What is a content hub?
Staying in touch with customers, prospects and associates is a must for every organization. You want to inspire them with attractive content, which you provide through various channels. A tool such as a content hub is indispensable for this. It’s a central location from where you plan your content strategy, produce and manage content and analyze results; it’s also the place where all team members can work together. For organizations that want to collaborate in a way that’s not dependent on time and location, a content hub is a godsend.
Everyone knows that there’s a lot of content available within your company, but where is it stored? What about the images and associated rights? And what about version control: has the management approved this article? The increased use and importance of content within every organization can make maintaining an overview a real challenge. The entire content trajectory is formalized in a content hub: from planning out your campaign strategy to analyzing the results, including all the steps in between.
Emphasis on teamwork
The goal of the content hub is to facilitate collaboration within the marketing team. Marketers, copywriters, content editors and product marketers work in a single clear tool and receive help with creating the content in as efficient and pleasant a manner as possible. The more easily they can produce content, the better their employee experience – and the content they produce – will be. Optimal customer experience then follows as an automatic consequence of this rock-solid content.
All communication takes place through the tool too. This makes collaboration smoother, because you don’t have to email back and forth endlessly. Employees know exactly what they can start working on: they log in and find the tasks they’re due to complete waiting for them in the to do list. This also makes working at home and on the road easier and more efficient. What’s more, submission and approval of articles all takes place via the tool – ideal when the management likes to keep an eye on evolving content.
Always up to date
The content hub ensures that you are always up-to-date in several ways. A library – containing all articles, downloads, manuals and photos – can be stored and managed in a central place. Images and artwork are saved in the correct formats, suitable for the channels you use for your brand. You can also easily find everything you’ve ever published. If you’re just starting out with a content hub, migrate everything to the new environment step by step.
When you work with templates for writing blog posts or case studies, for example, your content always reflects your organization’s writing style and your brand comes across more strongly. Designers will also find their work process clearer in the content hub. When the person with ultimate responsibility gives the go-ahead, a designer immediately has the right version to hand and can get started on his or her work right away.
The content hub can also help you ensure that there’s no old content on your website or intranet. This is done by automatic synchronization, which means that everyone has access to the latest version of the content. This is important: for example, take an energy company that has manuals on how to deal with a gas leak. Obviously, it will wants all its engineers to have the latest version. A paper manual will sit gathering dust somewhere, but with a content hub you can send current information about gas leaks directly to the engineers’ iPads, so that they’re not at risk.
You then also publish customized content on your social media channels, my environments, websites, web shops, and indeed any communication channels that your brand uses. And you can also analyze the results in the tool. The information for this is obtained by the content hub from the various channels and from Sitecore. For example, you can compare which photos or texts perform best, so that your next campaign is even stronger!
Would you like to know what possibilities the content hub has to offer for your organization? Draw inspiration from various practical applications in this blog.
