What is the Sitecore Content Hub?

The right content on the right channel at the right time is the key to success – in all stages of the customer journey. We need content, and it needs to be outstanding content.

“Sitecore Content Hub helps you manage every aspect of your marketing content for all your channels with a single, integrated solution.”

Well, if content is the key to success, this looks like a very interesting story!

The content crisis

When creating content, a lot of stakeholders, tools and sources can be involved. You might want to ask colleagues or external stakeholders (e.g. agencies, photographers, copywriters, partner vendors, …) to deliver parts of content.

All this content is composed with different tools and delivered by email, sharing tools (SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, file servers, …) or on paper (think of sketches or wireframes on paper). This makes collaboration on content difficult and you don’t have an overview of where you are with your content creation process.

On top of that, content gets used by different teams to update the website, send it out on social media, use it in product marketing, print and other channels. Sometimes content gets duplicated and seldom content is reused from one central system. This makes it hard to keep track who uses content and how the content performs.

Exactly that is the crisis that Sitecore solves with the Sitecore Content Hub.

Solving the content crisis: the approach

Following the approach that Stylelabs has established, organizations can take these steps to solve the content crisis:

• Get the content out of the channels

  • Social media, POS, apps, CMS, print, … are a few examples of channels where different teams create and manage content

  • It is important to move the content creation and management out of the channels to a stage before publishing to these channels, in order share the initial content before tweaking it for specific channels

• Define the process of content creation

  • Content creation needs to be streamlined and take the chaos out of the process by defining planning, authoring and collaboration strategies, publishing workflows for the different types of content

• Integration with the enterprise landscape

  • Content delivered to marketing channels can contain raw data from backend systems. The content delivery flows from system to system need to be analyzed and implemented, to get rid of CSV exports or copying content manually

• Content ownership and governance

  • The word is out: “governance”! Who’s responsible for which modular content and when is content “out of date” or “not in synch” in line with the content creation process?

   

Solving the content crisis: the tools

Sitecore looks at content creation and publication as a process, and with the acquisition of the Stylelabs tools they provide a technology platform that allows for the execution of this process from A to Z.

Before publishing to any channel, all stakeholders can work together on content creation and management in the Sitecore Content Hub, which exists of:

• Sitecore DAM (Digital Asset Management)

• Sitecore MRM (Marketing Resource Management)

• Sitecore CMP (Content Marketing Platform)

• Sitecore PCM Product Content Management or Product Information Management)

• Sitecore W2P (Web-To-Print)

It’s interesting to navigate through the user documentation to explore how the platform works. Some highlights of the screenshots:

Planning

(Source: https://docs-partners.stylelabs.com) 

Authoring

(Source: https://docs-partners.stylelabs.com) 

Collaboration (reviews, comments, annotations, …)

(Source: https://docs-partners.stylelabs.com) 

Management (version management, single version of truth)

(Source: https://docs-partners.stylelabs.com) 

Curation of modular content (metadata management)

(Source: https://docs-partners.stylelabs.com)

It is clear that Sitecore's focus is on the full marketing content lifecycle, delivered in one integrated digital marketing platform.