Content as a Service Is the Next Evolution for Marketing In order for businesses to continue to provide customers and prospects with the right content, via the right channel at the right time, they will need to embrace CaaS.
By Andrew Medal Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Content marketing has quickly become one of the most important marketing channels for any business. According to data reported by CMI, 88 percent of B2B marketers produce at least one piece of content a day. Of course, marketers aren't the only one's producing content -- product, sales, customer service and other teams within companies are all producing customer facing content.
In order for businesses to continue to provide customers and prospects with the right content, via the right channel at the right time, they will need to embrace content as a service (CaaS).
Where does your content live today?
Take a moment and think about where all of the different content you and your team produce lives today. If your business is like most, it is probably spread out over a variety of places. Some content might live on Google Drive, other content might be based in a website CMS, while other content might be trapped inside a mobile app.
Related: 3 Ways to Stop Overcomplicating Your Content Marketing Strategy
If you or a colleague wants to access and repurpose this content, how easy is it to do? Will you need to reformat the content so that it looks appropriate on a new device or channel? Can you even access the content yourself?
In some cases, you may not even be aware that the content you are looking for already exists somewhere else in the organization. This is the problem with the way content is managed by most businesses today. Content is siloed, hard to share and harder to repurpose for new mediums.
Meet CaaS, the future of content management.
While most businesses are struggling to manage all of the content needed to attract, convert and delight customers, there are some exciting new content as a service companies making it easier to manage and repurpose content.
Companies such as Prismic or Contentful are empowering marketers, developers and other business units to access, manipulate and share content from a centralized location. These platforms allow businesses to manage content in an agnostic way.
This means that content can be formatted so that it looks best on any given channel, making it easier to provide an omnichannel experience to prospects and customers.
Related: 6 Crazy Effective Growth Hacks for Your Next Content Marketing Campaign
We're living in an omnichannel world.
According to research cited by Cybra, the opportunity cost of not embracing an omnichannel approach is 10 percent lost revenue. To bring the point home even further, Google found that the average generation Zer uses five screens to consume content.
For brands to remain relevant, business people simply must embrace an omnichannel approach when engaging with prospects and customers. Content as a service becomes all the more important when brands need to maintain a consistent message across devices.
Personalization is the next big marketing technique.
Prospects and customers are beginning to expect personalized experiences. Janrain reports that 74 percent of internet users get frustrated when presented with irrelevant things. Prospects will reward brands that are able to successfully personalize content. Forrester finds that 77 percent of customers will pay more when brands accurately make personalized purchasing recommendations.
Content-as-a-service platforms have the ability to help brands do personalization better. For example, if a website or mobile app can draw upon centralized content to select the most appropriate information for a specific user, brands can provide a better experience.
CaaS platforms coupled with personalization tools such as Optimizely, or those offered by marketing automation platforms, can create tailored customer journeys without needing to create an endless supply of unique content.
Related: How To Create Content That Hooks Your Prospects and Keeps Them Engaged
Getting data on content consumption.
How does similar (or the same) piece of content perform across different channels? Does this content resonate with your audience? Typically it is difficult for content marketers to answer these questions.
One version of content could be hosted on a blog CMS, another version could live in an email template. With content as a service platforms, it's easier for content creators to understand how content is performing. Content insights can be centralized. Updates made to content based on centralized insights can be immediately pushed across channels with just the click of a button.
The way we consume content is changing, and swiftly. As consumers, we prefer personalized content provided by Netflix over cable. We want instantaneous, relevant content experiences at our fingertips, and we have little patience for brands that fall short of these expectations. We reward brands that provide an omnichannel shopping experience, and we consume content through many different screens.
