#049: Insights_ Streamlining the content supply chain with AEM Digital Foundation

WE NEED MORE CONTENT! As a marketer, you’ve heard this innumerable times, but usually our understanding of it ends at more and more content production. While quality content production has become a differentiating feature in today’s ecosystem, most organizations struggle to produce engaging content at an accelerated rate and in voluminous quantities. Combined with the need for ‘hyper-personalization communication’ based strategic approach across industries functions like fuel to fire for marketing and creative professionals. The experience organizations most expect and end users desire has become a challenge (and opportunity), painfully felt by marketers.?

On that note, Adobe states that the expected demand for content to drive marketing activities and campaigns, especially considering the personalization factor, will further grow 5X by 2024.?

Now, there are two sides to this statement. First, this will require marketers to be at their toes, generating this tsunami of content and competing against it online. Second, to further accelerate the demand, quantity and quality of content, organizations will have to establish processes and leverage associated technologies to keep feeding this tight content pipeline.?

Enter, digital content supply chain.?

Just like your regular supply chain with suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers; a digital content supply chain follows a similar approach.?

Here we discuss how the content supply chain works and is the need of the hour and delve into Adobe content supply chain solution package to champion it.?

What is a digital content supply chain?

Adobe states, “A digital content supply chain is the process that brings together people, tools, and workstreams to effectively plan, create, manage, and deliver content.” In the wake of dynamic customer demands around better and more personalized experiences at an increasingly faster pace, organizations (across verticals) need to deliver content right and at this moment than later.?

A digital content supply chain once established and enforced, streamlines content planning, production, distribution, analysis, and optimization. Let’s break down its associated phases:

• Planning: Here we define what content to create, the goals we’re trying to achieve with it, and specific KPIs to track post-delivery. We also explore the digital assets required, deploy internal and external teams involved, and lay out the tasks and responsibilities for everyone associated.?
• Production: This is where the actual magic happens. Marketers generate content and associated assets, all stored at a central location so that, with permission, users can access content in a self-service manner.?
• Distribution: This step involves delivering content across channels. Modern organizations leverage an automated headless digital experience management platform to ensure flexibility in content distribution. Moreover, this headless nature also results in seamless integrations with other composable content service providers to ensure that content delivery across any channel can be managed directly.?
• Performance Analysis: While the first three steps are what most marketers are accustomed with, performance analysis is where you gain insights into your content and if it reaches the right audience, engages them, and delivers the value proposition it was produced with. Again, Adobe provides tools for content analytics and empower you to optimize your future creative strategies accordingly. The ultimate goal is to gain a deeper understanding of content engagement, user needs, and go back to the production phase (called as optimization) of the operational model.?
• Optimization & Testing: This is where you hyper-personalize your marketing content and campaigns as per the insights gained in the previous phase and put them to work. Marketers can also leverage cutting-edge tools to test experiences to improve performance and engagement.?
• Scale & Grow: This bonus phase is how you expand across geographies and audiences. Once you have your content blueprint ready, it's time to repurpose it and leverage APIs to scale across brands, regions, product lines, channels, and audiences.?

Why is a content supply chain strategy so important?

Now that you have an understanding of what a digital content supply chain strategy actually means, it's time to answer the next pressing question, why is this so important for my business?

Well, sure you have been generating content and it's providing you with acceptable results, but, in the long run, you would need a model that streamlines and simplifies content production and helps you fulfill the increasing demand. To understand why you need a digital content supply chain strategy, here is what Adobe suggests:

• 70% of time is spent on non-core work, managing manual tasks in disparate systems across roles.
• 21% of creatives identified bottlenecks throughout the content process as a challenge to creating effective experiences.
• 31% of creatives and marketers say their top challenge is the inability to share assets with multiple stakeholders.

When you’re investing in any new digital experience management platform, it is usual to evaluate its ROI and improvements it will result in post deployment. Leveraging the Adobe solution package for content supply chain management will result in the following:

• Gain control of content production. The entire process, from planning to optimization becomes highly organized, with everyone in your marketing team fully aware of their roles and responsibilities.?
• Streamlined cross-functional collaboration. With a digital content supply chain in practice, the marketing team can prioritize activities and convey the same to your creative team. From there, the creative team, along with a digital asset management (DAM) platform, can create, find, employ, update, or repurpose assets.?
• The production, approval, and distribution of assets accelerates, resulting in faster delivery of experiences. With a centralized DAM, everyone can access content and assets, reducing the friction between teams.?
• Automation is another advantage of a digital content supply chain. Leveraging dedicated tools, you can automate the content production and distribution process.?
• Lower content production costs and seamless scalability. A digital content supply chain strategy results in fewer mistakes and expensed resources. With a connected digital foundation ecosystem, you can effortlessly scale content production, as and when you need it.?

Adobe DX Accelerator: Faster innovation and stronger digital foundation

As discussed, the key requisites of a digital content supply chain are:

• A modern digital customer experience management platform for creation, management and delivery of content experiences faster
• Powerful data analytics to understand customer behavior & preferences
• Robust targeting and experience optimization to help deliver personalized experiences at scale
• A cloud-native architecture to minimize security vulnerabilities and reliability issues and result in exceptional performance and consistency

The Adobe DX Accelerator helps you scale content creation and content supply chain management to support growth, deliver personalized experiences to drive conversion, and launch your unique experiences faster into the market. Along with tools like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target build a robust digital foundation that accomplishes your today’s needs and ensures consistent scalability for the future.?

With Adobe DX Accelerator, you accomplish your business objectives of improved business agility and customer conversion, drive revenue growth, and enhanced operational efficiency to support scale and reduce costs; and digital objectives of accelerated content velocity and time to market for experiences, deliver data-driven, personalized digital experiences, and streamline content management on a scalable platform.?

Adobe DX Accelerator capabilities to master the digital content supply chain

Every successful digital content supply chain requires a blueprint of its key capabilities and how it will result in a scalable and agile foundation. With the Adobe DX Accelerator, you can leverage leading Adobe Experience Cloud platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Target across all stages (beginner to advanced) of your digital transformation journey. The following are the key attributes of the Ranosys Adobe DX Accelerator and an understanding of how it will impact on your current content supply chain strategy.?

• Low Code to No Code Tools: Accelerate speed-to-market of engaging digital experiences. Empower non-tech users to create, modify, and publish content faster with agile tools. Enable developers to leverage low-code site creation tools to build faster while reducing development efforts.
• Headless Delivery: Build and deliver experiences faster with powerful and robust APIs. Deliver content fragments in JSON format with GraphQL APIs. Integrate seamlessly with third-party tools or easily build custom extensions and integrations with server-less third-party extensibility framework.
• AI-Powered Personalization: Measure and understand customer behavior faster with one-click Adobe Analytics integration and custom dashboards. Personalize and optimize experiences with robust targeting and A/B testing via Adobe Target.
• Connected Insights: Combine the power of Adobe’s best-of-the-breed integrated applications to improve experiences based on customer data using robust analytics. This lays a strong digital foundation with Sites, Assets, Analytics & Target for effective digital marketing.
• Modular Content: Streamline and scale content creation with a centralized Adobe AEM platform. Reuse content across pages, sites, brands, regions & channels to scale across multiple experiences and improve efficiency. Automate manual and repetitive tasks to boost productivity.
• Cloud-Native Agility: Innovate faster and reduce maintenance with secure, cloud architecture. Gain regular access to the latest capabilities, security updates and performance enhancements from Adobe. Lower TCO with no product upgrades, hosting or network costs.

The business value of the Adobe DX Accelerator

As customers navigate a tech-driven landscape, they desire hyper-contextual experiences from brands to meet them where they are, engage them in a way they want, and deliver satisfactory results in a manner that requires the least effort from their end. To accomplish this, enterprises must be able to deliver intelligent content via a digital customer experience management platform by thoroughly understanding customer intentions and needs via data and leverage the right components to deliver it across channels.?

On the enterprise level, marketers will have to componentize content to make it easily adjusted for different audiences, media, formats, channels, and devices. They will also need to ensure that the content is up-to-date, compliant, personalized, and easier to translate, localize, and modify in aggressively short timelines. This is where Adobe DX Accelerator digital experience management platform delivers immense business value.?

As per an IDC Report, AEM Sites alone enables organizations to realize on annual average business value of $3.92 million per organization over a span of three years and a 348% three-year ROI by:

• Making the creation and delivery of digital experiences more consistent and streamlined while accelerating time to market for new experiences?
• Empowering and increasing the productivity of employees responsible for the delivery of these digital experiences?
• Improving the digital experiences and engagement that is delivered by these organizations

Moreover, with AEM Sites :?

• Deliver a new brand or country site faster by 66%
• Reduce implementation costs by 80%
• Decrease time to create new pages by 10X
• Increase efficiency of digital experience teams by 23%

And more.?

The truth is, marketing organizations are always under pressure to accelerate the delivery of new digital experiences. They need to improve content reusability and consistency. They need actionable insights to guide them as they optimize experiences. They also need to facilitate better and more effective and efficient collaboration across departments. A modern digital experience management platform such as Adobe DX Accelerator helps here, by enabling cross-functional teams to automate and streamline the many workflows involved in creating, managing, and delivering digital experiences.?

Key capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites

Adobe Experience Manager Sites empowers marketers and other content contributors to quickly and easily publish web and mobile experiences without relying on IT or developers. Key capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites include:

• Multi-site management: AEM Sites gives organizations control over all the web and mobile properties, including sites, microsites, landing pages, and emails with integrated translation management and localization capabilities. AEM Sites reduces the amount of time and effort required to tailor experiences for different brands, geographies, markets, and customer segments, improving consistency and building brand value.?
• Responsive design: AEM Sites delivers fully responsive experiences across devices and browsers on PCs, mobile devices, tablets, digital signs, and other screens.?
• Mobile content management: AEM Sites enables marketers to push content, app updates, offers, and notifications to installed app experiences without needing to involve IT or the development team. This ensures that in-app experiences are kept up to date across web and mobile web experiences.?
• Ease of authoring for marketers and other content contributors: AEM Sites has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy for non-technical users to create and publish new experiences or updates existing pages.?
• Robust workflow capabilities: AEM Sites lets teams automate and streamline their workflows, improving team productivity and accelerating time-to-market.?
• Marketing campaign management: Integration with Adobe Campaign improves consistency and content reuse across emails, launch sites, and other properties.?
• Personalization and optimization: Integration with Adobe Target enables marketers to discover and define customer segments, personalize content for different segments, and test new experiences prior to launch, ensuring maximum engagement.?
• Commerce integration: AEM Sites provides an eCommerce framework that lets merchandisers create compelling, dynamic shopping experiences. Integration with AEM Assets adds dynamic imaging and video publishing; integration with Adobe Target adds automated recommendations.?
• Actionable insights: Integration with Adobe Analytics gives marketers the insights they need to continuously improve customer engagement, conversion, and advocacy.?

Read the complete resource here: Streamlining the content supply chain with AEM Digital Foundation