Sitecore Content Hub – taking control of your prize assets

The pandemic has driven businesses to place a greater emphasis on optimising how they market to their customers through digital channels. However, many have realised that their legacy marketing platforms are siloed, have become restrictive and hard to use which has led to inefficiency, disparate marketing assets and brand inconsistency.

This realisation has led to businesses increasing the investment into the marketing platforms that will enable them to deliver optimised campaigns and experiences to their customers, quickly, efficiently and to a consistently high level of quality. Here we look at how Sitecore Content Hub can help solve some of these challenges.

What is it?

Sitecore Content Hub is a flexible, scalable and unified content marketing solution that provides complete end-to-end visibility and control of your marketing and product content lifecycle, comprising of 5 key components:

• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Marketing Resource Management (MRM)
• Content Marketing Platform (CMP)
• Product Content Management (PCM)
• Web-to-Print (W2P)

They provide you with full control of your marketing assets and high levels of governance, productivity and collaboration by consolidating the planning, creation, management and distribution of your marketing activity.

Collaborative and efficient asset management

The last few years has seen a sharp rise in remote/hybrid working and as a result, a platform that encourages and supports collaboration and maximises efficiency is critical to support the shift to distributed marketing and content teams.

Content Hub supports this by providing content creators, editors, and curators with a suite of extremely intuitive and easy to use features to help them work effectively in parallel. Including, planning tools to coordinate tasks between multiple stakeholders, centralised approvals and automated workflows, granular access and user management, drag and drop UI and multiple search options for navigating large volumes of assets.

There are also intelligent AI capabilities (powered by Azure Cognitive Services) to enhance productivity further, such as automatic image recognition, analysis and meta data extraction and tagging of image and video assets.

Scalability and flexibility

Content Hub is extremely capable as a standalone platform. However, in most cases there will be other systems that will need to sit alongside and integrate with it. So, a platform that has the flexibility to integrate with external systems and seamlessly aggregate content is critical.

Its API-first approach makes it really easy to extend the capabilities of the platform, integrate with other systems (e.g. ERP) and pass data between them. There are also several pre-built connectors to external third-party platforms, for example Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Furthermore, by running the Sitecore Experience Platform (SXP) in tandem you can use Sitecore Connect modules to dynamically pull content into the SXP or search for assets from within SXP whilst managing them centrally from within Content Hub.

Streamlining the asset creation process

The traditional approach of creating variations of brand assets such as applying translations or product specific information relies on skilled designers and formal approval processes, for every change. This can be time consuming, costly and introduces risk of errors.

Content Hub has a component called Web-to-Print which utilises a service called CHILI Publisher to streamline this process by automating how image variants are created through the use of configurable Smart Templates and automated workflows. Assets can be created in digital and print formats either dynamically from external data sources via APIs or manually by the content team through Content Hub in a browser. In addition, there are plugins available for Adobe InDesign and Illustrator so assets can be sent seamlessly between them and Content Hub.

This functionality enables you to reduce the number of approval cycles, minimise the involvement of designers, deploy changes quickly and ensure brand consistency.

This just scratches the surface of the capabilities that Content Hub provides!

If you are interested in understanding more about Sitecore Content Hub and how it could help your organisation, then please get in touch.