Leverage Technology to Enhance Content Operations

Before we help you navigate the complicated landscape of content operations in the era of AI, headless CMSs, and subsequent specialized content platforms, let’s talk about reasons to invest your time into reading and thinking about innovative methods of content operations.  

Writing articles, manuals, product descriptions, drawing infographics, crafting ebooks, and other content pieces require investment – it costs money and time. Witty investors want to get maximum juice out of their assets, and the same applies to content: 

• Time-effective creation
• Automated distribution to customer
• Synergic effects of collaboration across departments 

These are the three goals you should pursue. Any inefficiencies drag your company down and create opportunities for your competitors to offer better content faster and precisely aimed at the target audience. 

Get ready for a full-course menu where we will serve you an introduction, data-based insights, and even a simple recipe to shortcut your way toward effective content operations (seasoned professionals can click here to skip the intro). 

Time to crunch some numbers. 

The Great Shift of Content Operations

First, we check what the data says about content operations. The general rule, firstly published in Upland Software research, states that companies waste $0.25 of every dollar spent on content.  

“As ACTUM Digital is focused on B2B clients, we add another popular statistic that says 70% or more of B2B content goes unused,” adds Matej Capla, Content Operations Consultant at ACTUM Digital. 

McKinsey examined one global company that created a center of excellence for content operations. They established transparency, new governance, and improved processes across the organization. These changes cut the time to produce content, halted the 25% growth in costs the company saw year after year, and brought discipline to managing the impact of content. As a result, marketing ROI improved by more than 20%. 

The growing number of technologies available is causing headaches for many companies. According to Chief Martec, the marketing technology landscape grew by 40% in the last year to a total of 5,381 solutions. Integration of tools used by content marketing teams is a real brainteaser when you want to keep your tech stack tidy and transparent. 

Digitalization pushes companies to innovate all functions continuously. And the leitmotif of the recent shift is technology. Speaking of content creation, the first thing on your mind should be AI-generated content, automations and workflows in CMS, and CRM systems. 

Further, we will explore how content operations teams can leverage technology to experience fast and transparent content management. “To give you examples, we will use the Kontent.ai platform, which my team loves not only for its cutting-edge features but also for its rugged security and reliability,” explains Matej Capla, who provided his battle-hardened experience and insights for this article. 

Evolution in B2B Content Operations 

The business-to-business industry is working hard on better organization of all content-related processes. The year 2023 breaks many stereotypes that B2B has dealt with for decades. What must B2B digital solutions offer?  

• The same quality as users know from B2C that even goes beyond Amazon 
• Smooth user experience (UX) and accessibility (A11Y)
• Ability to get maximum of every written word and graphics drawn
• Tools for content personalization and campaign automation 
• AI-powered features for content generation  

“As the demand for B2B content grows, so does the complexity of content operations. The main struggle of content operations teams in B2B is to provide high-quality and valuable content consistently. According to Forbes, failing to do so is a reason for 69% of B2B clients to look for new vendors who offer helpful and valuable content,” says Matej Capla. 

Any company thinking about optimization of its content operations should first ask itself questions such as: 

• Do we provide clients with quality content they expect from the vendor?
• Can we scale our content operations with the existing tech stack?
• Does AI help our content operations or make it more confusing? 

There is always room for improvement. Content operations evolve continuously, and work on it is never finished. At least not for long. Let’s check two sides of the same coin – the main mission and common traps of content operations. 

A. Content Operations Main Mission 

Content operations encompass the entire content lifecycle, from creation to distribution and analysis. 

It involves various tasks such as content ideation, creation, editing, SEO optimization, publishing, and performance tracking, to name a few. Indeed, you can imagine there are tons of opportunities to prune inefficiencies, cut delays, and improve process fluency. 

Now, consider the average company. B2B or B2C ecommerce, manufacturer, clothing brand, you name it. Every company has a limited supply of highly-effective converting content. The core is a few articles, brochures, or newsletters explaining your businesses’ unique selling proposition (USPs), introducing customers to your offer or new-customers discounts used as calls to action (CTAs). 

“The goal of content operations is not strictly focused on producing new content. It should find a way to reuse existing well-performing ‘evergreen’ content reasonably. This part is often neglected – new content creation dilutes the core messages and makes content less effective. What a paradox, right?” Matej Capla shares observations from a wide range of projects.

B. Common Traps of Modern Content Operations 

These days, companies are intensively incorporating AI tools to fuel their growth, rapidly increasing their ability to spit out new content. Still, if some content piece is performing well, it's much cheaper and more efficient to reuse it rather than invest time and budget in creating new content from scratch.  

The situation is even more complicated for B2B organizations where Matej Capla encounters many traps on an everyday basis: “Lots of B2B companies are driving sales through cold calls and industry events, so marketing, and especially content marketing, are relatively new to them. The investments in marketing are tiny, so when you look at an average B2B company, its marketing team usually consists of 3 to 5 people. And everyone is responsible for the full range of tasks required to transform ideas into content and content into sales.” 

B2B content creators are typically working on website content and email marketing. They can be scattered in various locations, so publishing new content requires costly coordination. Typically, through emails, Slack, Teams, and other channels. What does that mean? There is little ownership of processes, insufficient project management, and frequent errors or inconsistencies. 

Another trap is hidden in the seasonal workload where content teams are understaffed for peak season madness – e.g., product launch, contract negotiations for the new year, etc. Common symptoms are staff working under stress caused by lack of workforce, expertise, or insufficient technology to maximize marketing performance of their content. 

These two traps make content operations a real pain. Ultimately, it is slow; even trivial tasks often become complicated, and the content marketing team might be perceived as incompetent even though they are all working hard and under permanent stress.  

“The chaos is often caused by the fact there is no single source of truth. Files stored all over the cloud, outdated Excel spreadsheets in email attachments… Content operations quickly turn into a nightmare. And that’s when platforms like Kontent.ai come into play,” continues Matej.  

It's time to reveal what Kontent.ai does, right? 

Kontent.ai – Command Center for Content Operations 

Kontent.ai is a game-changing solution for B2B companies, revolutionizing their content operations. This cutting-edge platform simplifies and enhances content creation, management, and distribution. Leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, Kontent.ai streamlines collaboration, optimizes workflows, and ensures efficient content ideation and execution.  

With Kontent.ai, content management becomes a piece of cake. It centralizes your content assets, providing an organized and secure repository for easy access and searchability. Say goodbye to scattered content and welcome a well-structured content hub. Additionally, Kontent.ai elevates content distribution by making it significantly easier for companies to publish content to any channel from a single source of truth. 

Truly Headless CMS 

Kontent.ai is what we call a genuinely headless CMS. A content management system that takes the concept of decoupled architecture to the next level. Unlike traditional CMS platforms, a truly headless CMS completely separates the presentation layer (head) from the content management functionality (body). This means that content can be created, stored, and managed independently of any specific front-end technology or channel. 

Such CMS offers standout features to help you deliver content across multiple platforms and devices. Thanks to robust content APIs, developers can access and retrieve content with a simple API call. Whether it's a website, mobile app, IoT device, or even chatbot, the users are getting up-to-date, top-quality content in the blink of an eye. 

Showcase Project: Kontent.ai for a Global Automotive Company 

Imagine a premium car manufacturer that provides 50,000+ documents to their employees and partners. Every part and subsystem needs its own documentation, manual, and technical specification, available in several languages. Training documents, marketing, advertising and sales, manuals, white papers and PR articles, high-quality images, and video content also exist. 

And for such a client, Actum implemented Kontent.ai to create a fully centralized content hub, serving as a single source of truth for the entire global group. 

Before that, the manufacturer struggled with low reusability of original content. All processes were slow and complicated; many departments created similar content only in different languages to intensify the chaos among 800+ content editors. 

Our team created a new content operations infrastructure based on the headless CMS by Kontent.ai. What changed? 

• The new automated process created a clear path from brief to publication with a central content hub used by all 800+ editors.
• The future-proof granular model using content modules allowed 80% reusability of content.
• Content modules containing a single heading, a graph, an image, or a whole chapter from a training manual reduced time for document creation, organization, and maintenance.
• Improved metadata and taxonomy information accelerated content search.  

The end product of this showcase project is easy to visualize: greater efficiency, faster time to market, and reduced stress and workload for content managers, editors, and developers. Ultimately, it benefits individuals and the company because content creators and editors have the tools to do a better job. 

3 Ingredients of Unbeatable Content Operations in B2B

To change your content operations and get your team back in the game, here are our 3 recommendations that you simply stir together and get ready for the next generation of marketing. Innovations might bring little results but act as a catalyst for everything your company already does. 

Stop wasting time on routine tasks, remove stress, and let your team of content creators do what they do best – create superb content. 

1) Headless CMS 

As we explained earlier, a content management system (CMS) is the evolutionary step that replaces chaotic structures of emails and spreadsheets. The digital marketing stack of most B2B companies can benefit from a headless CMS, meaning it is an API-first, cloud-based solution such as Kontent.ai. Many legacy software developers call their platforms headless even though they are not even halfway there. 

“A headless CMS enables your organization to take control of content while enhancing collaboration between content and development teams and increasing content reusability. That all in a perfectly secure manner,” explains Matej Capla. 

You might ask whether moving your Excels to SharePoint will do the job. No, it will not. While it helps with collaboration, any cloud storage won’t give you a single source of truth in the same way as a full-fledged CMS. CMS streamlines content creation, management and publishing. It offers features like content scheduling, version control and user permissions. 

One can’t beat a tailor-made platform with content operations in its DNA by uploading files to a shared folder. 

While many companies benefit greatly from headless infrastructure, such as Gordon Ramsey’s chain of restaurants or UNICEF, there are some edge cases when you should think twice. To be honest with you, the Headless CMS solution is not for everyone. Especially smaller companies won’t benefit from its flexibility and specialization and won’t be happy with sacrificing the one-size-fits-all built-in features of their original tools. 

At least not yet. 

Headless will dominate digital marketing in the coming years, but smaller companies can afford to wait before hopping on this train. 

2) Tools with Native AI Capabilities 

Humankind has reached the point when artificial intelligence can generate flawless content. Generative AI in the form of large language models (LLM) is the new dot-com hype, and AI has become the top buzzword in 2023. 

As technologies revolutionize content operations by automating repetitive tasks, providing data-driven insights, and enhancing collaboration among content teams, they also bring the power of AI to your content marketing. AI-powered tools can assist content creation in numerous ways: 

• Generating topic ideas
• Suggesting improvements
• Automating writing process
• Summarizing
• Researching. You name it.  

Public tools like ChatGPT or specialized content-creating programs (Copy.ai) are just the beginning. The future is in private custom-made AI tools working with company data and helping humans generate better content faster. Matej Capla mostly hears from clients that AI creation tools help remove writer’s block and even reduce the time spent on tedious reviews. 

Native AI features that are helpful for content creators differ from AI features for customer care, for example. Let’s name a few features bringing benefits to content marketing: 

• Automated collaboration between marketing and dev teams.
• Instant creation of first drafts out of outline.
• Workflow management allows seamless content approval processes, task assignments, and deadline tracking.
• Native integration with marketing automation tools and third-party services enables seamless data and content synchronization.
• Comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities. 

3) Actum & Kontent.ai 

The last ingredient to cutting-edge B2B content operations is onboarding an experienced implementation partner. 

“Technologies are changing too quickly, so it is almost impossible for companies to keep track of all the options available. On the other hand, many specialists in Actum’s team are experts on specific technologies in really deep detail and also architects that can select and merge the tools into the most effective tech stack fitting the client’s needs,” Matej Capla summarizes the most important benefits of cooperation with a partner like ACTUM Digital. 

Based on his experience, the Kontent.ai headless CMS can bring quick relief to content creators in many B2B companies. It instantly improves the organization and management of every piece of content the company has created. The combination of a skilled implementation partner and a powerful headless CMS is almost too mighty to be legal. Trust us! 

Or not. But before you make up your mind, here are more stats you should know.

Study: Performance of Kontent.ai in Enterprises 

Kontent.ai just released a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Forrester Consulting, where they’ve assessed that for the studied composite organization, Kontent.ai reduces the deployment time for content by 90% (!!!), mainly thanks to increased efficiency of daily content operations. It has both a financial and efficiency ROI impact on organizations’ performance. 

Moreover, the headless CMS brought 320% ROI and generated other financial and non-financial benefits for the composite organization, totalling over $3 million. The net present value of such investment was $2.3 million, and the average payback time was less than six months. 

Are you still wondering how these numbers are even possible? 

Imagine, you don’t need 10 days for content creation; you can create it in 1 day. Or 3 hours. All your employees can then channel their time to more productive tasks and strategic initiatives related to content creation and management. As a result, they better know your customers, they create tailor-made content for additional target groups, communication channels or countries, tweak, refresh and translate existing content, add more graphics, and do all the other things they have always wanted to do, but there has never been enough time. 

If you are interested, read the full study by Kontent.ai. It is packed with priceless insights. 

Content Operations Ready for the Future of Marketing 

What a ride, don’t you think? Creating new content is going through a revolution, and it is necessary to doubt everything you know about it so far. Falling behind in the race to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing might put a stop to your company's growth and maybe even cost you some loyal clients. 

Explore AI-powered headless CMS and prepare your content operations for the future. If you are a B2B company, this task should be your utmost priority if you don’t want to miss the train. 

“Marketing teams do not get many investments, but ROI offered by headless CMS is a solid argument that usually justifies any doubts C-level managers might have.” Businesses should constantly evaluate their marketing and content creation needs before looking for ways to deploy technologies to leverage their content operations. “This initial analysis is something Actum is always more than happy to help,” concludes Matej Capla. 

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