As we’ve seen in our previous post, Brand Content Plans have become essential for large companies and require the use of software tools if they are to be effective and responsive.
In addition to content management platforms and multi-channel publishing, Marketing Resource Management (MRM) solutions are particularly suitable in this context.
To illustrate I’m focusing on 5 specific aspects of a MRM solution essential to implementing and managing Brand Content.
1. Plan and monitor production
What are the issues to be addressed? Who is responsible? Which media will be published? These questions become even more crucial when one aspires to real time marketing, which itself can be managed by the editorial planning module of a MRM solution?
This last one allows users to:
- create a new topic, assigning it to one or more managers and specifying its treatment (content type, target media, etc..)
- plan the various milestones (V1, approved master content, approved translations, etc . . .)
- view all the elements on the global and personal schedule (ie “To Do List”) of each participant.
- identify potential delays and trigger associated notifications.
2. Organize and share content
According to Frost & Sullivan, the ability to quickly and easily find desired content (a photo, a logo, a old article …) saves one hour per day per user.
A solid content management module, a core component of MRM solutions, guarantees the effectiveness of contributors who can work more quickly and instantly find the sources or digital elements they need.
3. Collaborate more effectively and speed up approvals
To date, exchanges between the employees responsible for content production are done mostly by email and are subject to an “antiquated” approval process; this process pushes back publication deadlines and complicates the tracking of changes across successive versions of content.
The collaborative features of a MRM platform allow one to:
replace a series of e-mails by online comments shared by all,
formalize workflow and approval exchanges between involved parties,
trigger notifications at each step of the process.
4. Localising content in an international context
Translating content within multinational groups is often tedious and time-consuming:
- headquarters inform subsidiary teams when new content must be translated and combined with existing content,
- each subsidiary manages its translation process, frequently with the help of local providers
- translations are then “re-centralised,” sent back to headquarters for approval and publishing.
This “manual” process becomes even more problematic when the flow of content to be translated becomes continuous. A MRM solution is particularly interesting in this distributed marketing context:
- automatic creation of multilingual versions of content with automatic pre-translation where appropriate,
- notification of subsidiaries when master content is approved,
- management of workflow, translation, and approval,
- etc. . .
5. Publish all media
How can one publish content on all target media (social networks, intranets, websites, blogs, print publications, etc.).? How can one have an overview of all created and disseminated media?
A MRM solution addresses these needs in two ways:
- by offering its own publication modules, whatever the channels (web2print, web and mobile publishing, emailing, etc.),
- by interfacing with other solutions via links
The content is published automatically to target media, without any copying and pasting, and according to the established dissemination mode: when a certain step in the process is reached, on a given date, or by manual release.
This concludes our series of two posts on Brand Content, a subject on which we will focus in the coming weeks.
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