The integration of the Stylelabs product, organization and strategy towards existing customers and partners had to find its feet. But since summertime 2019 things have started moving and we have definitely already begun investing resources in learning the technology. But more importantly – we need to start investing thought processes in how the new Sitecore Content Hub might actually fit our clients.
If you have been looking into the Stylelabs and now Sitecore offerings, you might have met Stylelabs as offering DAM (Digital Asset Management) as well as PCM (Product Content Management – early stages towards PIM) and MRM (Marketing Resource Management).
From my perspective this is of course just different aspects on content management with some generic elements (metadata descriptions, workflows, approval and auditing processes) as well as specific processes for the content vertical like image blueprinting, resizing and so forth. This is all good and the Content Hub offering is quite strong in the way you can interact with it – the way the user interface lets editors interact with the content and the automations you can set up around the processes.
WHY CONTENT HUB MATTERS
You can find a lot more information on Content Hub at the relevant Sitecore resources – or you can get in touch with us to gain more knowledge on this. But here – I would actually like to share with you, why I think this journey of integrating Stylelabs into the Experience Platform landscape of Sitecore is really interesting – and for me looks like being an interesting component in the future for marketing organizations.
The Sitecore Experience Platform is very much built to create compelling experiences through a strong content and digital experience management platform. It enables web editors, mobile application managers, marketing automation specialists and so forth in creating the right experience with the right content for the right people. The Sitecore Experience Platform does this by being data driven – collecting data on who we publish what piece of content to, through which channel - and how they interact with us based on the experiences we offer them. Having optimization tools like testing, segmentation and personalization makes us able to try to find the right piece of content which help our customers understand the experience we want to create – to help us create the desired outcomes of the experiences, whether it is e-commerce transactions, brand awareness or other sort of interaction.
BETTER EFFIENCY IN MARKETING
Now, add the Content Hub to this mix for larger regional or global organizations. Content Hub is targeted for content creating across any channel (digital or not) and is a systemic tool helping content creators be more efficient in their processes. The Stylelabs tools, as they have been acquired, does a great job of creating efficiencies through easy-to-use interfaces and the right tools at the right time. But what if Content Hub can do more for the content creating process.
What if Content Hub can make sure that the people driving the content creation process might actually have the right data at hand at the same time? What if the content production planners have insights into previous campaigns – and would know exactly what part of previous campaigns work great in Asia, what campaigns had the best conversion on social media and would have relevant insight into benchmarking of campaign material across identified customer segments too. This is what marketing has tried to achieve in many years.
MEASURABLE EVIDENCE
But if the future integration of the Sitecore Content Hub and Sitecore Experience Platform would be able to tie content campaign creating into data collection and feed that digital data collection directly back to the campaign evaluation – not only allowing an evaluation of the campaign as a whole – but allowing an evaluation of each individual piece of content created for the campaign – how has that piece of content performed on digital channels compared to others? Now the content creation teams would have measurable evidence to the effect. They will be able to adopt more efficient content and less content that is unsuccessful in driving conversions.
I know that marketing does not have time to evaluate all the generated content. But given the chance to evaluate some of it – or evaluating why the best performing elements perform well – and why the worst do not perform – that would bring a whole new dimension into the content creation process.
Sitecore has the chance to bring this directly into the Content Hub and I definitely hope that this is the direction Sitecore have seen as well – and if so, all I have to say is: Smart Move!
If you would like to discuss how you see the fit of Sitecore Content Hub – or if you have a “Content Crisis” at hand – let us know and we can work on enabling a strong content process.
Ready to super-charge your Sitecore Content Hub? Contact us
KLAUS PETERSEN
Global CTO
