By Alyssa
Meritt, Contentful
Christmas in August?
Absolutely. Summer marks the start of retailers’ holiday planning season. By
July, you’ve likely started campaign and channel planning, and even considered
some newer technologies such as Alexa skills or AR/VR. Regardless of what
you’re planning, what connects all of your holiday customer experiences is
content.
Content is the
currency for customer engagement, from top of the funnel acquisition to
retention and loyalty. The challenge is unlocking its value by making it scale
across channels.
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As you start your holiday planning, make sure your content — and your ability
to quickly deploy, change and add content — is top-notch. You’ll be rewarded
through quicker time to market for content campaigns, better use of resources
and more relevant customer experiences.
You’re
already investing in content — but it’s locked in silos
Is your content reusable across channels? Quality content
presented across multiple channels drives impressions and ultimately, sales.
What if you could create content in one place and publish it to multiple
channels?
Fashion network M2M
serves seven different platforms, including web, mobile and TV, without the
need for multiple CMSes. They do this by separating the content repository from
the presentation layer, and then structuring content so it’s easy for
developers to use it in any digital device. This expands the reach of their
content and provides a consistent experience across digital platforms.
Trunk Club adopted content infrastructure to unify its content
repository — no more CMS silos — and improve operational efficiency. It’s
paying off. The marketing team can trigger deployments anytime by typing a
simple command in a dedicated channel. This opens up the possibility for
richer product storytelling, such as digital lookbooks.
You’re
investing in paid search and display — but are you ready to convert?
Customer acquisition
through paid search and display is probably one of your biggest holiday costs.
Once customers have clicked through, is your landing page or microsite
experience meeting their expectations for content, and yours for conversion?
Maximize the value of advertising by being able to create targeted landing
pages on the fly, which delivers a better customer experience.
Strong content is also
one of the best drivers for organic search. Articles tend to rank above
product pages for SEO. Mr Porter, an international menswear seller, serves
up sartorial savvy in its online lifestyle magazine. A product page with the “buy” button is just one
click away.
By improving your
content infrastructure, you can manage SEO-related metadata such as HTML page
keywords, metadescription and even URLs within your editing experience,
maximizing the search value of your content across channels.
You’ve
already invested in a platform — but at the cost of innovation?
Legacy CMSes are
limited in their ability to adapt to new channels, and presentation is often
locked into standard templates, with customization both costly and
time-consuming. This means you can forget deploying rich media content to
a large-screen, multi-touch in-store kiosk application for flagship stores
within days, which is what Nike did using newer technologies. Using content infrastructure, it took just three days —
rather than three months — to create a prototype.
Content infrastructure
lets you spin up digital experiences on multiple channels — from e-Commerce storefronts
to lifestyle blogs to mobile apps — using the same content flexibly to fit any
container.
One of the most innovative ways to excite audiences is through augmented
reality that enables consumers to experience recreational vehicles. BRP
showcases its Can-Am Ryker Ride Builder so customers can view and customize their
three-wheel ride right before their eyes. The brand delivered this
experience on the web and mobile (in English and French) with content
infrastructure as the backbone of their effort.
You’ve
invested in a data lake — but haven’t leveraged the power of data
Data lakes can become data
swamps if you can’t use the data to provide relevant customer experiences.
Content infrastructure provides the extensibility to connect your content with
core services such as CRM, search, product catalogs and personalization that
define leading-edge e-Commerce.
Making content more relevant to audiences can be as basic as offering localized
content, or as sophisticated as one-to-one experiences. But can your content
management system keep up? If loyalty is a cornerstone of your retail program,
how do you reward your best customers? Do you customize their experience if they are logged in, display
unique content based on their attributes, or recommend products they might like?
Maximize Your
Digital Investment
The necessity to be
agile with content — on all devices, across all screens — has never been
greater. The high-stakes holiday selling season highlights this as retailers
compete for consumer attention.
Rather than leaving valuable
content locked in CMS silos, consider unifying it with content infrastructure,
so it’s ready to deploy to any digital device. It’s a holiday gift to your
content creators and developers that will pay off all season by making your
team more agile and better equipped to achieve your business goals.
This move can be
piloted in parallel with existing systems, with a low cost to launch and speedy
ramp-up time. Landing pages or microsites are a great way to see the power of
content infrastructure at work. Why not test it before the chill of the holiday
code freeze hits?
Alyssa Meritt is Director of Content
Operations Strategy at Contentful. She partners with enterprises to overcome the often invisible
barriers to delivering great digital experiences. Meritt helps organizations
define strategy and operations for digital content, accelerating their ability
to deliver unified content across all digital platforms. Meritt is an
international speaker and consultant on omnichannel digital strategy. Her
20-year career includes creating and leading global strategic services for
Urban Airship, as well as agency and client-side roles. She has personally
consulted with more than 10% of the Fortune 500, including brands such as Home
Depot, Gap, Starwood and Virgin Atlantic, ABC News and Bank of America.
