Sitecore Content Hub™: Beyond DAM — Part One

In part one of this two-part interview series, we explore the benefits of content consolidation and the importance of creating a single source of truth for your assets. We discuss how Sitecore Content Hub (Content Hub) can enhance the delivery of multibrand, multisite and multilingual digital experiences for global organizations.

Makenzie Barket

Many of the world's leading brands have implemented Content Hub. What are some of the primary business benefits these organizations experience?

Chandra Sekaran

The biggest benefit is the return on investment (ROI) you get from saved time and costs. Content Hub makes it easy for users to find assets, supports the reuse and repurpose of existing assets and eliminates duplicate efforts. It makes marketing teams more productive and accelerates speed-to-market.

When it comes to content creation, organizations spend a lot of money, and they engage external agencies and internal creative teams to produce assets. Once they are created, the assets sit in the different systems used by each team, like OneDrive or a local file system. Most of the time, the teams responsible for content creation spend a significant amount of valuable time digging through those systems to try to find assets. To put it simply, there are a lot of inefficiencies and disconnects between teams when it comes to file management that cause major delays with the content creation process.

Content Hub removes those inefficiencies because it provides workflows out-of-the-box for digital asset management (DAM) and includes other helpful features like its Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM). CMP enables you to effectively streamline content strategy, planning, creation and publication, whereas MRM allows you to efficiently manage, budget and control marketing projects. It even enables businesses to create user accounts for external agencies so they can log into the tool, upload assets and submit them for review. Best of all, everything takes place in one platform, so marketers don't have to use multiple systems to manage different aspects of the content lifecycle, which is a big time-saver.

MB

How does Content Hub solve some of the many business challenges related to digital asset management?

CS

One of the most significant challenges businesses face with digital asset management is that there is no single source of truth for their assets. Different teams within an organization have different tools and processes that they use. Some teams manage their assets in a local file system, OneDrive, SharePoint or a cloud storage solution. Some teams may even use their own DAMs, which other teams don’t have access to.

This leaves the assets scattered between systems and disorganized, which puts the company at a disadvantage. When assets created by one team cannot be found and leveraged by another team, that creates a major issue. In those situations, organizations are forced to spend a lot of time and money to recreate those lost or siloed assets.

Another common challenge businesses run into with DAM systems is poor search capabilities. Businesses that have thousands of assets need a solution that has robust search capabilities, faceting functions, tools that enable file and content sharing between different teams and metadata association. Another useful feature many DAM systems lack is notifications. Businesses need DAM systems with notifications that inform teams when assets are added, updated or removed. Those are some of the capabilities businesses look for in DAM systems today that Content Hub provides.

End users can easily leverage full-text and advanced search capabilities with the click of a button.

Another challenge organizations face today is that their assets don’t cater to different business uses, and they aren’t easy to change. Businesses want to be able to change assets to different resolutions and renditions, they want to crop them and they want technologies baked into assets, so they can be resized on the fly for the channel that they will be published to.

MB

I would imagine for multinational or multibrand organizations, it's important to have a variety of renditions that are used in omnichannel publishing.

CS

Exactly. Businesses don't want to upload 10 different versions of an asset for 10 different channels. They want to upload one asset and have the system generate various renditions for different channels. They don't want to spend time creating those renditions, they want to just use one version of an asset.

And when it comes to managing all of these renditions, it is critical to ensure the organization is in compliance. A lot of organizations have DAM systems that do not have digital rights management (DRM) capabilities, and they find it difficult to manage DRM on their own. If they wanted DRM, they would have to spend additional money on a third-party tool because it's not baked into their DAM system. Content Hub boasts DRM features that address this prominent pain point for businesses. Content Hub’s DRM provides capabilities to enforce asset compliance. It also tracks and controls asset usage and any associated licenses. DRM is especially important for companies that are multinational that need to ensure every asset is used properly across different brands, channels and countries.

MB

That is another point that speaks to the return on investment Content Hub provides as well.

CS

Absolutely. All of these benefits boil down to the ROI businesses get from saving time and costs. Typically, large organizations have multiple teams creating different parts of the content. For example, one team may create assets, while a separate team creates content for marketing materials and another team uses these assets for campaigns. Content Hub is one tool where those teams can manage all of the different aspects of the content lifecycle, which saves so much time and makes processes much more efficient for teams.

With a traditional DAM solution, end users can only manage assets, which isn’t ideal. Teams would not have all the unique content management functionality Content Hub offers. If they want those features, they will have to use different systems in conjunction with their DAM solution, and those products likely don't integrate with each other very well.

As I mentioned before, Content Hub also has MRM for Marketing Resource Management, which is a natural fit for the content lifecycle. Content Hub can be used to create different workflows for different campaigns and projects, and it can assign users to different sets of tasks. With Content Hub, you can control activities and their progress at a very granular level to ensure you are getting tasks done in a timely fashion, and you’re not scrambling across different tools. Whether it’s the team who uploads the assets in the DAM system or the team that creates the content, they’ll be able to manage everything in one single platform.

To learn more about EPAM’s expertise in Sitecore Content Hub or to view a demo, visit: www.epam.com/sitecore-content-hub.