The Marketing Factory: Exploring the role of centralising and scaling content production in a world where thousands of assets have to be built — Post 2
Post 1 of our blog series, Recognising the challenges of a changing marketing landscape, highlighted how the disruption of digital has transformed the way marketers communicate with customers and how a digital, personalised approach is key to increasing conversion rates. In this second post, Succeeding in the new marketing landscape, we move to the creation a future-ready marketing infrastructure by re-defining and streamlining marketing roles to align with that of the Marketing Factory ethos, which we defined in Post 1 of our blog series.
Post 2 — Succeeding in the new marketing landscape
How can companies adapt and align themselves to these new demands?
While solutions may vary depending on a company’s structure, culture and objectives, local marketing teams do not possess the holistic focus, resources or knowledge to create personalised campaigns that run seamlessly through the consumer journey, whilst also paying attention to the bigger picture of brand building. Marketing campaigns and their content act as a vital expression of a brand’s voice. Moreover, a higher purchase intent is achieved when communicating with consumers at multi-touchpoints using the same consistent message. This cannot be achieved without a centralised approach to the ideation of personalised marketing campaigns and the creation of assets.
Today, technology allows companies to collect and use data from their campaigns to create more personalised campaigns in the future and to test different scenarios, but this requires local marketing teams to have the right assets available and be able to use them.
The solution of centralisation and personalisation lies in the ability of the organisation to restructure its marketing function.
For organisations that have a multi-market approach, re-designing marketing roles and streamlining functions is key in creating a centralised approach to marketing campaigns and their content. This requires the creation of a future-ready marketing operations centre with an infrastructure that will drive marketing excellence.
“90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization, but content will be the bottleneck and cause of failure by 2020.”[1]
The solution is to centralise and structure the process of creating master assets to allow for scalable productions that will fulfil local requirements, save costs and resources, maintain consistency and brand image, while achieving maximum efficiency and effectiveness on a global scale.
An example of successful centralisation can be seen in the recent digital transformation of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) who have undergone a fully automated and streamlined digital content production and distribution at scale across all their markets. In an interview with Accenture, Raakhi Sippy, GSK’s Global Head of Marketing Operations & Third-Party Partnerships, commented on the importance of overcoming fears and unifying different areas of the business: “Accenture helped us create an entirely new content hub and spoke marketing operating model for select markets. At the same time, they helped us overcome our fear that a more centralized model would reduce local market relevance. And, what we’ve found is that magic happens when you have the right capability, technology and business working toward the same vision at the same pace.”[2]
A strong channel and content marketing strategy can create a virtuous circle of feedback that can benefit new campaigns and feed personalisation.
It is inevitable that, with the evolution of so many marketing channels, companies must increase their level of digital content production to remain a forerunner. Mastering a content strategy that will convey your brand message powerfully and consistently, amplified through many channels, will produce more high quality content.
When considering restructuring for centralised marketing content, there are pillars that need to form the basis of a company’s business model. From the many examples we’ve seen in our current practice, Accenture’s 5 Pillar Model encompasses all elements:
- Content & Channel Strategy — Define a unified methodology for strategy setting. Let content drive your channel strategy, categorise your content by theme and channel aligned with audience personas, and phase your content to fit your marketing objectives and brand story, to deliver at scale.
- Content Creation and Production — Optimise production at scale of images, multimedia, infographics and print assets on a global and localised basis in line with the content and channel strategy.
- Content Management — Providing the tools to store, organise and analyse digital assets, including classification, protective rights and quality measurement processes.
- Content Distribution — Ensuring technology platforms are capable of efficiently distributing assets to the relevant channels on a global and local level, in line with the needs of the content and channel strategy.
- Content Performance — Track, measure and evaluate content operations and digital assets. Technology ecosystems need to be structured in order to store and organise digital assets. They must also efficiently capture a significant amount of ongoing data from local campaigns and gather consumer insights to feed back to the central marketing teams for new campaign ideas and to evaluate asset relevance, as well as feeding personalisation.[3]
In conclusion
Communicating with customers on a mass personalised level, consistently and effectively, requires a centralised approach to the ideation of marketing campaigns and the creation of assets, backed with a strong channel and content marketing strategy. GSK’s bold digital transformation is a winning example of how an automated and streamlined digital content production and distribution infrastructure is crossing the winning line first.
In Post 3 of our blog series, The Marketing Factory Foundation, we will discover more about how this centralised marketing infrastructure is capable of achieving best-in-class campaign ideas while reducing duplication and inconsistencies of local campaigns, and reinforcing and unifying brand messages.
This article was created and written by Luigi Matrone — CEO & Founder of the eBusiness Institute.
At the eBusiness Institute, we have extensive experience of working with numerous brands on their digital transformation. We understand the importance of an optimised consumer experience to drive your brand’s sales online and offline. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you.
Sources
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/gartner-top-5-marketing-predictions-for-2018
[2] https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-data-driven-marketing#search
[3] https://www.accenture.com/us-en/service-interactive-digital-content
Originally published at https://ebusinessinstitute.com on July 9, 2019.
