Content demand is skyrocketing, and many modern marketing organizations aren’t equipped to keep up. With consumers craving increasingly personalized experiences, brands face an urgent challenge: how to achieve agility and scale to create highly relevant content.  

To meet this challenge, many brands focus on increasing content volume. However, prioritizing quantity over quality often results in disorganization and eventually frustration when the flood of content fails to deliver customer value or performance improvements. The real solution lies in creating the right content that serves customers throughout the various stages of their journey.  

To start driving efficiencies, cost savings, and better CX, brands must focus their efforts on building a best-in-class content supply chain. They must bring together an insights-driven, performance-based approach with end-to-end automation and new ways of working to see the gains they want: less content waste, streamlined processes, and stronger performance. 

Let’s explore the key benefits of strong content supply chains and the components that enable those successes. 

Reasons To Strengthen Your Content Supply Chain

1. Create content with intention: As we mentioned earlier, many companies lean on content volume as a success metric, using the number of transmutations of a piece of content to decide how customized it is. This has become particularly true with the introduction of AI to content creation. However, unfocused content production creates distractions and drains considerable resources to create, manage, approve, and activate assets. A strong content supply chain is fueled by audience insights to help brands create the right content, with human oversight to ensure compliance with brand, regulatory, and privacy requirements. 
2.  Control costs: Brands sometimes work with multiple agencies and piece together disparate solutions to form their content supply chain. This can be expensive and lead to disjointed processes and brand oversight challenges. A strong content supply chain that’s consolidated to fewer providers reduces cost and simplifies brand compliance processes. 
3.  Streamline production: Though brands know it’s not ideal, some companies still work in content “silos,” leading to duplicated efforts and a disjointed brand narrative. In a strong content supply chain, a centralized content hub that distributes outward to different channels creates consistency for the customer and eliminates inefficiencies. 
4.  Reduce time-to-market: For many brands, the creation-approval-activation timeline is 3 to 4x longer than it should be in today’s environment. A strong content supply chain isn’t just about processes – it also incorporates new ways of thinking and working to deliver customer-centric content quickly. To achieve content velocity and bring quality content to market faster, brands must combine creative, strategy, and technology. 
5.  Balance content creation and repurposing: Many companies already have a lot of great content, but they don’t know what works and what doesn’t. They’ll use resources to create new content when existing content would effectively meet their current need. An oft-overlooked component of a strong content supply chain is a solid analytics foundation. It provides the data brands need to fully evaluate the performance of their existing content, meaning marketers can achieve a healthy balance between net-new content creation and the reuse of high-performance content to drive efficiency and control costs. 
6.  Go “glocal”: The hub-and-spoke model enables not just content distribution to different channels, but also different countries and geographies. For this, a strong content supply chain needs the right tech alongside the right people and oversight. Rigorous processes must be used to translate content in a way that maintains the core messaging while incorporating cultural understanding and global standards. The transcreation of global assets for hyper-localization goes beyond a 1:1 translation and requires cultural consultation, copy origination, editing and proofing, and more. 
7.  Rally the enterprise around new ways of working: When implementing a strong content supply chain, organizational change management is as important as the changes to the supply chain itself. Implementation must incorporate processes, technology, and people. Without alignment across the business, brands are likely to face resistance and continued silos, even if the technical components are fully optimized. A thoughtful content supply chain implementation will account for and heavily incorporate all of its stakeholders and users. 
8.  Realize the full value potential of platform investments: Brands often struggle to get the value they expect from their tech investments. A strong content supply chain requires a connected ecosystem where data and insights connect into and inform audience segments and journeys, which connects customers with engaging content, which helps drive the best, high-performing experiences. This formula for interconnectedness leads to value realization for platform investments, because they’re implemented to perform to their full potential.

Conclusion

The when and where of brand touchpoints is growing exponentially, and those interactions must work together to tell the brand story. The only way to keep up meaningfully is with a thoroughly planned, expertly implemented content supply chain. By working with a trusted partner, brands can improve their customer experience, realize the benefits we’ve outlined above, and position themselves to meet the unknown personalization challenges of tomorrow.