A recent Gartner study noted that business leaders need to find strategic ways to cut costs while also funding new growth investments to pull ahead in COVID-19 recovery and outpace the competition. In other words, they need to consider how to reallocate resources to drive sustained cost savings and support future growth.
Global marketing teams, specifically, are always looking for ways to realize significant cost savings, while also ensuring brand and messaging consistency and maximum impact for their marketing dollars so they can continue to grow.
These challenges aren’t easy to solve for, but there are small steps to take that can help these teams achieve their goals. As they take a close look at optimizing resources, organizations should be careful not to overlook the time- and money-saving benefits of modular content.
What is modular content?
Modular content allows marketers to look at content in its smallest usable component, and it gives businesses finite control of their content in order to be able to distribute based on device.
It’s essentially content reuse, stemming from a need to deliver content on multiple devices and screens and in variations for different audiences based on location.
How modular content works
Think of modular content like building blocks. The process is quite simple:
- First, stack several small sentence "blocks" together, and you've created an article that can be displayed on a website.
- Then, deliver a smaller set of those blocks for use in the print version of that article (to accommodate for the space restrictions inherent in print).
- Finally, designate a handful of blocks for use as pull quotes that can be styled differently and pushed to a reviews section.
When implemented properly and leveraged in day-to-day publishing operations, modular content is one approach that organizations should take advantage of as they assess options for sustained cost savings and future growth.
- Time-saving: Modular content and segmentation—i.e. specific audience segments by different behaviors, against which variations of the same content asset can be assembled based on the defined audience target—come together to tailor and deliver custom messages or content to a particular segment. For instance, you can easily create a title or an offer for multiple different segments while spending less time on reviews and distribution. Modular content lets global brands drive one single message but speak in many voices to suit different segments.
- Money-saving: Modular content also helps with measurement. You can easily track where individual components are being used and how they are succeeding or lagging with different segments, which allows you to avoid overusing certain assets and lets you more easily manage and update key messaging. This analytic intelligence is gold for marketers, who can create programs and modules at a global level and gain a view across the board about what's working and what's not—and make the necessary course corrections to avoid spending money in areas where the data is telling them not to.
Connect with Brightspot
Robust content management systems bring a "create-once, publish-everywhere" simplicity to an organization’s tech stack and amplify reach across channels and beyond silos. The Brightspot CMS was built from the beginning to support modular content as our API-first approach extends to provide connectivity across platforms.
Brightspot has successfully implemented several modular content approaches for our customers, from seminaries and institutes, global consultancy firms, news media publishers, and life sciences organizations.
If you’re looking for creative ways to save resources and reduce costs as your organization strategizes how to get one step ahead and outpace the competition, contact us today to book a demo and see for yourself how the modular content concept works in the Brightspot CMS.
