The content crisis: What it is and how to solve it

While customer expectations and content consumption are higher than ever today, they’ve been on the rise for years.

As early as 2018, 7 out of 10 customers expected companies to understand their needs and expectations. This trend has held, along with another — 8 out of 10 customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service.

Another persistent trend? The rise of digital channels, with 55% of customers — including 68% of millennials and Gen Zers — preferring digital over traditional channels. And the pandemic appears to have sped up this trend, with 84% of marketers saying customers place even more value on digital experiences today.

Customers want to engage with you via digital channels. That’s great news for our new normal, where the pandemic has caused organizations of all shapes and sizes to double down on the most reliable avenue when people have to abandon retail— digital.

But as every marketer knows, digital experiences require content; tailoring them to individual customers requires a lot. Which leads to another not-so-surprising reality — 8 out of 10 marketers struggling to create enough content.

At Sitecore, we call this the content crisis. It’s the convergence of heightened customer expectations, the increasing importance and variety of digital channels, and the quantity of high-quality content needed to respond. It was here before the pandemic, but it’s only gotten worse.

We’ve been working to understand this crisis and determine the strategy, tactics, and tools needed to meet it head-on.

Content created in partnership with Sitecore.

Tailored customer journeys require a huge amount of work — or an end-to-end solution

You know the importance of mapping out customer journeys — and that they’re unique. Even prospects that ultimately purchase the same product or service often take very different paths to get there. If you can segment them correctly early on, you can help move them along their journey with content tailored to their in-the-moment needs.

Creating tailored content can be as simple as tweaking a sentence in an email or as complex as creating a new asset.

To keep up with the content demand for personalized experiences, you can either work harder or smarter. Working smarter means creating modular content, intuitively stored and easily accessible to all teams (including various levels of access), and able to be efficiently repurposed — not to mention delivered across channels.

Expansive intelligence enables experiences that connect

Working smarter also requires intelligence. An intuitive and experienced salesperson can size up a prospect as quickly as it takes them to cross the store’s threshold. But that salesperson’s skill set is severely hampered on a digital platform, which needs to operate at scale.

Data capture is the beginning of digital intelligence. And given the expansion of digital channels, it’s no simple task. One thing that helps — headless architecture that supports omnichannel delivery and data collection.

Once you have the data, you need to connect it. From your CRM to your social channels to your website and more, connected data is the key to connected customer experiences.

But data insight goes beyond customer actions to include content performance. From automated A/B testing to robust engagement analytics, your data insight must reveal the experiences that connect and those that don’t.

Our next article in this three-part series takes a look at content as a service, and how to marry content creation, delivery, and metrics.