This article was originally written by Avanade alum Andrea Gillum and Saul Darby.

Digital transformation is a core focus for many businesses. It can be an expensive and time-consuming process that needs to provide ROI through increased leads, conversions and overall growth.

Unfortunately, many digital transformations fail to deliver on these fundamental KPIs. One of the reasons we consistently see this happening is poorly managed and executed content delivery.

Across business, managing digital content is an ongoing concern.

Sitecore states that 97% of marketing professionals report this is their primary worry. Less than 1 in 20 businesses have a cohesive content delivery strategy – yet 75% of CEOs say that content is the strategic key to growing lifetime customer value.

The management of relevant, searchable and personalised content is complicated by both the sheer volume of (and constant need for) new material. This overwhelming task has been dubbed ‘The Content Crisis’.

During digital transformations, content work is often sidelined or viewed as an afterthought. Content may be seen purely as an in-house role or presumed to be a straightforward addition to a larger digital transformation.

Unfortunately, limited in-house resources who are also juggling BAU can easily become overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the work required to re-imagine all the content for a digital transformation, slowing down delivery and creating inconsistencies.

To meet this challenge, the content team at Avanade Digital Innovation Studio Melbourne have developed an actionable framework for the successful end-to-end management of scaled content execution. We call this the Content Delivery Approach (CDA).

The CDA is a framework of best practice processes and guidelines that provide a business with an actionable plan for their content transformation project – and becomes a future resource for their digital teams.

Importantly, this approach is not a technical solution. Rather, it can be designed as a standalone methodology or to sit alongside and / or inform the use of a given software solution – and to enable an organisation to maximise the value of their investment in that software.

The CDA works by balancing technology needs against variable business or project requirements and offering a tailored methodology for ongoing content creation and management specific to that environment.

A CDA can feature detailed copywriting workflows; guidelines for best practice review structures; comprehensive web content standards; component guides; template creation guides; and more. Collectively, these deliverables offer in-house content creators’ a roadmap for manageable consistency, repeatability, increased capability and scalability.

By providing a living resource for in-house content teams and content creators, the CDA ensures efficiency of content delivery alongside team uplift.

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