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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 1 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. 2 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 3 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. 4 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 5 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. 6 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. 7 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. 8 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. 9 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 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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. 15 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. 16 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. 17 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: 18 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 19 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 20 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 21 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 22 Restaurant Customer Article Spring Video Season Ingredient Recipe Magazine SKU 5526 xmas Product image Week 22 Product Collection Chef Campaign PROMO POS material Folder A client driven domain model in the Marketing Content Hub 23 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. 24 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, 25 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. 26 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 27 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. 28 Artwork Layout Copywriting Product content 3D production Video production Interactive design Translation Localisation Typical content creation processes 29 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 30 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 31 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. 32 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. 33 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. 34 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 35 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 36 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. 37 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. 38 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. 39 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. 40 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. 41 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 42 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. 43 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. 44 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. 45 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 46 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 48 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. 49 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. 50 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 51 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. 52 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. 53 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. 54 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. 55 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. 56 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. 57 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. 58 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. 59 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. 60 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 . 61 Learn more on @stylelabsnews www.linkedin.com/company/stylelabs www.facebook.com/marketingcontenthub stylelabs.com/newsletter marketingcontenthub.com Send a copy of this book to a friend or get informed about updates 62 stylelabs.com/publications 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. 63