How Should You Manage Content?
How Should You Manage Content?
A Primer for CMSs, DAMs, and CDNs. IYKYK amirite?
Lucy is an avid cyclist.
Six months ago, one of her riding friends landed in the hospital with a serious concussion on the same downhill.
She had been wearing a helmet, but the injuries were serious anyway.
Watching her friend slowly re-learn to walk again made Lucy think: “There must be a better way to protect your head while cycling”.
Being a highly motivated rider, she started designing her own line of extra-protective helmets.
Lets walk through the story of her brand that matures from early-stage, ad-hoc content creation to automated management.
I’ve previously talked about the great future of Marketing Automation and the potential disruption for AI and advanced analytics.
You’ll read and hear a lot of really exciting future use cases about how generative AI will produce the content your marketing team needs.
You won’t hear as much about the much easier stepping stone between ad-hoc creation of all content and fully automated content creation: Content Reuse.
In this post, we’ll be covering the systems that Lucy will have to use when she start reusing content across multiple campaigns.
Stage 1: Ad Hoc
You’ve already met Lucy.
She has a vision, the relevant product experience, and a go-getter attitude.
She studied the physics of common crashes, the properties of modern composites, and assembled her first models for sale in her garage.
Like I said, she’s a go-getter.
To sell her first run of helmets, she made a gut decision on how to run campaigns and took the pictures she needed.
Obvious to her, the helmets needed to be photographed with bicycles to show their use.
She took all of the pictures herself and kept them on her personal computer for use later.
Stage 1 Summary
(Each category out of 5)
Cost: $
Effort per Asset: 💪💪💪💪💪
Scalability: 📈
Stage 2: Manual Process Driven
Lucy’s first run of helmets sold out immediately and she had to hire employees to help run the business.
After hearing her story about her friend and seeing that it’s specifically for bicycles, crowds of casual summer cyclists bought the entire first run.
In the first month, a few hundred helmets went onto the heads of waiting customers.
Customers called back in and told the company what they thought.
Always a savvy business-owner, Lucy asked her employees to record the aggregated feedback on the quality of the product and where to improve.
Upon review, she noticed that customers were impressed by the helmet’s ventilation.
Using that new information, she designed the next campaign to showcase both the cooling airflow and protection of the helmet.
One of her new employees had an engineering background and mocked up a bunch of photos from a fluid dynamics software.
Lucy loved the look of the ad.
She kept all of the separate pictures from this photoshoot as well as the computer models for airflow. She just dropped them all into a bunch of folders in a shared Google Drive account
She wasn’t sure how they would be useful initially.
When a customer complained about her son’s head getting hot in other helmets, Lucy realized she could Photoshop the airflow diagrams onto her previous bicycle images to make a new campaign for children’s helmets.
Her marketer uploaded all these images to her website after she had approved them.
Great! Lucy saved money instead of having to do yet another photoshoot.
Stage 2 Summary
(Each category out of 5)
Cost: $$
Effort per Asset: 💪💪💪
Scalability: 📈📈
Stage 3: Automatic Process Driven
Lucy’s helmets became the cat’s meow.
For some reason, they grew to be popular in the streetwear community to wear solely for style.
The demand surged from hundreds to tens of thousands per month.
Instead of just wanting more protection, people clamored for new styles and colors.
The demand is so enormous that Lucy made a whole separate line of non-protecting helmets that are only to be used for fashion.
She expanded beyond visuals on the website and made a jingle for radio advertisements.
Managing all the different kinds of digital files through a shared Google Drive became a nightmare.
She knew it was time to grow.
Lucy implemented a Digital Asset Manager to hold all of the different kinds of files.
Instead of making a new jingle for each ad, the marketing team could now easily search and reuse existing materials from the tags that they’ve put on the files.
One of the marketers suggested making a separate website landing page for customers coming in from a fashion blog rather than a cycling forum.
The new landing page made sure customers are guided to the content relevant to them.
Lucy couldn’t update all these website pictures manually anymore as campaigns change.
She implemented a Content Management System that serves the correct pictures for each variation of the website.
If someone clicks a link from streetwearhelmets.com, then they’re given information and pictures of people wearing stylish helmets. If someone comes from bestcyclinghelmets.net, they’re given the classic product.
Stage 3 Summary
(Each category out of 5)
Cost:
Effort per Asset: 💪💪
Scalability: 📈📈📈📈
Stage 4: Enterprise Scale
Lucy’s helmet conglomerate now spans the northern hemisphere. The sun never sets on the Lucy helmet empire.
No country escaped the pull of the fashion-forward helmets.
Lucy manages marketing teams for each locale, and each of them has their own strategy and digital presence.
Her DAM has been updated so that it automatically tags each asset uploaded. Marketers can pull existing assets as needed and modify them for each new campaign.
Data pipelines compare engagement online with the content of advertisements and, with generative AI, dynamically redesign campaigns to maintain brand image.
As the team expanded into Australia, the United-States-based CMS took way too long to serve images, so a distributed network of Content Delivery Services (Content Delivery Network) were spun up to ensure all global customers are rapidly served updated digital assets.
As colors, styles, and trends evolve, Lucy’s company is able to stay abreast of all the changes and still leave room in the marketing team’s schedule for innovative thinking.
Lucy made a great company with very strong marketing bones
Stage 4 Summary
(Each category out of 5)
Cost: $
Effort per Asset: 💪
Scalability: 📈📈📈📈📈
Conclusion
Like almost every founder, Lucy didn’t know anything about marketing technologies when she started.
But, also like most founders, she is scrappy and was able to adapt and learn throughout the process.
She learned about:
Digital Asset Management: How to store various kinds of digital files so that teams can work with them without creating new versions each time
Content Management Systems: How to dynamically manage website content across various customer journeys without manually updating everything
Content Delivery Networks: How to ensure customers across large physical distances all have a quality digital experience without lag
As you move forward in your digital maturity journey, add in the appropriate tooling and strategies to support future growth without incurring unnecessary costs.