Fundamentals of Content Optimization to Strengthen CX

In today's fast-paced digital world, capturing and retaining the attention of your target audience is an ever-evolving challenge. With a multitude of content vying for consumer attention, the key to success lies in delivering personalized, relevant, and engaging experiences that leave a lasting impact on customers. Enter Intelligent Content Optimization (ICO) - a powerful approach that enables your business to enhance content strategies and create meaningful interactions with your audience. Experience management platform leaders, Sitecore, Optimizely, Adobe Experience Manager for example, offer a central hub to manage a full content lifecycle.

In this comprehensive guide, we will take a deep dive into the world of intelligent content optimization and explore the fundamentals and strategies that can take your customer experience to new heights.

What is Intelligent Content Optimization? The Fundamental Characteristics

Intelligent content optimization describes how the content combines the best of technology (AI & machine learning) with a touch of human expertise. This approach is seen as a powerful business asset to make the content reconfigurable and adaptable for marketers.

Let's delve deeper into the characteristics of intelligent content optimization.

Intelligent Content is Semantically Aware

This type of content is usually tagged with metadata to recognize the kind of content within it. For instance, you may tag your content according to role, audience, product, or industry. Content that is tagged with semantic metadata, makes it easy to create customized information sets based on industry or audience. If your company is working towards creating personalized content, then metadata is very important to consider.

Structurally Rich Content that is Discoverable

In general, blog posts, landing pages, white papers, or other marketing assets should be structured to answer specific questions for a niche audience. To help with that, intelligent content is structurally rich as it is designed to be both machine and human readable.

Intelligent Content Optimization Improves Content Reusability

Content is easily discoverable and reusable if it is semantically aware and structurally rich. Usually, this is common in technical documentation, however, it is becoming a popular approach in creating business document materials such as contracts, proposals, policies, or marketing collaterals.

In addition to that, intelligent content is easy to readapt across various platforms for particular audiences or multichannel use. This content can be adapted in many ways to meet every new requirement. It is possible because the content is structured and intelligently tagged.

Why Does Your Brand Need Intelligent Content Optimization for Success?

Creating an accelerated customer experience for your brand is achievable when you have the right ingredient: intelligent content optimization. It delivers at speed and acts with utmost intuition toward your audience. Today, content signifies a crucial business opportunity for brands. Any process that is content-focused or based on an intelligent AI platform can benefit the most.

Here is a list of benefits that your brand can leverage with intelligent content optimization:

•  Reduces the development, translation-related expenses, review, and maintenance costs
•  Easily adapts to the different requirements of the channel and the recipients with very little intervention
•  Improves the quality and consistency of your content
•  Adds value through achieving maximum benefit to the customer and organization
•  Displays the right information at the right time to the right audience.

One of the significant benefits of intelligent content optimization is its direct proportion with sales, and ROI. Content optimization, when implemented correctly based on user interests, establishes good customer experience opportunities. While the customer experience directly impacts business sales. The better the experience, the higher the sales. Hence, this is one of the most crucial perks that intrigues organizations to start implementing intelligent content optimization to generate more leads.

Fundamental Components of an Intelligent Content Optimization Process

Behind the practice of intelligent content optimization, there are a handful of elements that assist to build the intelligence –

1. Leveraging XML to Accelerate Content Intelligence

This underlying technology is an integral component that makes intelligent content possible. It enables breaking the content into shareable and reusable elements.

2. Harnessing the Power of DITA to Maintain Format Consistency

Created primarily by IBM to tackle the changing requirements of business, DITA helps in putting the content in several output formats while increasing its effectiveness.

3. Web Content Management is Required to Manage Various Aspects of Content

Web content management is an important component of a successful intelligent content optimization strategy. Within this, content is managed and then distributed to the appropriate channels.

4. Authoring Tools to Enable the Content Creation Process

Before content can be reused or handled, it must be produced. Authoring tools equip authors to produce the content so that it can be reused and manipulated for various channels.

5. Content and Data Analytics to Help Establish an Edge Over Competitors

If you are working on intelligent content optimization, then content analytics can be crucial in offering you information such as engagement time or distribution rate. It enables you to collect invaluable information for relentless measurement.

Besides content analytics, data analytics is another crucial component of intelligent content optimization. AI is all about data and analytics; hence the data and metrics that you assess and record are in fact a miraculous tool to develop such algorithms that optimize and intelligently shape the content. These metrics for data analytics include customer behavior, preferences, interests, click rate, read time, age, demographics and geographics, and such critical factors influencing consumer choice. Exploring these terms with data analytics, and feeding your system with intelligently developed algorithms will do wonders for audience reach and interaction, and hence possible chances for a business to generate more solid leads.

6. Digital Asset Management to Distribute Digital Product Material

It enables the content creator to reuse the images, infographics, audio clips, and videos across multiple channels. As most of them need unique permission for printing, having Digital Asset Management (DAM) will help in downloading these assets upon every new embed.

7. Smart Marketing Automation Solution to Increase the Impact

This enables content to be delivered to specific audiences with unique narratives. Marketing automation guides the audience through the buyer's journey to influence better engagement.

Process of Implementing Intelligent Content Optimization

The first step to intelligent content optimization is understanding the process. The second, is putting forward the best plan to execute. Here are a few things to consider:

•  Recognize your brand’s requirements specifically
•  Create a strategy based on those requirements
•  Support the strategy with execution

Moreover, you need to

1. Find the Pain-Points of Your Business’s Content

Ann Rockley, the author of "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy", says that before going ahead with restructuring the content, you need to see how well your current content is meeting your audience's requirements and recognize any gaps in between.

Creating content without an accurate knowledge of your consumer requirements will result in ineffective intelligent content optimization. Use every possibility to gather information so that you can create and structure the content accordingly.

2. Select a Small Project

After you have gathered the pain-points of your content process, you can choose a small project first to work on. Choosing the small one will help you to figure out all the important elements for clearly established results.

3. Develop a Content Model

Content model is an important part of intelligent content because it clearly defines the type of content your brand creates or how to bring structure to that content. Creating content models is crucial as it formalizes the structure of your content in multichannel. Content modeling will help in identifying and documenting the structure for your intelligent content approach.

Case Study: Intelligent Content Optimization for New York Road Runners

The world's largest running organization, New York Road Runners (NYRR), conducts over 60 annual races and the famous New York City Marathon. With their expanded popularity across the world, they had a new challenge – to keep up with the increased organizational popularity. Their business infrastructure, IT and digital system were not equipped with the right capabilities to deal with it.

Icreon, award-winning Sitecore agency by Sitecore, helped NYRR to create a top-notch digital infrastructure to improve the complete experience of their running community. Leveraging the flexible intelligent content and tech assessment, Icreon was able to implement a high-level digital roadmap for NYRR. They did work with such an approach which ensured that particular technologies are deployed in a way that best suited the business and realized the long-term visions of the company.

Intelligent Content Optimization Minimizes Effort While Maximizing Value - Now is the Time to Get Started

The journey to intelligent content optimization can seem a little daunting, but the destination is worth it. While introducing it, be sure to develop a strategy for training and development of teams to ensure they have the right skill set to tackle this. Additionally, invest in knowing the current state to evaluate your content system and recognize the gaps that are creating roadblocks. Intelligent content optimization is a development priority for mid-market companies.

Want to know more about intelligent content optimization journey and how it impacts you as a marketer or brand? Explore Icreon’s Digital Transformation Services