Content lifecycle management is hard. The challenge is not just knowing how to create great blogs or killer social media posts. And neither is it solely focusing on what technology services you use to engage your customers. The content crunch is rooted in how efficiently you operationalize the end-to-end content lifecycle. Why? Because your customers are inundated with content.

To keep pace with your customers’ ever-evolving needs and expectations and reap the rewards for your organization – greater agility, increased conversion, improved loyalty, and revenue growth – you need to deliver an exceptional CX. That means identifying the bottlenecks in your content journey and reducing the process inefficiencies holding back your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can achieve an experience-first content strategy that works at scale.

Rethink CX: Adopt an experience first content strategy
What is your north star for content-driven experiences? One of the first steps toward making your content work for your audience and brand is ironically, to take a step back. Rethink your brand purpose to ensure your content brings out the human element.

By incorporating perspectives from all areas of your business into your baseline message, you’ll be able to better source, manage and personalize content in different formats. Once you’re clear on how you want your audience to experience and engage with your brand, it’s time to reframe the content journey with these strategic imperatives in mind:

• Adjust your mindset: Look beyond channel silos and create a holistic view that defines how to get the right content to the right channel at the right stage of the engagement journey.
• View content creation as a process: Audit your existing processes to identify where improvements can be made, where duplication exists and how to bridge silos.
• Formalize your content supply chain: Make content production part of your enterprise landscape.
• Modularize your content: Define what content is needed in what channels, for what personas and at what stage of the customer lifecycle and then create pre-approved content building blogs.
• Invest in the right tools: Use digital marketing technology as a powerful enabler of the content lifecycle—not only as a tool to address your digital asset management needs. Choose technology that supports and facilitates unified processes for content collaboration, creation, governance and integration with your other customer experience and engagement platforms, so you can deliver impact in the moment and build brand loyalty.

Partner with the right crew to master your content lifecycle
When it comes to driving customer engagement, some brands focus purely on their content; others purely on the technology services that deliver content. As previously said, neither of these strategies achieve what the organization is looking for – at least not independently.

Combining our technology expertise and commitment to an experience-first approach, Avanade partners with brands to help optimize and master their end-to-end content lifecycle. This involves designing human-centred content strategies and operating models and using industry-leading technology like Sitecore Content Hub™ to drive content strategy enablement and delivery. By integrating content marketing, digital asset management and marketing resource management, you can structure content in a way that can easily be reused, repackaged, and leveraged consistently across the organization.

The result? Market-leading, content-driven experiences that are memorable, worth sharing and ultimately, profitable for your organization.

Where are you in your content journey? I’d love to hear your thoughts and perspectives and look forward to connecting with you on LinkedIn. In the meantime, please watch for additional articles from our leading practitioners in this ‘Experience First’ insights series.

The Avanade + Sitecore Advantage
Avanade’s experience-first approach harnesses our leadership in digital transformation, advisory, human-centred strategy and design thinking with the power of Sitecore’s enabling technologies to help brands tackle the content crunch and create market-leading, content-driven experiences at scale. Together, Avanade and Sitecore create award-winning customer experiences for the enterprise across industries.