketing’s reporting needs and how it works with other departments helps to make informed decisions on how to configure Workfront and AEM to have maximum impact on the content supply chain.
In addition, organizations must be equipped to track KPIs to determine success. The key to success is marrying your level of maturity with available technologies and KPIs – across the 4Vs (volume velocity, variety, and value) – to actively manage the content supply chain.
If your team wants help making that vision a reality, get in touch today. MERGE is an Adobe Gold Solutions Partner with Workfront, AEM, and Marketo Engage specialization, our team of experts are skilled and ready to bring your content supply chain to life.