Creatives, marketers and designers have developed content the same way for decades. Restrictions such as physical size and the number of pages have ruled content long before the digital era. Even digital technologies have not eased these creative boundaries, with similar formatting boundaries restricting display advertising and web page content.
Now, content marketers grapple with serving audiences across multiple platforms and channels. Modular content, which is simply small pieces of content reused for omnichannel delivery, provide a solution to this escalating and all too familiar pain point and provide the mechanism for personalisation.
How modular content feeds omnichannel delivery
Previously, content creators could focus on just one channel or format when creating content. Today's marketers must cater to various media options, including print and digital media, social media, audio tech, and wearable merchandise. Customers today expect more content across multiple channels, and creators need to focus on developing their content for brand consistency and content personalisation across omnichannel delivery.
You can compare modular content to Lego pieces. One Lego block could be a sentence about your brand, another your company logo, and perhaps a third as the language or product or offer copy. By connecting a bunch of these Lego blocks, you build one complete message your business wants to convey. You can then rearrange and modify these pieces according to the channel or audience.
For example, car manufacturers began using modular content by photographing new car models with a green screen and overlaying the colour choices when displaying cars on their websites. The purpose is to allow customers to swap colours and wheel options to customise the car before making a purchase.
Car manufacturers adapted this process to TVC, where they could simulate cars driving in places they have never been. The COVID-19 pandemic and low-cost cars have escalated this omnichannel approach, and car companies have made this technique their standard. It is so common that Ford exposed this and leveraged it as a sales technique.
Why leverage modular content for omnichannel delivery?
Consumers get to see a lot of brand content these days, and they often expect to see personalised content. You need to rethink your content marketing strategies in line with these expectations. After all, content forms the basis for communication with your customers.
Modular content provides a flexible approach to asset production and managing content because you can break it into smaller components to easily edit and publish. Also, you can create multiple versions of the same content in a short time and launch campaigns faster.
Imagine hiring stylists, graphic artists, videographers, photographers and other team members required to shoot an advert. That is many moving parts and salaries to fill each time you need to tweak your content. By rethinking the production approach to the shoot and modularising the content created by each role, you can easily amend the content created, re-develop and re-target again and again, without expensive production costs.
To achieve this, you need to adapt your content marketing processes. It is a good idea to separate primary content development from your content publishing processes. By creating content in smaller blocks you can easily reuse and reorganise the content and its design elements. Costs for production and time will be saved as you will not need to rehire the talent for any new offers by simply restructuring the modular content. Don’t think this is just automatic. It's just a different approach to production, content storage and distribution. Talented experts will still need to edit, retouch and republish this content, but this is where you would leverage an omnichannel content platform (OCP) rather than simply digital asset management (DAM) to store these modular objects and make them available for automated distribution and personalisation.
Managing modular content and omnichannel delivery
An OCP is DAM 3.0. Technology developments now allow modern DAM platforms to store these objects and define their relationships programmatically. These tools store the assets in a more advanced database structure to support this type of capability that typical DAM 1.0 & 2.0 platforms cannot support. They also include workflows and approval processes to manage versioning, editing, and personalisation tagging. Additionally, an OCP includes options for developers to query and get the content delivered to their platforms based on parameters.
When combined with a Content Delivery Platform, the content can be delivered dynamically to the omnichannel platforms that consume the content, meaning no one needs to log into multiple platforms to manage the content lifecycle. Just update with a new version and release, demote or replace with new content.
An Omnichannel Content Platform not only allows you to change the way you plan, create and manage primary content, it also allows you to create radical efficiency, ensure accuracy across channels and reduce both costs and time to market.
How Creative Folks enables omnichannel delivery
At Creative Folks, we specialise in content management systems for modular content and omnichannel delivery. We are a Gold Partner of Sitecore, a brand at the forefront of omnichannel content platforms, and are specialists in Sitecore Content Hub. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you manage and meet your marketing and content needs, please view our Sitecore Content Hub product page, or get in touch with us.
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