5 Ways to Increase Your Content Velocity

Written by Marcus Sarmento

According to Salesforce, 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. This means that consumers expect brands to know them, anticipate their needs and interests, and serve them only the content and products they want. This requires an omnichannel content development and delivery strategy that meets customers wherever they are, whether that’s mobile, web, email, smartwatches, TVs, or any other platform.

Because customer expectations are so high, the pressure is on to ship digital initiatives faster than ever before. The issue: launching digital initiatives takes too much time due to information silos. Everybody requires dynamically updated data, but it’s typically housed in a variety of different systems. That’s why launching projects requires extensive departmental back-and-forth slowing content velocity and curbing the ability to deliver seamless experiences that drive engagement and revenue.

So, what can organizations do to solve the problem and start delivering digital customer experiences with agility and speed? There are five proven strategies, underpinned by supporting technology.

1. Become a composable business

A big key to becoming more agile is to become composable. It’s a term Gartner popularized last year that means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. With this type of architecture, organizations can adapt in real-time and become more resilient in the face of uncertainty. They can rely on modular technology, tied together by APIs. The approach of decentralizing the technology that underpins the business works equally well for content. When content is data, it can move faster and be quickly deployed to power customer experiences.

2. Build a framework for structured content

First, treat content as data. When content is data, and transforms into structured content, content operates from a single source of truth: update in one place and it updates everywhere it’s used. Content also becomes reusable for different projects instead of locked into a specific page or content type.

Next, put together an interdisciplinary group responsible for identifying, collating, and relating all of that content into a centralized structure – so that you can build efficient workflows and data structures from it. A successful content modeling exercise will shed light on the needs of all your departments and pave the way for a centralized source of structured content. Ultimately, structuring content gives us more flexibility to experiment with new ways of driving the customer experience.

3. Apply automation and business logic to structured content

Remember that all content is data, and once it’s treated as such, it is easy to query and serve up the right content automatically instead of manually editing pages. Content can easily be used to drive sales, provision new websites, power experiential designs, support product information management, and more.

4. Tailor your tools to your unique business

Make sure your structured content is not operating in a silo with developers holding the keys. When you build good workflows that are integrated with other teams automatically, there’s less of a need to check in to get updated information and people can operate more autonomously. When you decouple digital production teams, it allows content teams to start work before design is finalized and vice versa.

5. Leverage the systems you’ve built to move faster on innovation projects

Once you have the framework for modeling, automating, and reshaping structured content as pieces of data, you can go even further with your content, personalizing the customer experience to specific audiences and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to gain new insights that drive smarter content decisions. With personalized and localized content, you can deliver better experiences across a wider range of cultures, languages, and tastes. The rich data models that are possible when you treat content as data mean that localization, personalization, and optimization are just a new data structure away.

A final word

Here’s the best part: you can launch new experiences for customers in weeks or days instead of months. And you can let your tools do the heavy lifting so you can dream up innovative new projects to drive the success of your business.

Download the white paper to learn more about transforming your content into a strategic business asset and how Sanity is the best platform to supercharge your content velocity and power immersive digital experiences.