Streamline your content process with content orchestration

For too long, content teams across all industries have faced the same challenge.

Complex organizational structures and the use of multiple Content Management Systems (CMS) within one umbrella organization have become a major headache to effectively create and distribute content across different channels and platforms.

This has only increased in complexity with both the increase in platform types (i.e., social media and apps) and shifting user expectations and behaviors.

But there is now a solution: content orchestration.

What is content orchestration?

Content orchestration allows organizations to aggregate and manage content from multiple disparate content sources into centralized workflows. That omnichannel content can then be seamlessly pushed to a wide range of endpoints (websites, portals, web and mobile apps, and social channels) via API.

The benefits of content orchestration

Content orchestration allows organizations to build more efficient content processes on top of their current system, without the need to re-platform or migrate their existing content.

Instead of going through a costly migration project, organizations can maintain their current systems and workflows, saving time and effort.

Moreover, by adopting a single “source-of-truth” and publishing workflow for their content, organizations are first and foremost less prone to errors. Copying and pasting content across the system to replicate content will always introduce errors.

Organizations will also be able to publish high-quality content much faster by pushing content out to multiple sources simultaneously, without manual labor. Besides, once an organization reaches a certain volume of digital assets to manage, manually publishing content to each of them is simply no longer feasible.

Finally, it also becomes easier to leverage personalization through a single platform. Individually implementing personalization on each of an organization’s websites or portals would be a nightmare.

Moving away from clunky content migration

Until recently, the only viable solution was to consolidate all digital content from different content teams into a single platform to enjoy a more streamlined content management solution. There simply wasn’t any other option, and organizations recognized the need to keep things simple if they wanted to successfully grow.

But migration projects of any size are typically demanding in terms of resources and time, which smaller organizations cannot afford.

For large organizations, especially those that have been through multiple digital transformation initiatives, these migrations can take several years to complete, as they need to be broken up into manageable pieces.

On top of the time and cost that goes into these traditional content migration projects, organizations have to account for the following challenges:

• Stakeholder disagreements – Convincing decision-makers (e.g., board members) to act, and facing resistance from those who don’t have personal experience with the limitations of the existing system, can impact the success of a migration.
• Upskilling relevant stakeholders – the resource strain and disruptions that come from having to upskill employees can slow down a migration rollout. This is sometimes made more difficult when dealing with multiple organizations or departments.
• Changes in management – Stakeholders can often change over the time it takes to complete a migration, sometimes leading to a project being managed by people who disagree with the goals or approach of the migration.
• Project complexity – Large organizations that have been around for a while often suffer from complex, messy content processes. The sheer volume of content can also stop decision-makers from committing to a lengthy migration.
• Platform preferences – Forcing everyone onto one platform comes with its own problems. What if another tool could do the job better for some specific business functions? Teams from different departments or brands within an umbrella organization often revert to their preferred tools over time.

A composable DXP helps organizations integrate different tools – like forms, search, CRM, analytics, and more – without forcing users to change tools or scrap and replace existing systems that might be working well. Organizations can enjoy a more customizable and adaptable method for creating digital experiences without having to go through a full-scale content migration.

There is also greater freedom in what tools you use with a composable DXP. You have the power to carefully select the ideal combination of capabilities and technologies. This allows for easy addition, removal, and updates to your stack, making it easy to create advanced digital experiences.

This flexibility allows for simple orchestration of content, whether you want to pull content from multiple sources and manage it within one platform or disseminate content to different channels and platforms.

How does content orchestration work?

Content orchestration allows an organization to connect multiple sources of content to a single publishing workflow, making it easy to manage and publish content to different digital channels. Typically, content orchestration consists of the following 5 steps.

1. Integration

A DXP that offers content orchestration will use some type of integration platform, or iPaaS, to allow an organization to connect directly to multiple sources (e.g., CMSs) from a single place.

iPaaS platforms offer pre-built connectors or ‘RESTful APIs’ to connect with different CMSs. These connectors enable seamless integration with various CMS platforms, allowing data to be extracted, synchronized, or migrated between them.

This technology development moves on from traditional point-to-point, developer-led integration solutions, which often come with significant bottlenecks, and introduces a new system, such as our Integrations feature. This is agnostic to what platforms you pull content from, packaging your data and digital content so your content processes are more straightforward.

2. Aggregation

Once data, such as news articles from multiple CMS sources, is integrated with an iPaaS, it is then aggregated to make sense of the content.

The iPaaS platform provides tools to define data mappings and transformations between different CMSs. You can build automated workflows which trigger actions based on specific events or conditions, such as creating, updating, or deleting content in one CMS based on changes in another CMS. This way, the content coming from various source platforms can be properly adapted to the target CMS's format and structure.

3. Governance and orchestration

Orchestrating services enable the automated management of content workflows and processes. It allows organizations to define and automate content-related jobs such as content creation, approval, publishing, and distribution. You can apply automated workflows to send notifications or log information about who makes the update when the update happens, and any errors that occur when publishing content.

Permissions help organizations manage who can publish content and where from the central DXP. This helps orchestrate the distribution and syndication of content across multiple channels, including websites, social media platforms, email marketing tools, and more. It ensures that the right content is delivered to the right channels at the right time, maintaining consistency and governance.

This step helps reduce manual effort, improve efficiency, and ensure consistent content governance.

4. Segmentation

Not all your content needs to be consumed by the same audience. Segmentation lets you assign which piece of content should be viewed by any of your different audience segments.

Content can be tagged (categorized) during the content orchestration process based on specific segmentation criteria or attributes. By assigning specific metadata or tags to content, editors can define rules and criteria for associating that content with particular customer segments. When a segmented customer visits the website or platform, the content that aligns with their segment can be displayed or prioritized.

This means your audiences receive more personalized and engaging content, cuts out any noise, and facilitates your automated marketing strategy by helping you populate triggered campaigns with the right content.

5. Delivery

Through Content Orchestration solutions, you can then orchestrate content-related tasks in two different scenarios.

• One-way – Write, edit, schedule, and publish content out to different channels from one place. Use ‘components’ to communicate with other websites or APIs to communicate with your apps and social media channels.
• Two-way: Pull in content from multiple sources with iPaaS, automatically aggregate that content, edit and manage it before finally sending it back out to the same or different sources. This helps manage the accuracy and consistency of content across your different platforms.