Is your martech stack a machine to create the emotional connections that drive buying behavior?
Now that your digital transformation is underway, it's time to focus on the elephant in the room: Are all of your investments and hard work paying off?
Gartner's recent prediction that 80% of marketers will abandon their personalization efforts by 2025 suggests that, for many marketers, the answer is "no." And in a world where people say how a brand makes them feel is one of the most important factors in their buying decisions, the reason may be that we've focused our martech stacks on the wrong objective.
To get closer to their customers, many companies have spent heavily on data collection and analysis technologies. But although now we may know more than ever about who our customers are, we seem to have spent significantly less time understanding their needs and putting those at the core of strategy.
Research shows that we're focusing on technology at the expense of the people with whom we are trying to connect. According to PwC's 2019 Global Consumer Insights Survey, 59% of consumers say companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. That lack of customer empathy indicates companies have a deeper problem with their martech stacks, and they need to address that problem.
The Mismatch Between Content Supply and Demand
Consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides them with a personalized omnichannel experience. In a world where we're bombarded by information, context is everything. That means it isn't enough for a brand to interact with its customers everywhere. To offer a truly positive experience, brands have to be able to share relevant content with customers at the right points throughout the customer journey.
Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about and creating content, but many of us are struggling to create content at scale quickly enough to deliver personalized customer experiences. This is the "Content Crisis." It is caused by a slow and inefficient content production line that leaves marketers struggling to locate, manage, share, and repurpose the assets they do have, starving them of the new content they need to operate in an omnichannel world.
One common denominator we see is that companies have multiple content sources and content repositories. Those storage areas and content sources fragment your content across separate silos. Teams stick with their preferred tools for content creation and management instead of unified resources, and they share that content with other groups, further exacerbating the problem.
But:
- What if we could get to the point where we have replaced that disjointed content production process with a clear, structured, and streamlined content supply chain that helps us to manage these workflows?
- What if this supply chain were part of an end-to-end content lifecycle that enables us to understand what content is working—and what isn't—to better improve the strategizing and planning process for the next round of projects?
- And what if this entire system allowed us to spend less time creating content and more time creating empathy and telling stories that resonate with our customers?
How to Reclaim Your Content
A broken content strategy negatively impacts not only company productivity but also the bottom line. The solution can be found in a centralized content hub.
Such a content hub provides a centralized platform to help your brand avoid the negative impacts of branding inconsistencies, lack of personalization, and the spiraling costs that result. Without one, it's not only much harder to adequately deliver the content your customers need but also, down the line, you're limited in your ability to gather appropriate data on your customers, which can be used to tailor better experiences for them continuously.
In our experience, the main requirements for an enterprise-ready content hub include the abilities to...
- Build customizable workflows
- Add metadata to assets coming in from third parties
- Auto-tag content using artificial intelligence
With those capabilities, asset management, searching, and filtering become much easier. And business users and brand managers can finally get content out of the channels and silos, placing them instead into a centralized system where editors can collaborate, manage, and repurpose content.
Getting to the root of the problem and solving your content crisis requires understanding where the holes in your current strategy are before you can begin to plug them. Are you ready to solve these problems and start reclaiming the emotional connection with your customers?
Download the Sitecore e-book on How to Solve Your Content Crisis for a list of the steps you need to take to overcome your content crisis and get back on track.
