As we accelerate into 2022, organizations are putting a major focus on their digital content delivery programs and how they can make them more effective and efficient in the months ahead.
Being able to source assets and content from multiple external systems is a valuable resource for editorial teams, but it can also add some complexity to their workflow. Brightspot was designed to be integration-ready and our federated search and integrations enable users to import assets from all types of external systems.
The need to get this right has been long-established. But the physical restrictions created by COVID-19 have emphasized the importance of having a slick and sophisticated content management system.
In our latest webinar, "Solving Complex Content Challenges: Is Modular Content the Solution?", we asked two of our in-house experts to offer some practical help and guidance to those wrestling with these issues.
Dylan Gang, Principal Product Manager at Brightspot, and Lucy Collins, Senior Product Manager at Brightspot, had some fascinating things to say in the session.
Global organizations face complex content challenges
Content challenges come in many different shapes and sizes. Maybe you’re a large organization and need to improve the consistency of messaging coming out of different teams in different locations around the world.
International organizations have customers and audiences who speak different languages and perhaps translation services are proving costly.
Lots of firms want to be faster and more reactive to events, but do you have the capability to create and publish content quickly and simultaneously across all your social and digital channels?
Summing up the situation, Lucy says: "When we talk about complex content, we’re really referring to all the challenges that relate to creating and delivering content to end users in today’s world."
The good news is that modular content provides an effective solution to pretty much all of these issues.
Modular content can help you scale your content management, meet user expectations for personalized content, develop content specific workflows and distribute to multiple delivery channels.
Modular content is a way to simplify but also think bigger
So, just what do we mean by modular content?
"Modular content is essentially content that has been broken down into smaller shareable modules, enabling fast and easy use across different distribution channels," Dylan explains. "It's something we have been doing for years at Brightspot."
A module can be as small as two or three words of text, which are used as a call to action, or something longer such as a disclaimer. It can be text, audio, image or video content.
There are three stages in a modular content approach. First is the creation of the content, which can either be done on the Brightspot CMS or by importing material from another source.
Second, the content is then used in its constituent pieces and assembled into whatever the user needs. For example, this could be a landing page, a print layout for an advertisement or a promotion for a wearable device.
Third, the individual modules of content are then tracked so users know where they have been deployed, can assess their performance and analyze how best to use them going forward.
"The modular approach to content allows teams to create a central library of components—text, images, videos—that they can reuse," Dylan comments. "These can be used again and again on any given site and all within the same instance of Brightspot."
Get more for less—plus reduce waste and duplication
One of the biggest challenges facing organizations is the sheer volume of content they need to create, publish and manage on an ongoing basis.
To handle their content needs, companies often use multiple external content systems to either source and/or edit their content. This enables them to enhance their output, but it adds complexity and confusion to workflows.
Companies may have many different sites with various editorial teams looking after a different part of each one. These teams will all have their own specific workflows and content goals and so it’s easy for them to end up duplicating work on a very large scale.
Lucy says: "Brightspot was designed to be integration ready and our federated search and integrations enable users to import assets from all types of external systems."
"Modules in Brightspot are designed to be reused. For example, on upload every image can become shareable, which makes it available to all other users in the CMS," she continues. "This eliminates one editor or designer downloading an image, saving it to their local machines and it never being seen again."
No matter how many teams an organization has using Brightspot, they can all access every individual module of content and reuse it for their own specific purpose.
This reduces duplication across the organization, improves efficiency and creates time for teams to focus on additional activities.
Brightspot’s workflow engine is very flexible and it allows businesses managing multiple sites to apply their own custom workflows to each site based on their own unique business logic and requirements.
Deliver personalized and localized content at scale
In addition to the sheer scale of content that organizations need to create and manage, they are also under growing pressure to make it more localized and more personalized.
Dylan believes this is one of the many areas where modular content delivers fast and highly effective solutions for companies.
He says: "If a team is building content for many audiences using modular content, they can easily edit the personalized messages for each audience. This also applies to localization, which is another type of variation of content. Ultimately modular content can really help you streamline the editorial overhead that is associated with production of targeted and localized content."
During their discussion, Lucy also points to the value to an approach that starts with content as modules rather than silo-ed blocks.
"A modular content approach allows teams to reuse content across a variety of sites which frees them up to focus on localizations," she notes. "Because modularization uses smaller sets of building blocks, they can be translated in smaller sets which makes localization easier and reduces the translation costs."
If your organization is facing some of the challenges discussed here, then modular content could help.
"Modular content can be a helpful tool if your organization is trying to develop a customer solution for your complex content," Lucy concludes.
“As several of our customers have demonstrated, modular content can help you scale your content management, meet user expectations for personalized content, develop content specific workflows and distribute to multiple delivery channels.”
