How to ace content orchestration at scale

For companies operating in digital, the amount of content can get out of hands – especially if you’re aiming high with personalisation and an omnichannel approach to digital commerce. To succeed in digital sales, a systematic and strategic approach is needed to administer all the content. That’s what content orchestration is all about.

What is content orchestration?

Content orchestration refers to the strategic and systematic approach to managing content. It involves all technologies and processes that ensure synchronicity of content creation and distribution. When content orchestration works, all content is cohesive and aligned with the overall content strategy and travels smoothly between teams and from one channel to the next.

While content has traditionally been seen as a marketing responsibility, content orchestration takes a more holistic approach. Content is created, distributed and handled in many parts of the organisation, and content orchestration makes sure that for example ecommerce and digital sales operations are aligned.

Why do companies need content orchestration?

In the digital marketing age, the amount of content has increased significantly and it’s distributed across multiple channels. This is only increased when the content gets personalised to different customer segments. When you add multiple languages and markets to the mix, the palette can get even more complex.

At the same time, many have embraced microservice architectures which has led to content being distributed among a variety of systems. The same content can be used in the ecommerce engine, in a CMS and on social media. 

For many, this has led to poor cross-functional collaboration. Content producers, marketing and ecommerce teams are struggling to keep everything in order and the processes can get messy. Moreover, unorganised content can lead to customer frustration if they are promised something on one channel and those promises are not met when they move to the next step in their customer journey.

Content orchestration aims to ensure efficiency between teams, processes and tools. It helps reduce bottlenecks and minimise the number of teams doing the same work twice.

On a small scale, content orchestration might seem redundant. So what if the ecommerce team has to copy-paste content from the blog written by marketing to their product pages? However, content orchestration and content operations become increasingly relevant as the context scales up to numerous content teams, external content sources, and multiple brands and languages. 

Content orchestration aims to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in marketing and digital sales, reduce time-to-market, and better enable content personalisation. By organising content effectively and investing in suitable tools and processes, businesses can improve their efficiency and content impact, driving growth. Not to forget, it can decrease customer frustration along their journey.

How to get started with content orchestration

1. Assess the current content model

As in most cases, in order to get started with content orchestration, a company needs to assess its current state. If you have content somewhere, you have a content model. 

Figure out your current content model: the tools and processes in place. What tools are used currently (Contentful, other CMS, Drive, Trello, etc.)? What processes are already in place? 

Content creators are the first people to interview. Ask them what they have to say about their tools, processes, and responsibilities at the moment. They are the source of truth for how to improve things. Tap into their experience, creativity, and motivation to improve their own workflows.

2. Create a content orchestration target state

After the current state is established, you will formulate your content orchestration target state. It takes a stand on content organisation, content strategy, content processes and eventually content architecture and solutions. Some companies might have parts of this already defined (for example the content strategy), but other aspects, like the target state for people, processes and systems are missing. 

Think of how you want the content organisation to look so that you have the right talent in the right place. Figure out the bottlenecks in the current content processes that need to be fixed. 

Map the lifecycle phase of each system handling content. Are there some that need to be replaced or consolidated? This doesn't necessarily need to imply a complete system overhaul but rather repurposing what you have to serve the content process better.

3. Execute gradually

When executing the target state, it’s also not always necessary to make big-bang changes. One option is to move forward gradually with the technical improvements and find opportunities for consolidation and automation as you go. 

You might be able to spot some tools or processes that can be completely let go if their contents are merged with other tools or processes. For example, it can mean moving content from Drive folders to a CMS and creating a technical content model if you don’t already have one. Make sure everyone involved gets sufficient training, and have their voices heard. This is extremely important, for example when content creators work with tools created and maintained by software developers, or the other way around.

In the end, you should start to see results in more efficient content production and reuse, which usually leads to a more positive atmosphere within the content team. Moreover, customer satisfaction will be impacted as content is more personalised and there are fewer errors and inconsistencies leading to complaints. This will drive growth. 

If this article resonates with you and you find that you might need some sparring and further assistance with content orchestration, get in touch! We have done this with several of our clients and are happy to take on your challenge.