Over the past decade, digital transformation has forced a shift to online channels. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic is only accelerating this process for brands and publishers.
According to an April 2020 study by the University of Southern California (USC) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the pandemic has rapidly altered consumer and user behavior; trends that once might have been expected to shift over months or years have now changed over the course of days. Nearly one-third (32%) of those who had never bought online prior to the pandemic, for example, are now doing so—and 44% of those who were online buyers say they're now buying products online that they hadn't purchased through that channel in the past. Meanwhile, a separate study shows nearly a quarter (24%) of consumers will increase long-term use of digital channels due to COVID-19.
It’s clear that the digital experience is one of the most critical factors—if not the most critical factor—that will define businesses’ success immediately and into the future. At the heart of delivering on this successful digital experience is content.
Great content is key to setting your business apart from your competition. To succeed, you need to consider it early in your transformation process.
Today, every business is now a content business that requires technology that will enable organizations and publishers to work smarter, faster and more seamlessly. First things first, the most important consideration in digital transformation success for your content business is adopting solutions that enable you to work with your existing technology while moving your business forward. The foundation with which organizations and publishers need to achieve this is a content hub that brings together all existing and new solutions in one place, and can seamlessly handle integrations.
Technology that is integration-ready and has an extensible architecture allows organizations and publishers to create their own business logic and adopt their own workflows. In many cases, businesses already have multiple systems, channels and processes in play before they find that they are stuck when trying to transform their digital offering. A content hub solution considers the business as a whole from the inside out, allowing the digital transformation journey to start with what you already have, as opposed to ripping and replacing current systems and processes.
Getting your content management up to speed quickly
We’ve established the basics. Digital transformation starts with a content hub that enables you to work with your existing technology and lets you adopt your own workflows. The next consideration for digitally transforming for success is doing it quickly, especially given the pressure being put on organizations and publishers today.
Speed is the name of the game for businesses looking to build a digital presence. In many cases, organizations are already behind given the rapid progression of digital transformation driven by the pandemic. At the heart of the problem is again the fact that digital transformation is slowed when new systems don’t plug-and-play into existing environments. Oftentimes, businesses have to completely rethink how they’re working and reshape their existing architecture—a daunting feat that is impossible to achieve quickly.
For organizations and publishers, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to get up to speed quickly online to deliver personalized digital content experiences—each business faces unique challenges that require flexible thinking and architecture, fast. Other common challenges to getting your content business and management started quickly include identifying the most important problem at hand, gaining real-time access to content and data, and understanding the technology landscape to know which trends to prepare for long term.
Steps for success on the path toward digital transformation
- Identify the problem
Sorting through which problem to solve first can be a daunting challenge for organizations and publishers looking to enhance their digital content strategy. For some, merely not having a digital presence is the main problem at hand, while in many cases, others who already operate online realize the digital experiences they’re providing are not satisfactory in today’s new age of customer expectations. For these organizations and publishers, anything from time-consuming manual processes, to lacking a scalable solution to streamline the publishing process are common challenges. In pinpointing the main problem at hand, frequently the right answer is to find a platform that lets you evolve rather than change every process currently in place. - Utilize content and data
Real-time access to all of an organization’s or publisher’s content and data is critical to carrying out a successful digital content strategy. These businesses have two options when it comes to getting started quickly and most efficiently: migration or integration. Both avoid the need to build from the ground up, abandon current publishing workflows, or rely heavily on IT for start-up maintenance. With access to all content and data, and knowing how the business wants to use this information going forward, organizations and publishers can easily create content for different channels from a single publishing experience. - Understand the technology landscape
The landscape for digital content is changing constantly. From the shift of web to mobile, to increasing interest in video and audio, truly understanding the technology landscape as you get your content strategy up to speed can be challenging. Some trends might be just that—trends—while others will require transferable skills for the long haul that need to be planned for as you develop your content strategy and look for the right solution.
How Brightspot can drive your digital transformation
As we've discussed here, no matter the industry in which you operate, content is ultimately what drives users and consumers to engage with your business. As such, the type of content experience today’s organizations and publishers offer must be digital, intuitive and personalized. Brightspot CMS acts as the center, or “hub,” of all of an organization’s integrations. Instead of requiring businesses to completely rethink the ways they’re currently working, Brightspot works with customers’ existing logic. This ensures the process of digitally transforming your content business is seamless and effective through:
- Support for a clean and iterative migration approach: Brightspot offers several tools to help ease the workflows around content migration directly into the CMS, including search and counts for various content types, custom search results, bulk export of search results, bulk editing and workstreams.
- The ability to use existing systems: Brightspot’s API-first architecture ensures interoperability with the existing technology stack. Organizations and publishers can leverage existing internal and external content, data and systems in place rather than needing to completely rip-and-replace their approach.
- The ease of integrating new data: Digital transformation is not a standalone event; it’s an iterative process that requires organizations to be agile and able to make enhancements at a fast pace. Brightspot’s integration-ready platform minimizes time spent on things like creating definitions and new architectures when other tools, applications or data are introduced to the system. The hub instead allows you to integrate new data easily over time.
- Front-end flexibility: Brightspot’s CMS offers the greatest flexibility to publish content on different platforms through a headless approach. The front end can change completely without impacting what’s happening in the back end, making it easier and faster to integrate new designs.
