Download The case for a marketing content hub

The case for a
marketing
content hub
By Tom DE RIDDER and Tim PASHUYSEN
STYLELABS co-founders
Brussels • New York • marketingcontenthub.com
THE MARKETING CONTENT HUB IS
THE CORNERSTONE IN THE QUEST
FOR CONTENT MARKETING AND
OMNICHANNEL
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The case for a
marketing
content hub
With this booklet, we would like to sketch the context
and challenges that led us to come up with the Marketing Content Hub. In essence, the Marketing Content Hub
is a piece of software, but its greatest value comes from
how it extends the traditional business case for DAM
with a more holistic approach to marketing content. This
approach means it can better tackle today’s marketing
operations challenges – ultimately empowering your
marketing organization to add value to the company.
Spoiler alert: the Marketing Content Hub is all about
aggregating existing marketing content from other
platforms with newly created content.
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We enrich and extend this content in a 360° interaction
based on a client-driven domain model, and support
this with creative project management and collaboration
tools, embedded in a marketing portal and inally facilitating the publication toward omnichannel.
We strongly believe the Marketing Content Hub is the
holy grail in the quest for content marketing and omnichannel that lots of our clients have undertaken.
This is our manifesto. We hope you enjoy it!
Tom DE RIDDER
Tim PASHUYSEN
STYLELABS co-founders
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The coming of
age of DAM
It’s taken an awfully long time, but we’ve inally arrived
at what might be called a milestone in the evolution
of Digital Asset Management (DAM). Across industries,
DAM is now irmly established as a platform, an industry
category and – for brands from startup to enterprise – an
indispensable commodity. What’s more, for the overwhelming majority of customers, DAM is the irst point
of entry to the vast and ever growing world of marketing
technology.
And yet, the evolution of DAM itself continues to be slow
and, in many cases, painstaking. Even for high-end DAM
platforms, true enterprise scale and complexity remain
a challenge. Consider that there are still plenty of DAM
systems that treat management of video – the fastest
growing digital format – as an add-on feature that’s sold
separately (and, of course, at a premium price). Far too
often, DAM systems fall short of being the comprehensive response to your marketing operation’s needs.
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OUT FROM THE SHADOWS
Where is the CMO?
A few years ago, just as larger organizations began
to replace their original “starter” DAM systems with a
second-generation platform, attention quickly turned
toward the other end of the marketing operations chain.
Analytics and user experience management, tools from
the ancient world of web content management (wCMS),
ofered all new insights into the customer experience.
For perhaps the irst time in marketing technology
history, the CMO sat up and paid attention. Finally, here
were tools that made it possible to quantify the impact
of all those expensive marketing production processes.
Measurability ofered what every CMO was desperately
looking for in this age of doing more with less - the
chance to justify the marketing department’s existence
and budget.
This newfound conidence has opened the doorway to
integrating new technologies. One of the results is
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that most marketing departments are able to focus on
content marketing and omnichannel. For those unfamiliar
with the lingo, content marketing means the marketing
message is built around facts and engagement rather
than fantasy. Omnichannel means that a company sends
out a message that is consistent across consumer touch
points, and that the potential of every channel is fully leveraged by using the richest possible media and content.
So, where is the CMO these days? Front and center.
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HERE’S WHERE WE COME IN
The marketing
content hub
Before we dive into the case for a Marketing Content
Hub, let’s size up the problem.
Marketing content is all over the place. Literally. We have
seen it sitting in cupboards and left abandoned in basements. We have discovered it on hard drives. In Excel
iles and Word documents. We have even found it on
servers that clients had long forgotten existed. Mostly,
however, we’ve found bits and pieces of marketing
content on platforms that are (or in less ideal situations,
are not) owned by the marketing organization.
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This is where the Marketing Content Hub comes in. The
challenge is to get a 360° overview of these disparate
bits of digital content, add new content and prepare for
the new age of marketing. By connecting all the dots
– from fragmented infrastructures to lonely DAM silos –
the Marketing Content Hub helps minimize complexity
while delivering on the full promise of omnichannel and
content marketing.
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MARKETING CONTENT IS
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Where is your
marketing content
hiding?
Remember, content marketing is about interaction and
engagement. It has real value for the customer, which
ultimately adds value to your organization. With that in
mind, let’s investigate all the places where these nuggets
of valuable content are hiding.
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Legacy
agency
MRM
ERP
PLM
supplier
aggregate
marketing brand portal
creative project
management &
collaboration tools
marketing
content
hub
marketing
content
repository
distribute
enterprise
search
ecommerce
CMS
documents
CRM
apps
Sources of marketing content
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ERP
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are employed by the older, more “serious” areas of an organization, and are typically used to store inancial and logistical
information. ERP platforms are generally neither willing
nor able to accommodate marketing information, and
aren’t equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing
needs of most marketing departments.
Still, ERP systems do contain bits of valuable marketing
content that will eventually end up in a publication channel. Examples include product structure, SKUs, catalog
management of product availability, and more.
PLM
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems support
every stage of product development – from early R&D
right through to phase out. PLM systems are generally
very smart, relatively complex systems that form the
backbone of most industrial processes within productoriented organizations. Some of the information typically
stored on PLM platforms is useful to marketing or, at
least, the marketing-facing aspects of product management. Examples of marketing content stored in PLM
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systems include technical speciications (e.g. “This power
tool uses 24V batteries”), as well as technical documentation and manuals.
PIM/PCM
Product Information Management (PIM) and Product
Content Management (PCM) are PLM’s smaller, more
nimble, marketing-focused brothers. Examples of
marketing content found in PIM/PCM systems might
include sizes, colors, and other customer-facing product
information. Although PIM and PCM ill a very real need in
product-oriented organizations, we’ve always felt that the
DAM-PIM distinction is slightly artiicial, and arises more
from the way software vendors package their products
than a functional reality. But more on that later.
DAM
DAM systems are generally owned by the marketing
area and are used to store digital media iles, including
images, graphics and other artwork, layouts, documents,
translations and occasionally more. If you’re prepared
to pay a hefty premium, there may even be some video
storage capabilities – though we’d advise against holding
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your breath. But all joking aside, DAM is one of the most
mature, and therefore valuable, repositories of marketing
content in most organizations.
MRM
Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platforms, aka
Campaign Management platforms, have a unique role.
They’re designed to support and measure the overall
marketing cycle – from strategic planning all the way
through to measuring impact. The sheer scope of MRM’s
purview makes it a pretty impressive – and comprehensive – solution.
But the reality is, most MRM implementations are poorly
executed. At best, these MRM platforms provide a bird’s
eye view of the marketing calendar and bring some
structure to high-level processes, but not much else. For
example, we’ve seen clients use pricey MRM platforms
for regulatory approval or even creative review – in no
way a full use of the platform’s capabilities.
Even in an organization where processes are mature and
the MRM implementation is elegant, there is usually still
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a major element missing: the way content, both data and
iles and their associated metadata, are handled, stored
and made available downstream.
CREATIVE REVIEW
Creative Review (CR) tools handle the upload of layout
drafts (or other creative collateral, such as video), as well
as annotation and commenting by stakeholders. This is a
very useful and well-deined scope of purpose that lends
itself perfectly to a subscription-based SaaS (Software as
a Service) ofering.
Interestingly, this is also where marketing departments
go rogue. There are so many good and relatively affordable CR oferings on the market, a small investment
allows marketers to engage in all sorts of hijinks – like
avoiding CAPEX procedures and investment freezes, and
not going through the IT department for procurement.
AGENCY
Agencies are, for a number of clients, an important and
unexpected source of master data. In fact, some agencies – though certainly not all – are better organized than
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their clients. The agencies that fall into this category tend
to keep track of the marketing content they create and
store it in their own internal libraries or platforms.
The business model for agencies, at least before the
advertising crisis, used to go something like this: Take a
fee on buying media space and use your creative studio
as a cover up. When the job was done, it was “job done.”
Since the advertising crisis, some agencies rethought
their added value. These agencies have begun to silently
store and organize your content for you. The downside is
it’s their added value and client retention tool. So letting
go can be either expensive or ugly, or both.
NEW CONTENT
New content that originates in the marketing department
often does not have a dedicated platform. This is the
type of content that is at the highest risk. It typically sits
on ile servers or hard drives with little or no management.
That rounds out our review of the most common places
where valuable marketing content is found hiding.
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INTRODUCING THE DOMAIN MODEL
Bringing it all together
Now that we’ve identiied the many diferent places
where marketing content is hiding, we need a plan to
bring it all together. To make this plan work, let’s introduce a concept that is central to our way of looking
at marketing content: the domain model – and how it
pertains to the Marketing Content Hub.
BUILDING THE SKELETON
The domain model is an idea taken from the IT world. It’s
built around “entities” and “actors”. Entities are the structural concepts around which your business is organized.
Actors are the diferent types of users that engage with
your marketing content.
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You
Season
Model
Channel
Agency
ERP
Brand
Region
BU
Client
Campaign
Project
Activity
Market
Product
family
Product
Asset
Layout
MRM
PLM
DAM
SKU
Domain model entities
If we consider the source platforms from which our
marketing content is derived, we can make a few assumptions about which entities come from where. DAM
will contribute rich-media assets and layout. PIM or PLM
will bring market, product family, product, and SKU. MRM
will ofer campaign, project and activity. And ERP will
bring brand, region, business unit and customer.
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Additionally, there are also some entities – things like
season, model, channel and agency – that don’t live
on a single dedicated platform. The Marketing Content
Hub can accommodate them, too – as well as any other
categories you use for your business. The key here is to
realize that the Marketing Content Hub happily ignores
domain models imposed by technology. We frame the
way we want our information to be structured, searched
and linked based on the way you do business – not the
way the vendor database was designed.
We also layer, mix and match domain models that traditionally belong in segregated silos and separate industry
categories. Content managed by DAM, PLM, MRM and
ERP is all related from a marketing perspective. So it’s
pretty silly to keep it apart.
FLESHING OUT THE MARKETING CONTENT HUB
With this basic structure of the Marketing Content Hub in
mind, it’s time to see how we would low in some actual
content.
There are four important steps to leshing out the Marketing Content Hub:
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1. Aggregate
Content from source platforms is aggregated in the
Marketing Content Hub. Master data ownership of aggregated entities typically remains with the dedicated
platforms. These entities are live-linked and aggregated
as proxies.
Enterpise
search
Proxy
ERP
CRM
SKU
Product
eCommerce
Agency
wCMS
MRM
Spec
Manual
PLM
Print
Aggregate content through proxy entities
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2. Enrich existing entities
Proxy entities in the Marketing Content Hub can be
enriched with additional data or metadata. From a marketing standpoint, additional content for an entity may
be required – for example, multilingual versions of the
beneits of a product.
Enterpise
search
ERP
CRM
SKU
Product
Agency
eCommerce
Enrich
wCMS
MRM
Spec
Manual
PLM
Print
Enriching proxy entities in the Marketing Content Hub
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3. Add new entities
If new entities are deined, master data ownership can
be assigned to the Marketing Content Hub. This feature
creates an unobtrusive architecture. It also allows for
changes down the road without risk, such as the introduction of new platforms or the phasing out of others.
Enterpise
search
ERP
CRM
SKU
Campaign
Product
Channel
Master
Agency
Project
MRM
eCommerce
Layout
Asset
Job
wCMS
Spec
Manual
PLM
Print
Adding new entities owned by the Marketing Content Hub
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4. Document relationships
Once we have aggregated, enriched and deined new
entities, we can also document and articulate the previously invisible relationships between them. This is one of
the most compelling features of the Marketing Content
Hub. Not only does the software bring bits of content
together, it also allows you to see and explore their
relationships to each other.
Enterpise
search
ERP
CRM
SKU
Campaign
Product
Channel
eCommerce
Agency
Layout
Project
MRM
Relations
Job
wCMS
Spec
Asset
Manual
PLM
Print
Document relationships between entities living in diferent platforms
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

Restaurant
Customer
Article


Spring
Video

Season

Ingredient
Recipe



Magazine

SKU 5526
xmas
Product image



Week
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Product
Collection

Chef
Campaign
PROMO
POS material
Folder
A client driven domain model in the Marketing Content Hub
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IT IS NOT AN ENTERPRISE BUS
Sure – the Marketing Content Hub’s infrastructure does
allow it to ill the role of an enterprise service bus for
marketing content. But it’s also a lot more. All of the
aforementioned features can be accessed through a
dedicated UI. Not only does the Marketing Content Hub
serve as a platform to pass information to downstream
systems, it also makes that information available to users
for browsing, searching and previewing.
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
Food
Waiting Room
Search

Uploads


Admin



Inspirational mashups
EXPAND THE MASH UP
While centralizing the content you have stored in your
enterprise systems through a hub is extremely valuable,
there’s also a whole world of content outside of the
enterprise that is highly useful to your marketing organization.
For example, imagine that you’re a fancy food retailer,
and your central strategic marketing organization is
setting up seasonal campaigns. Next summer’s roll out
is all about vegetables: heirloom tomatoes, Tuscan kale,
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portobello mushrooms, that sort of thing. You probably
own some content – kale chips recipes, for example, or
maybe charts of heirloom tomato varieties. But when it
comes to inspiring all those marketers, agency creatives,
copywriters, photographers and that bunch of freelancers who you’ve never met face to face, there’s lots more
content out there being used. They’ll be sourcing content
from Wikipedia, grabbing recipes from Bing Food &
Drink, downloading stock photos, using Pinterest pics,
copying from blogs about seed swap events, quoting
write-ups on farmers’ markets that sell the perfect goat
cheese to match your produce oferings.
And on, and on.
It’s multimedia run wild, and the ability to gather this
huge diversity of content turns your DAM/PIM/marketing portal into a virtual mood board of sorts. It makes it
easy for strategic teams to present inspirational content
that can serve as brieings or springboards for everyone
producing marketing content.
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GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE
Creative coherence
Bringing content together and enriching or creating new
content is a process. Having a place to store that content
and make it available is paramount. However, supporting
and streamlining some of the underlying processes is
equally important.
In the diagram, this is the irst of the supporting layers around the central repository role provided by the
Marketing Content Hub. The second one is the marketing
portal – more on that later.
Marketing or brand portal
Creative project management
& collaboration tools
Marketing content repository
marketing
content
hub
Layered: central repository supported by creative project
management & collaboration tools and a marketing portal
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Marketing professionals and their creative suppliers
have gained a perhaps unfair reputation for having a
deep-rooted aversion to procedure, rules and structure.
In most corporations, marketing is regarded as the last
stronghold of stylish anarchy. Some project managers
tell us that getting marketing and creatives to toe the line
can be a trying business.
And yet, there is growing pressure for marketing to get
organized. With CMOs desiring insight into their operations, structure is becoming inevitable. But do not grieve
for the anarchic days of yore – it is pressure, after all, that
turns mere carbon into diamonds.
Marketing content project management and collaboration tools are the irst supporting layer that is added to
the core repository functionality.
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Artwork
Layout
Copywriting
Product
content
3D
production
Video
production
Interactive
design
Translation
Localisation
Typical content creation processes
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WORKFLOW
Lots of clients ask us if worklow can remedy chaos.
Frankly, it’s the kind of medicine that might cure the
disease, but will surely kill the patient in the process.
Worklow, in the sense of a ixed sequence of events
hardwired into a deined lowchart, is it for a factory, not
for a creative process.
This is probably also the origin of the reputation the
marketing department has built. When you impose
traditional IT analysis tactics on a much more luid and
diverse set of processes, it should be no surprise that
users reject the solution. Now, what would be a more
humble and constructive approach? The challenge at
hand is to support both project managers and creative
teams in collaborating in a quickly shifting environment
with multiple stakeholders on tight deadlines.
CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
We believe that the idea of project management should
be central when looking into creative and marketing
processes. The project manager brings specialized
knowledge and experience to his or her ield of work. The
Marketing Content Hub can complement those human
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assets with tools that support both the project manager
and the team.
Dashboards
Calendar
Upload &
submit
Review &
annotation
Approval
Tasks
Reporting
&
analytics
Comment
& rate
Typical project management & collaboration tools
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PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Our tools for the project manager add structure and
insight to the marketing process. Templates, which
relect best practices in the organization, can be further
tweaked on a case-by-case basis at any stage of a project. High-level milestones can also provide insight into
progress when combined with productivity tools such as
Gantt charts and KPI dashboards.
COLLABORATION TOOLS
Within the Marketing Content Hub, team members and
external suppliers who participate in content creation are
supported by productivity tools that facilitate collaboration. This includes the ability to upload, preview, comment, rate and annotate iles, ask questions and manage
task lists.
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SETTING UP A DIALOG WITH YOUR
MARKETING COMMUNITY
Speak to the crowd
A second, outer layer around the Marketing Content
Hub is the marketing portal – one of the software’s most
visible features. It’s essentially web content management
(wCMS) functionality that can be used to embed the
application in a website.
The website is not, however, the inal publication channel for the content, nor a consumer-facing site. It is the
marketing portal targeted at the extended marketing
community of strategic and production marketers, agencies, product managers, sales staf and anybody else
who engages with the marketing content.
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EDITORIAL CONTENT AND CONTEXT
Whereas the marketing content repository is focused
primarily on structured data, the marketing portal allows
you to add editorial content and context. A good example
of context for structured data is a conventional brand or
corporate identity guide. Instead of just providing company and brand logos, visuals and graphic devices, they
are introduced through their conceptual background
and accompanied by the instructions on how to properly
use them. Editorial content its the form of text and web
pages rather than data or iles in a metadata structure.
Examples are news items, blog posts or even micro sites
describing upcoming campaign concepts.
SET UP A DIALOG
The marketing portal also allows you to set up a dialog
with your marketing community. Now that you have a
channel where marketing people gather, you should
make use of it. The dialog can be practical, but we prefer
to focus on the more inspiring aspects - remember the
mood board we discussed earlier. This is where we can
challenge marketers and agencies far from the central
marketing organization to benchmark their work and
learn from peers.
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FROM CONTENT MARKETING TO
DEALING WITH OMNICHANNEL
Getting it out there
Now that we have this cornucopia of consolidated,
enriched marketing content available in our Marketing
Content Hub, it’s time to use it.
Enterpise
search
Proxy
ERP
CRM
SKU
Campaign
Product
Channel
Master
Agency Enrich
Project
MRM
eCommerce
Layout
Relations
Job
wCMS
Spec
PLM
Asset
Manual
Print
Distribute your newly enriched content
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First of, the Marketing Content Hub has made content
accessible via the portal’s UI. This lets human users
browse and download information, and potentially supply
it manually to other users or processes.
But the Marketing Content Hub also excels at structural
integrations in systems, platforms and processes that are
subscribers to the Marketing Content Hub. Let’s take a
look at those now.
CHANNEL MANAGEMENT
When publishing to downstream systems, the irst challenge is knowing what content needs to go where, and in
which formats. Typical downstream systems can include
e-commerce, websites, CRM and apps, as well as external sites or processes. This is handled through channel
management. Every subscribing downstream platform
is registered in the Marketing Content Hub. A ilter is
created that covers just the content that will be available
to this platform – functionality comparable to a content
restriction coniguration for users. The ilter is also tasked
with deciding on the practicalities of how content – both
iles and data – is delivered. This part is actually pretty
close to the order processing options in the Marketing
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Content Hub’s shopping cart.
CONNECTORS AND APIS
One of the Marketing Content Hub’s best traits is that it
has a can-do attitude toward making connections. The
primary feature for connecting to other platforms is its
RESTful aka Hypermedia API, which boasts a full Level III
on the Richardson maturity scale. Come again? Basically,
the Hypermedia API is to enterprise software platforms
what USB is to electronic devices. That means you can
expect other platforms will have no problem connecting
to it. The API also follows any changes in the coniguration of, say, the domain model or the metadata structure
automagically.
Richardson Level III means the Marketing Content Hub
is fully discoverable. Any third-party platform integrator
who can navigate a browser to the API’s URL is able
to browse the content that is made available without
technology or protocol roadblocks. From an operational
point of view, the result is that very little coordination is
required. Every platform’s owner can work on the side
that they know best with a very simple and clear data
contract between them.
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Next to the generic APIs, there are also out-of-the-box
speciic implementations for popular third-party products
such as ERP, e-commerce and CMS platforms.
DOCUMENT LAYOUT AUTOMATION
A speciic use of marketing content is in generating
document layouts for print and electronic distribution.
The creation of print layouts was one of the strongholds
of the traditional content repository/publication mix-up.
Let us explain. When you are working on, say, a product
catalog, the traditional low of the editorial process looks
something like this:
The product manager pulls a spreadsheet from the ERP
system and starts adding commercial descriptions to
the sheet. The marketing department sends the sheet
to a translation service that converts it into multiple
languages. The translated sheet goes to the production
agency, which creates the layout of the catalog. The
draft is presented to the regional product managers who
make corrections. The corrections are processed by the
production agency directly on the layout.
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Great! It works. But if you take a closer look at this
process, you’ll notice that none of the steps allow for
updated information to low upstream to the master data
owner. Though the printed catalog will contain correct
and translated data, there is no mechanism for reusing
that data in the next edition, let alone for other channels.
The Marketing Content Hub tackles this problem headon. It makes aggregated and enriched data centrally
available, and allows us to respect a strict separation of
content and design within our layouts. To a large extent,
this means layouts can be created automatically and any
corrections to the content made during the review of a
speciic publication are usable in the next version and by
other channels.
And for publications that can only be automated in part,
such as B2C materials, the Marketing Content Hub can
nonetheless combine aspects of layout automation with
creative project management and collaboration tools –
again a vast improvement over traditional methods.
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A FRESH APPROACH TO
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
True enterprise
marketing technology
When we were conceiving of the Marketing Content
Hub, we thought long and hard about what enterprise
technology could be – and more importantly, should be
– to meet the vast marketing needs of today’s enterprise
businesses. Of course, that meant thinking critically about
all the ways existing marketing technology fails to make
the grade. As we’ve discussed, we’ve found that there’s
no shortage of expensive platforms that don’t deliver
on the business case. Still others we’ve encountered
seem to have been designed by acquisitions, rather than
software architects. And in the worst cases, they don’t
even deliver on the basic functionality and user experience that might reasonably be expected.
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FRESH, NEW TECHNOLOGY
As a marketing technology supplier with more than 10
years enterprise experience, we’ve had the opportunity
to watch and learn. Our approach to creating the Marketing Content Hub is fresh and new, but it is the result of
more than a decade of expertise and experience. From
a conceptual and technological perspective, the Marketing Content Hub represents a complete rethinking and
rebuilding of traditional marketing technology.
When designing the Marketing Content Hub, we used
the app paradigm as the benchmark. The outcome is
that both end users and administrators can interface with
it with the same ease and elegance as they would with
an app. At the same time, behind all that simplicity, the
software successfully addresses the myriad and complex challenges facing enterprise software.
Based on our experience we carefully selected a consistent, technology-driven architecture and technology
stack. No spit and gum, no corporate acquisition driven
architecture, and no repackaging. Just the right tool for
the job.
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ANY WAY YOU LIKE
When considering infrastructure and managed services,
there is a vast array of possibilities, and this means there
is an appropriate it for every requirement or scenario.
At one end of the spectrum is what might be called
the old school option: physical machines located in the
client’s own datacenter and complemented by managed
services provided by the internal IT department. If this
describes your company’s culture, suddenly upending
that structure is an unlikely proposition.
Moving along the continuum, we encounter virtualization,
third-party hosting, and what is now already conventional
– the cloud. From a inancial point of view, this generally
moves the budget from Capex to Opex. From a services
standpoint, internal management evolves into Software
as a Service (SaaS).
Bring this all together – the cloud, virtualization, abstraction, and the transformation of complicated projects into
more transparent service layers – and you arrive at Platform as a Service (PaaS). DAM is now widely regarded as
an essential commodity. PaaS will be, too. And looking to
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the future, this is obviously the direction the Marketing
Content Hub is heading in.
IT projects are often viewed as complicated and stressful by business stakeholders – because they usually
are. Those who use enterprise IT services are fed up
with scaling problems. PaaS promises to change this.
Everything that is complicated or hard is made simple.
The platform simply works and scales as expected. If you
make an acquisition, your new employees – however
many there are - can get to work immediately.
Let’s look at how the Marketing Content Hub responds to
some of these challenges.
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TRULY SCALABLE
Lots of enterprise software makers seem to think that
two’s company, but three’s a crowd. We wholeheartedly
disagree. The Market Content Hub is designed to be truly
horizontally scalable so it can deal with everything from
the simplest to the most demanding circumstances.
With the current state of technology, this requires more
granular control than you might intuitively think. With a
No-SQL database in its core architecture, the Marketing
Content Hub leverages modern technologies to address nearly all performance use cases while giving you
complete control over every aspect of the software.
FULLY CONNECTED
As we mentioned previously, the Marketing Content Hub
has a can-do attitude toward integration, which is central
to its role as a hub. It features a full SCRUD, Richardson
Level III Hypermedia API, a more conventional managed
API, and message bus. In addition, it has a great selection of out-of-the-box connectors for popular third-party
platforms.
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USER-CENTRIC
Even when we’re discussing technology, our focus
remains squarely on the user. Consideration of the user
experience at every stage is central to the design of the
Marketing Content Hub. The responsive interface follows
a mobile-irst approach with attention to mobile devices,
tablets, and touch. The MVVM (Model View ViewModel)
approach makes the user interface snappy, consistent
and intuitive. After all, without users, there’s really no
need for technology.
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MARKETING OPERATIONAL
EXCELLENCE ADDS VALUE TO YOUR
COMPANY
Where is the value?
What we’ve found again and again is that CMOs are
increasingly looking to demonstrate the value of their
operations. Now how does the Marketing Content Hub it
into that equation?
Quality
Value
Cost
Speed
ROI triangle
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MARKETING OPERATIONS ROI TRIANGLE
Let’s start by noting that simple return on investment
(ROI) optimizations can mostly be found in your core
marketing operations. Here, the number of parameters
you can inluence is not overly complicated – as with
most things, it all comes down to cost, quality and speed.
Together, these three criteria are the most critical elements in achieving not only return on investment (ROI),
but eventually value.
QUALITY
Although quality seems like a parameter that’s harder
to quantify, there are a few examples that yield sureire
results. Better brieings, and more eicient review and
approval rounds lead to better quality and increased
efectiveness in marketing deliverables. More accessible
brand guidelines and assets, well-deined localization
processes, and the use of permissions to limit access to
approved marketing content and source iles prevents
duplication and assures consistent results.
SPEED
Time to market indicates the agility of your marketing
organization and its ability to turn innovation or market in47
sight into revenue. The Marketing Content Hub supports,
streamlines and structures the entire marketing creation
process with tools that organize your strategic marketing
eforts, production and publication.
COST
Cost is the most direct and visible parameter when ROI
comes to mind. With tools to remove ineiciencies from
your marketing processes, both internal and external
costs are reduced. After the initial production of assets, costs are further reduced thanks to the Marketing
Content Hub’s ability to eiciently store, ind, distribute
and reuse valuable marketing assets.
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE & VALUE
By balancing and optimizing quality, cost and speed, the
Marketing Content Hub increases ROI through improving
marketing operations. We call it “operational excellence,”
and by keeping it in your sights, your marketing organization will contribute real value to your enterprise.
You’ll see shareholder value increasing in the marketing domain as a result, including brand value, corporate
image, support for revenue growth, and contributions to
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corporate governance.
STRATEGIC VALUE
Gains through better ROI are great. Adding value to the
company is even better. But operational excellence
can also allow you to succeed in strategic goals that
transcend both. Knowing your speed to market with a
controlled cost and quality level can allow leadership to
make informed decisions about initiatives or strategies.
Balancing cost and quality means that scaling up marketing operations becomes predictable. And this is where
operational excellence becomes a tool in the decision
making process in the boardroom.
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OUR ORGANIZATION NEEDS
A REPOSITORY TO STORE AND
RETRIEVE MEDIA FILES. REALLY?
The business case
Now that we’ve explored what the Marketing Content
Hub can do and the beneits it yields, the remaining
question is, how does all of this translate into a solid and
complete business case?
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the typical DAM business case, as DAM is often a good reference point for
beginning marketing technology explorations.
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The DAM
business case
The DAM business case we encounter with most clients
looks more or less like this:
Our organization needs a repository to store
and retrieve media iles.
Introducing a DAM will bring beneits of quality, cost
and speed to marketing operations processes that are
consumers of these assets.
From a functional point of view, a typical DAM project
will cover a relatively manageable scope of use cases,
such as upload, store and add metadata to iles; review
and validate; manage lifecycles; search and preview; and
transform and distribute. That’s about it.
Upload &
review
Store files
& metadata
Manage
lifecycle
Search
Transform
Distribute
Scope of DAM use cases
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In terms of value, there is certainly a clear and undeniable ROI in a DAM project. But the scope is too narrow to
cover all the bases, and consequently misses most of the
strategic value we discussed above.
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WHAT THE DAM BUSINESS CASE IS MISSING
Let’s summarize some of the elements we covered earlier that touch on the additional aspirations or challenges
we often hear at the margins of typical DAM projects.
Primary
marketing
content is
scattered
Collaboration is
not efficient
Cannot store and
ind marketing
content
Need to setup a
dialog with
marketing
community
Omnichannel
publishing
challenges
Leverage
structured
content in
documents
Content
marketing
challenges
Multi-lingual
content & marketing
localizations
Marketers,
agencies,
product
managers, sales
Use cases DAM is missing
There are three main categories of possible improvement here:
1.
dealing with content marketing and omnichannel;
2.
making collaboration more eicient; and
3.
creating a marketing community and setting up a
dialogue with them.
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1. Content marketing and omnichannel
The scope for improvement in content marketing obviously extends far beyond simple media iles. Content
marketing includes all kinds of content, both ile based
and non-ile based. In addition, marketing content is usually scattered throughout the organization, and there are
few places to store new content.
This is where the Marketing Content Hub’s capabilities kick in to aggregate and enrich existing content,
store new content in a client-driven domain model, and
document previously invisible relationships between all
entities.
Entities themselves are channel agnostic, and this helps
create cells of content that are well-structured and classiied, but generic enough to be reusable.
The Marketing Content Hub’s channel management
functionality then allows you to move that content to
downstream systems, complementing the UI driven
search and download options, or the automated layout of
documents.
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2. Collaboration
Marketing creation and publication processes are evolving slower than we would like. Traditional tools still focus
on work in progress, mostly with annotation tools for
media iles, or on rigid BPMS-driven worklows.
But in our opinion, marketing technology decisions must
give precedence to project management tools that ofer
insight and overview to the marketing project manager,
and productivity tools to empower the marketing team.
3. Dialog with the marketing community
An impressive community out there is gathered around
your brand or marketing campaign. Now you need the
marketing technology capable of instigating collaboration and conversations that align with your practical and
strategic goals.
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The marketing content
hub business case
Finally, we are ready to present the Marketing Content
Hub business case. Here, we can build on the traditional
DAM business case, with a view to vastly improving it – or
replacing it altogether. Let’s summarize…
The Marketing Content Hub supports and guides your
marketing organization in achieving
operational excellence.
Operational excellence provides practical and tangible
beneits in your marketing operations ROI.
Optimizing the triangle of cost, quality and speed creates
the conditions for your marketing organization
to add value to the company.
Apart from these incremental beneits, the Marketing
Content Hub can help your marketing organization
develop insights that allow your leadership to make
informed decisions and achieve strategic
goals for the company.
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A key aspect of the business case above is that there is
something that aligns with the perspective and responsibilities of every stakeholder.
Let’s now examine the beneits for some of the key
players.
OPERATIONAL
The Marketing Content Hub empowers operational marketing teams with tools and best practices that provide
guidance. Their work will become more efective and
their jobs will be more enjoyable at the same time.
MANAGEMENT
Marketing management will be able to deliver straightforward optimizations, cost improvements and success
in strategic projects. Management will also be able to
measure and report all of this to leadership.
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LEADERSHIP
Leadership will have better insights, and be able to make
decisions conident in the knowledge that management
will be able to execute them. This puts marketing in a
position where it can be part of the solution when dealing
with strategic challenges.
IT
The Marketing Content Hub leverages proven yet
modern approaches and technologies. It is built on
a convincing scaling and integration model, and can
accommodate corporate requirements for hosting either
on-premises or in the cloud.
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The inal word
With the business case for the Marketing Content Hub in
place, that wraps it up for our manifesto. We hope it was
insightful, entertaining and maybe even inspiring.
We strongly believe the Marketing Content Hub is the
way to go for a lot of clients across industries that are
dealing with marketing and creative production.
One of the concerns we hear frequently is about change
management and how all of this will impact your organization.
As a parting thought, we’d like to turn that around and
ofer you a new perspective.
Introducing the Marketing Content Hub can be a catalyst
for change – one that doesn’t impose or snub your marketing organization’s operational teams, management,
leadership or IT. Instead, it can serve as a tool that facilitates, empowers and points the way toward operational
excellence. And that, in the end, is the type of impactful
change every stakeholder can rally around.
Thank you for your time. We appreciate it.
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A CLEAR FOCUS ON MARKETING
TECHNOLOGIES
About STYLELABS
STYLELABS is a marketing technologies software and
delivery company. STYLELABS has a track record of
more than 10 years in delivering enterprise marketing
technologies for leading brands, media, retail and agency
networks in nearly every vertical market.
The STYLELABS headquarters is located near Brussels,
Belgium, right in the heart of the European Community,
with a sales and support oice in New York and Philadelphia.
STYLELABS operates globally with clients across Europe
and the U.S.
STYLELABS is the company behind
, the Marketing
Content Hub software that is based on the vision presented in this book.
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About the authors
Tom De Ridder
Tom is the co-founder and CTO
of STYLELABS. He holds a
MSc(Eng)Arch.
At STYLELABS, he is in charge
of the strategic and technology
roadmap as a cover up for his
true passion: collecting vintage
synthesizers from the ‘80s.
Tim Pashuysen
Tim is the co-founder and
CFO of STYLELABS. He holds
a MSc(Eng)Arch. After an
early career as an architect and
teaching architectural design,
he found himself in the marketing technologies space. Tim
focuses on the business value
and user experience aspects at
STYLELABS .
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Copyright © 2015 STYLELABS. All rights reserved.
March 2015
Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this document
are copyrighted by STYLELABS. All rights reserved. No
part of this document, either text or image may be reproduced, modiied in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or otherwise without prior written permission.
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