The case for amarketingcontent hubBy Tom DE RIDDER and Tim PASHUYSEN

STYLELABS co-founders

Brussels • New York • marketingcontenthub.com

1

THE MARKETING CONTENT HUB IS

THE CORNERSTONE IN THE QUEST

FOR CONTENT MARKETING AND

OMNICHANNEL

2

The case for a marketing content hubWith this booklet, we would like to sketch the context

and challenges that led us to come up with the Market-

ing Content Hub. In essence, the Marketing Content Hub

is a piece of software, but its greatest value comes from

how it extends the traditional business case for DAM

with a more holistic approach to marketing content. This

approach means it can better tackle today’s marketing

operations challenges – ultimately empowering your

marketing organization to add value to the company.

Spoiler alert: the Marketing Content Hub is all about

aggregating existing marketing content from other

platforms with newly created content.

3

We enrich and extend this content in a 360° interaction

based on a client-driven domain model, and support

this with creative project management and collaboration

tools, embedded in a marketing portal and inally facili-

tating the publication toward omnichannel.

We strongly believe the Marketing Content Hub is the

holy grail in the quest for content marketing and om-

nichannel that lots of our clients have undertaken.

This is our manifesto. We hope you enjoy it!

Tom DE RIDDER Tim PASHUYSEN

STYLELABS co-founders

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The coming of age of DAMIt’s taken an awfully long time, but we’ve inally arrived

at what might be called a milestone in the evolution

of Digital Asset Management (DAM). Across industries,

DAM is now irmly established as a platform, an industry

category and – for brands from startup to enterprise – an

indispensable commodity. What’s more, for the over-

whelming majority of customers, DAM is the irst point

of entry to the vast and ever growing world of marketing

technology.

And yet, the evolution of DAM itself continues to be slow

and, in many cases, painstaking. Even for high-end DAM

platforms, true enterprise scale and complexity remain

a challenge. Consider that there are still plenty of DAM

systems that treat management of video – the fastest

growing digital format – as an add-on feature that’s sold

separately (and, of course, at a premium price). Far too

often, DAM systems fall short of being the comprehen-

sive response to your marketing operation’s needs.

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OUT FROM THE SHADOWS

Where is the CMO?

A few years ago, just as larger organizations began

to replace their original “starter” DAM systems with a

second-generation platform, attention quickly turned

toward the other end of the marketing operations chain.

Analytics and user experience management, tools from

the ancient world of web content management (wCMS),

ofered all new insights into the customer experience.

For perhaps the irst time in marketing technology

history, the CMO sat up and paid attention. Finally, here

were tools that made it possible to quantify the impact

of all those expensive marketing production processes.

Measurability ofered what every CMO was desperately

looking for in this age of doing more with less - the

chance to justify the marketing department’s existence

and budget.

This newfound conidence has opened the doorway to

integrating new technologies. One of the results is

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that most marketing departments are able to focus on

content marketing and omnichannel. For those unfamiliar

with the lingo, content marketing means the marketing

message is built around facts and engagement rather

than fantasy. Omnichannel means that a company sends

out a message that is consistent across consumer touch

points, and that the potential of every channel is fully lev-

eraged by using the richest possible media and content.

So, where is the CMO these days? Front and center.

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HERE’S WHERE WE COME IN

The marketing content hubBefore we dive into the case for a Marketing Content

Hub, let’s size up the problem.

Marketing content is all over the place. Literally. We have

seen it sitting in cupboards and left abandoned in base-

ments. We have discovered it on hard drives. In Excel

iles and Word documents. We have even found it on

servers that clients had long forgotten existed. Mostly,

however, we’ve found bits and pieces of marketing

content on platforms that are (or in less ideal situations,

are not) owned by the marketing organization.

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This is where the Marketing Content Hub comes in. The

challenge is to get a 360° overview of these disparate

bits of digital content, add new content and prepare for

the new age of marketing. By connecting all the dots

– from fragmented infrastructures to lonely DAM silos –

the Marketing Content Hub helps minimize complexity

while delivering on the full promise of omnichannel and

content marketing.

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MARKETING CONTENT IS

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

Where is your

marketing content

hiding?

Remember, content marketing is about interaction and

engagement. It has real value for the customer, which

ultimately adds value to your organization. With that in

mind, let’s investigate all the places where these nuggets

of valuable content are hiding.

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marketing

content

hub

aggregate

distribute

agency

ERP

Legacy

ecommerce

documentsCMS

enterprisesearch

apps

CRM

PLM

MRM

supplier

marketing brand portal

creative project

management &

collaboration tools

marketing

content

repository

Sources of marketing content

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ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are em-

ployed by the older, more “serious” areas of an organiza-

tion, and are typically used to store inancial and logistical

information. ERP platforms are generally neither willing

nor able to accommodate marketing information, and

aren’t equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing

needs of most marketing departments.

Still, ERP systems do contain bits of valuable marketing

content that will eventually end up in a publication chan-

nel. Examples include product structure, SKUs, catalog

management of product availability, and more.

PLM

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems support

every stage of product development – from early R&D

right through to phase out. PLM systems are generally

very smart, relatively complex systems that form the

backbone of most industrial processes within product-

oriented organizations. Some of the information typically

stored on PLM platforms is useful to marketing or, at

least, the marketing-facing aspects of product manage-

ment. Examples of marketing content stored in PLM

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systems include technical speciications (e.g. “This power

tool uses 24V batteries”), as well as technical documenta-

tion and manuals.

PIM/PCM

Product Information Management (PIM) and Product

Content Management (PCM) are PLM’s smaller, more

nimble, marketing-focused brothers. Examples of

marketing content found in PIM/PCM systems might

include sizes, colors, and other customer-facing product

information. Although PIM and PCM ill a very real need in

product-oriented organizations, we’ve always felt that the

DAM-PIM distinction is slightly artiicial, and arises more

from the way software vendors package their products

than a functional reality. But more on that later.

DAM

DAM systems are generally owned by the marketing

area and are used to store digital media iles, including

images, graphics and other artwork, layouts, documents,

translations and occasionally more. If you’re prepared

to pay a hefty premium, there may even be some video

storage capabilities – though we’d advise against holding

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your breath. But all joking aside, DAM is one of the most

mature, and therefore valuable, repositories of marketing

content in most organizations.

MRM

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platforms, aka

Campaign Management platforms, have a unique role.

They’re designed to support and measure the overall

marketing cycle – from strategic planning all the way

through to measuring impact. The sheer scope of MRM’s

purview makes it a pretty impressive – and comprehen-

sive – solution.

But the reality is, most MRM implementations are poorly

executed. At best, these MRM platforms provide a bird’s

eye view of the marketing calendar and bring some

structure to high-level processes, but not much else. For

example, we’ve seen clients use pricey MRM platforms

for regulatory approval or even creative review – in no

way a full use of the platform’s capabilities.

Even in an organization where processes are mature and

the MRM implementation is elegant, there is usually still

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a major element missing: the way content, both data and

iles and their associated metadata, are handled, stored

and made available downstream.

CREATIVE REVIEW

Creative Review (CR) tools handle the upload of layout

drafts (or other creative collateral, such as video), as well

as annotation and commenting by stakeholders. This is a

very useful and well-deined scope of purpose that lends

itself perfectly to a subscription-based SaaS (Software as

a Service) ofering.

Interestingly, this is also where marketing departments

go rogue. There are so many good and relatively af-

fordable CR oferings on the market, a small investment

allows marketers to engage in all sorts of hijinks – like

avoiding CAPEX procedures and investment freezes, and

not going through the IT department for procurement.

AGENCY

Agencies are, for a number of clients, an important and

unexpected source of master data. In fact, some agen-

cies – though certainly not all – are better organized than

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their clients. The agencies that fall into this category tend

to keep track of the marketing content they create and

store it in their own internal libraries or platforms.

The business model for agencies, at least before the

advertising crisis, used to go something like this: Take a

fee on buying media space and use your creative studio

as a cover up. When the job was done, it was “job done.”

Since the advertising crisis, some agencies rethought

their added value. These agencies have begun to silently

store and organize your content for you. The downside is

it’s their added value and client retention tool. So letting

go can be either expensive or ugly, or both.

NEW CONTENT

New content that originates in the marketing department

often does not have a dedicated platform. This is the

type of content that is at the highest risk. It typically sits

on ile servers or hard drives with little or no manage-

ment.

That rounds out our review of the most common places

where valuable marketing content is found hiding.

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INTRODUCING THE DOMAIN MODEL

Bringing it all together

Now that we’ve identiied the many diferent places

where marketing content is hiding, we need a plan to

bring it all together. To make this plan work, let’s intro-

duce a concept that is central to our way of looking

at marketing content: the domain model – and how it

pertains to the Marketing Content Hub.

BUILDING THE SKELETON

The domain model is an idea taken from the IT world. It’s

built around “entities” and “actors”. Entities are the struc-

tural concepts around which your business is organized.

Actors are the diferent types of users that engage with

your marketing content.

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If we consider the source platforms from which our

marketing content is derived, we can make a few as-

sumptions about which entities come from where. DAM

will contribute rich-media assets and layout. PIM or PLM

will bring market, product family, product, and SKU. MRM

will ofer campaign, project and activity. And ERP will

bring brand, region, business unit and customer.

SeasonYou

ERP

MRM

PLM

DAM

Model Channel Agency

Brand Region BU Client

Campaign Project Activity

MarketProduct

familyProduct SKU

Asset Layout

Domain model entities

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Additionally, there are also some entities – things like

season, model, channel and agency – that don’t live

on a single dedicated platform. The Marketing Content

Hub can accommodate them, too – as well as any other

categories you use for your business. The key here is to

realize that the Marketing Content Hub happily ignores

domain models imposed by technology. We frame the

way we want our information to be structured, searched

and linked based on the way you do business – not the

way the vendor database was designed.

We also layer, mix and match domain models that tradi-

tionally belong in segregated silos and separate industry

categories. Content managed by DAM, PLM, MRM and

ERP is all related from a marketing perspective. So it’s

pretty silly to keep it apart.

FLESHING OUT THE MARKETING CONTENT HUB

With this basic structure of the Marketing Content Hub in

mind, it’s time to see how we would low in some actual

content.

There are four important steps to leshing out the Mar-

keting Content Hub:

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1. Aggregate

Content from source platforms is aggregated in the

Marketing Content Hub. Master data ownership of ag-

gregated entities typically remains with the dedicated

platforms. These entities are live-linked and aggregated

as proxies.

Enterpise

search

CRM

eCommerce

wCMS

PrintPLM

MRM

Agency

ERPSKU

Product

Spec

Manual

Proxy

Aggregate content through proxy entities

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2. Enrich existing entities

Proxy entities in the Marketing Content Hub can be

enriched with additional data or metadata. From a mar-

keting standpoint, additional content for an entity may

be required – for example, multilingual versions of the

beneits of a product.

Enterpise

search

CRM

eCommerce

wCMS

PrintPLM

MRM

Agency

ERPSKU

Product

Spec

Manual

Enrich

Enriching proxy entities in the Marketing Content Hub

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3. Add new entities

If new entities are deined, master data ownership can

be assigned to the Marketing Content Hub. This feature

creates an unobtrusive architecture. It also allows for

changes down the road without risk, such as the intro-

duction of new platforms or the phasing out of others.

Enterpise

search

CRM

eCommerce

wCMS

PrintPLM

MRM

Agency

ERPSKU

Product

Project

Job

Spec

Manual

Campaign

Master

Channel

Layout

Asset

Adding new entities owned by the Marketing Content Hub

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4. Document relationships

Once we have aggregated, enriched and deined new

entities, we can also document and articulate the previ-

ously invisible relationships between them. This is one of

the most compelling features of the Marketing Content

Hub. Not only does the software bring bits of content

together, it also allows you to see and explore their

relationships to each other.

Enterpise

search

CRM

eCommerce

wCMS

PrintPLM

MRM

Agency

ERPSKU

Product

Project

Job

Spec

Manual

Campaign

Relations

Channel

Layout

Asset

Document relationships between entities living in diferent platforms

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SKU 5526

Week

22

xmas

Spring

Ingredient

Product

Campaign

Collection

Chef

Season

Article

Recipe

Product image

POS material

Video

PROMO

Folder

Magazine

Restaurant

Customer

A client driven domain model in the Marketing Content Hub

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IT IS NOT AN ENTERPRISE BUS

Sure – the Marketing Content Hub’s infrastructure does

allow it to ill the role of an enterprise service bus for

marketing content. But it’s also a lot more. All of the

aforementioned features can be accessed through a

dedicated UI. Not only does the Marketing Content Hub

serve as a platform to pass information to downstream

systems, it also makes that information available to users

for browsing, searching and previewing.

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EXPAND THE MASH UP

While centralizing the content you have stored in your

enterprise systems through a hub is extremely valuable,

there’s also a whole world of content outside of the

enterprise that is highly useful to your marketing organi-

zation.

For example, imagine that you’re a fancy food retailer,

and your central strategic marketing organization is

setting up seasonal campaigns. Next summer’s roll out

is all about vegetables: heirloom tomatoes, Tuscan kale,

Food Waiting Room Search Uploads Admin

Inspirational mashups

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portobello mushrooms, that sort of thing. You probably

own some content – kale chips recipes, for example, or

maybe charts of heirloom tomato varieties. But when it

comes to inspiring all those marketers, agency creatives,

copywriters, photographers and that bunch of freelanc-

ers who you’ve never met face to face, there’s lots more

content out there being used. They’ll be sourcing content

from Wikipedia, grabbing recipes from Bing Food &

Drink, downloading stock photos, using Pinterest pics,

copying from blogs about seed swap events, quoting

write-ups on farmers’ markets that sell the perfect goat

cheese to match your produce oferings.

And on, and on.

It’s multimedia run wild, and the ability to gather this

huge diversity of content turns your DAM/PIM/market-

ing portal into a virtual mood board of sorts. It makes it

easy for strategic teams to present inspirational content

that can serve as brieings or springboards for everyone

producing marketing content.

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GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE

Creative coherence

Bringing content together and enriching or creating new

content is a process. Having a place to store that content

and make it available is paramount. However, supporting

and streamlining some of the underlying processes is

equally important.

In the diagram, this is the irst of the supporting lay-

ers around the central repository role provided by the

Marketing Content Hub. The second one is the marketing

portal – more on that later.

marketing

content

hub

Marketing or brand portal

Creative project management & collaboration tools

Marketing content repository

Layered: central repository supported by creative project

management & collaboration tools and a marketing portal

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Marketing professionals and their creative suppliers

have gained a perhaps unfair reputation for having a

deep-rooted aversion to procedure, rules and structure.

In most corporations, marketing is regarded as the last

stronghold of stylish anarchy. Some project managers

tell us that getting marketing and creatives to toe the line

can be a trying business.

And yet, there is growing pressure for marketing to get

organized. With CMOs desiring insight into their opera-

tions, structure is becoming inevitable. But do not grieve

for the anarchic days of yore – it is pressure, after all, that

turns mere carbon into diamonds.

Marketing content project management and collabora-

tion tools are the irst supporting layer that is added to

the core repository functionality.

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Artwork Layout Copywriting

Video

production

3D

production

Product

content

LocalisationTranslationInteractive

design

Typical content creation processes

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WORKFLOW

Lots of clients ask us if worklow can remedy chaos.

Frankly, it’s the kind of medicine that might cure the

disease, but will surely kill the patient in the process.

Worklow, in the sense of a ixed sequence of events

hardwired into a deined lowchart, is it for a factory, not

for a creative process.

This is probably also the origin of the reputation the

marketing department has built. When you impose

traditional IT analysis tactics on a much more luid and

diverse set of processes, it should be no surprise that

users reject the solution. Now, what would be a more

humble and constructive approach? The challenge at

hand is to support both project managers and creative

teams in collaborating in a quickly shifting environment

with multiple stakeholders on tight deadlines.

CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

We believe that the idea of project management should

be central when looking into creative and marketing

processes. The project manager brings specialized

knowledge and experience to his or her ield of work. The

Marketing Content Hub can complement those human

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assets with tools that support both the project manager

and the team.

Dashboards Calendar Upload &

submit

Reporting

&

analytics

TasksApproval

Review &

annotation

Comment

& rate

Typical project management & collaboration tools

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Our tools for the project manager add structure and

insight to the marketing process. Templates, which

relect best practices in the organization, can be further

tweaked on a case-by-case basis at any stage of a proj-

ect. High-level milestones can also provide insight into

progress when combined with productivity tools such as

Gantt charts and KPI dashboards.

COLLABORATION TOOLS

Within the Marketing Content Hub, team members and

external suppliers who participate in content creation are

supported by productivity tools that facilitate collabora-

tion. This includes the ability to upload, preview, com-

ment, rate and annotate iles, ask questions and manage

task lists.

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SETTING UP A DIALOG WITH YOUR

MARKETING COMMUNITY

Speak to the crowd

A second, outer layer around the Marketing Content

Hub is the marketing portal – one of the software’s most

visible features. It’s essentially web content management

(wCMS) functionality that can be used to embed the

application in a website.

The website is not, however, the inal publication chan-

nel for the content, nor a consumer-facing site. It is the

marketing portal targeted at the extended marketing

community of strategic and production marketers, agen-

cies, product managers, sales staf and anybody else

who engages with the marketing content.

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EDITORIAL CONTENT AND CONTEXT

Whereas the marketing content repository is focused

primarily on structured data, the marketing portal allows

you to add editorial content and context. A good example

of context for structured data is a conventional brand or

corporate identity guide. Instead of just providing com-

pany and brand logos, visuals and graphic devices, they

are introduced through their conceptual background

and accompanied by the instructions on how to properly

use them. Editorial content its the form of text and web

pages rather than data or iles in a metadata structure.

Examples are news items, blog posts or even micro sites

describing upcoming campaign concepts.

SET UP A DIALOG

The marketing portal also allows you to set up a dialog

with your marketing community. Now that you have a

channel where marketing people gather, you should

make use of it. The dialog can be practical, but we prefer

to focus on the more inspiring aspects - remember the

mood board we discussed earlier. This is where we can

challenge marketers and agencies far from the central

marketing organization to benchmark their work and

learn from peers.

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FROM CONTENT MARKETING TO

DEALING WITH OMNICHANNEL

Getting it out there

Now that we have this cornucopia of consolidated,

enriched marketing content available in our Marketing

Content Hub, it’s time to use it.

Enterpise

search

CRM

eCommerce

wCMS

PrintPLM

MRM

Agency

ERPSKU

Product

Project

Job

Spec

Manual

Campaign

Enrich

Relations

Proxy

Channel

Layout

Asset

Master

Distribute your newly enriched content

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First of, the Marketing Content Hub has made content

accessible via the portal’s UI. This lets human users

browse and download information, and potentially supply

it manually to other users or processes.

But the Marketing Content Hub also excels at structural

integrations in systems, platforms and processes that are

subscribers to the Marketing Content Hub. Let’s take a

look at those now.

CHANNEL MANAGEMENT

When publishing to downstream systems, the irst chal-

lenge is knowing what content needs to go where, and in

which formats. Typical downstream systems can include

e-commerce, websites, CRM and apps, as well as exter-

nal sites or processes. This is handled through channel

management. Every subscribing downstream platform

is registered in the Marketing Content Hub. A ilter is

created that covers just the content that will be available

to this platform – functionality comparable to a content

restriction coniguration for users. The ilter is also tasked

with deciding on the practicalities of how content – both

iles and data – is delivered. This part is actually pretty

close to the order processing options in the Marketing

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Content Hub’s shopping cart.

CONNECTORS AND APIS

One of the Marketing Content Hub’s best traits is that it

has a can-do attitude toward making connections. The

primary feature for connecting to other platforms is its

RESTful aka Hypermedia API, which boasts a full Level III

on the Richardson maturity scale. Come again? Basically,

the Hypermedia API is to enterprise software platforms

what USB is to electronic devices. That means you can

expect other platforms will have no problem connecting

to it. The API also follows any changes in the conigura-

tion of, say, the domain model or the metadata structure

automagically.

Richardson Level III means the Marketing Content Hub

is fully discoverable. Any third-party platform integrator

who can navigate a browser to the API’s URL is able

to browse the content that is made available without

technology or protocol roadblocks. From an operational

point of view, the result is that very little coordination is

required. Every platform’s owner can work on the side

that they know best with a very simple and clear data

contract between them.

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Next to the generic APIs, there are also out-of-the-box

speciic implementations for popular third-party products

such as ERP, e-commerce and CMS platforms.

DOCUMENT LAYOUT AUTOMATION

A speciic use of marketing content is in generating

document layouts for print and electronic distribution.

The creation of print layouts was one of the strongholds

of the traditional content repository/publication mix-up.

Let us explain. When you are working on, say, a product

catalog, the traditional low of the editorial process looks

something like this:

The product manager pulls a spreadsheet from the ERP

system and starts adding commercial descriptions to

the sheet. The marketing department sends the sheet

to a translation service that converts it into multiple

languages. The translated sheet goes to the production

agency, which creates the layout of the catalog. The

draft is presented to the regional product managers who

make corrections. The corrections are processed by the

production agency directly on the layout.

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Great! It works. But if you take a closer look at this

process, you’ll notice that none of the steps allow for

updated information to low upstream to the master data

owner. Though the printed catalog will contain correct

and translated data, there is no mechanism for reusing

that data in the next edition, let alone for other channels.

The Marketing Content Hub tackles this problem head-

on. It makes aggregated and enriched data centrally

available, and allows us to respect a strict separation of

content and design within our layouts. To a large extent,

this means layouts can be created automatically and any

corrections to the content made during the review of a

speciic publication are usable in the next version and by

other channels.

And for publications that can only be automated in part,

such as B2C materials, the Marketing Content Hub can

nonetheless combine aspects of layout automation with

creative project management and collaboration tools –

again a vast improvement over traditional methods.

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A FRESH APPROACH TO

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE

True enterprise

marketing technology

When we were conceiving of the Marketing Content

Hub, we thought long and hard about what enterprise

technology could be – and more importantly, should be

– to meet the vast marketing needs of today’s enterprise

businesses. Of course, that meant thinking critically about

all the ways existing marketing technology fails to make

the grade. As we’ve discussed, we’ve found that there’s

no shortage of expensive platforms that don’t deliver

on the business case. Still others we’ve encountered

seem to have been designed by acquisitions, rather than

software architects. And in the worst cases, they don’t

even deliver on the basic functionality and user experi-

ence that might reasonably be expected.

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FRESH, NEW TECHNOLOGY

As a marketing technology supplier with more than 10

years enterprise experience, we’ve had the opportunity

to watch and learn. Our approach to creating the Market-

ing Content Hub is fresh and new, but it is the result of

more than a decade of expertise and experience. From

a conceptual and technological perspective, the Market-

ing Content Hub represents a complete rethinking and

rebuilding of traditional marketing technology.

When designing the Marketing Content Hub, we used

the app paradigm as the benchmark. The outcome is

that both end users and administrators can interface with

it with the same ease and elegance as they would with

an app. At the same time, behind all that simplicity, the

software successfully addresses the myriad and com-

plex challenges facing enterprise software.

Based on our experience we carefully selected a con-

sistent, technology-driven architecture and technology

stack. No spit and gum, no corporate acquisition driven

architecture, and no repackaging. Just the right tool for

the job.

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ANY WAY YOU LIKE

When considering infrastructure and managed services,

there is a vast array of possibilities, and this means there

is an appropriate it for every requirement or scenario.

At one end of the spectrum is what might be called

the old school option: physical machines located in the

client’s own datacenter and complemented by managed

services provided by the internal IT department. If this

describes your company’s culture, suddenly upending

that structure is an unlikely proposition.

Moving along the continuum, we encounter virtualization,

third-party hosting, and what is now already conventional

– the cloud. From a inancial point of view, this generally

moves the budget from Capex to Opex. From a services

standpoint, internal management evolves into Software

as a Service (SaaS).

Bring this all together – the cloud, virtualization, abstrac-

tion, and the transformation of complicated projects into

more transparent service layers – and you arrive at Plat-

form as a Service (PaaS). DAM is now widely regarded as

an essential commodity. PaaS will be, too. And looking to

43

the future, this is obviously the direction the Marketing

Content Hub is heading in.

IT projects are often viewed as complicated and stress-

ful by business stakeholders – because they usually

are. Those who use enterprise IT services are fed up

with scaling problems. PaaS promises to change this.

Everything that is complicated or hard is made simple.

The platform simply works and scales as expected. If you

make an acquisition, your new employees – however

many there are - can get to work immediately.

Let’s look at how the Marketing Content Hub responds to

some of these challenges.

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TRULY SCALABLE

Lots of enterprise software makers seem to think that

two’s company, but three’s a crowd. We wholeheartedly

disagree. The Market Content Hub is designed to be truly

horizontally scalable so it can deal with everything from

the simplest to the most demanding circumstances.

With the current state of technology, this requires more

granular control than you might intuitively think. With a

No-SQL database in its core architecture, the Marketing

Content Hub leverages modern technologies to ad-

dress nearly all performance use cases while giving you

complete control over every aspect of the software.

FULLY CONNECTED

As we mentioned previously, the Marketing Content Hub

has a can-do attitude toward integration, which is central

to its role as a hub. It features a full SCRUD, Richardson

Level III Hypermedia API, a more conventional managed

API, and message bus. In addition, it has a great selec-

tion of out-of-the-box connectors for popular third-party

platforms.

45

USER-CENTRIC

Even when we’re discussing technology, our focus

remains squarely on the user. Consideration of the user

experience at every stage is central to the design of the

Marketing Content Hub. The responsive interface follows

a mobile-irst approach with attention to mobile devices,

tablets, and touch. The MVVM (Model View ViewModel)

approach makes the user interface snappy, consistent

and intuitive. After all, without users, there’s really no

need for technology.

46

MARKETING OPERATIONAL

EXCELLENCE ADDS VALUE TO YOUR

COMPANY

Where is the value?

What we’ve found again and again is that CMOs are

increasingly looking to demonstrate the value of their

operations. Now how does the Marketing Content Hub it

into that equation?

Value

Quality

SpeedCost

ROI triangle

47

MARKETING OPERATIONS ROI TRIANGLE

Let’s start by noting that simple return on investment

(ROI) optimizations can mostly be found in your core

marketing operations. Here, the number of parameters

you can inluence is not overly complicated – as with

most things, it all comes down to cost, quality and speed.

Together, these three criteria are the most critical ele-

ments in achieving not only return on investment (ROI),

but eventually value.

QUALITY

Although quality seems like a parameter that’s harder

to quantify, there are a few examples that yield sureire

results. Better brieings, and more eicient review and

approval rounds lead to better quality and increased

efectiveness in marketing deliverables. More accessible

brand guidelines and assets, well-deined localization

processes, and the use of permissions to limit access to

approved marketing content and source iles prevents

duplication and assures consistent results.

SPEED

Time to market indicates the agility of your marketing

organization and its ability to turn innovation or market in-

48

sight into revenue. The Marketing Content Hub supports,

streamlines and structures the entire marketing creation

process with tools that organize your strategic marketing

eforts, production and publication.

COST

Cost is the most direct and visible parameter when ROI

comes to mind. With tools to remove ineiciencies from

your marketing processes, both internal and external

costs are reduced. After the initial production of as-

sets, costs are further reduced thanks to the Marketing

Content Hub’s ability to eiciently store, ind, distribute

and reuse valuable marketing assets.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE & VALUE

By balancing and optimizing quality, cost and speed, the

Marketing Content Hub increases ROI through improving

marketing operations. We call it “operational excellence,”

and by keeping it in your sights, your marketing organiza-

tion will contribute real value to your enterprise.

You’ll see shareholder value increasing in the market-

ing domain as a result, including brand value, corporate

image, support for revenue growth, and contributions to

49

corporate governance.

STRATEGIC VALUE

Gains through better ROI are great. Adding value to the

company is even better. But operational excellence

can also allow you to succeed in strategic goals that

transcend both. Knowing your speed to market with a

controlled cost and quality level can allow leadership to

make informed decisions about initiatives or strategies.

Balancing cost and quality means that scaling up mar-

keting operations becomes predictable. And this is where

operational excellence becomes a tool in the decision

making process in the boardroom.

50

OUR ORGANIZATION NEEDS

A REPOSITORY TO STORE AND

RETRIEVE MEDIA FILES. REALLY?

The business case

Now that we’ve explored what the Marketing Content

Hub can do and the beneits it yields, the remaining

question is, how does all of this translate into a solid and

complete business case?

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the typical DAM busi-

ness case, as DAM is often a good reference point for

beginning marketing technology explorations.

51

The DAM

business case

The DAM business case we encounter with most clients

looks more or less like this:

Our organization needs a repository to store

and retrieve media iles.

Introducing a DAM will bring beneits of quality, cost

and speed to marketing operations processes that are

consumers of these assets.

From a functional point of view, a typical DAM project

will cover a relatively manageable scope of use cases,

such as upload, store and add metadata to iles; review

and validate; manage lifecycles; search and preview; and

transform and distribute. That’s about it.

Upload &

review

Store �les

& metadata

Manage

lifecycle

DistributeTransformSearch

Scope of DAM use cases

52

In terms of value, there is certainly a clear and undeni-

able ROI in a DAM project. But the scope is too narrow to

cover all the bases, and consequently misses most of the

strategic value we discussed above.

53

WHAT THE DAM BUSINESS CASE IS MISSING

Let’s summarize some of the elements we covered ear-

lier that touch on the additional aspirations or challenges

we often hear at the margins of typical DAM projects.

There are three main categories of possible improve-

ment here:

1. dealing with content marketing and omnichannel;

2. making collaboration more eicient; and

3. creating a marketing community and setting up a

dialogue with them.

Primarymarketingcontent is scattered

Collaboration isnot efficient

Cannot store andind marketing

content

Need to setup adialog withmarketing

community

Omnichannelpublishingchallenges

Leveragestructuredcontent in

documents

Contentmarketingchallenges

Multi-lingualcontent & marketing

localizations

Marketers,agencies,product

managers, sales

Use cases DAM is missing

54

1. Content marketing and omnichannel

The scope for improvement in content marketing obvi-

ously extends far beyond simple media iles. Content

marketing includes all kinds of content, both ile based

and non-ile based. In addition, marketing content is usu-

ally scattered throughout the organization, and there are

few places to store new content.

This is where the Marketing Content Hub’s capabili-

ties kick in to aggregate and enrich existing content,

store new content in a client-driven domain model, and

document previously invisible relationships between all

entities.

Entities themselves are channel agnostic, and this helps

create cells of content that are well-structured and clas-

siied, but generic enough to be reusable.

The Marketing Content Hub’s channel management

functionality then allows you to move that content to

downstream systems, complementing the UI driven

search and download options, or the automated layout of

documents.

55

2. Collaboration

Marketing creation and publication processes are evolv-

ing slower than we would like. Traditional tools still focus

on work in progress, mostly with annotation tools for

media iles, or on rigid BPMS-driven worklows.

But in our opinion, marketing technology decisions must

give precedence to project management tools that ofer

insight and overview to the marketing project manager,

and productivity tools to empower the marketing team.

3. Dialog with the marketing community

An impressive community out there is gathered around

your brand or marketing campaign. Now you need the

marketing technology capable of instigating collabora-

tion and conversations that align with your practical and

strategic goals.

56

The marketing content

hub business case

Finally, we are ready to present the Marketing Content

Hub business case. Here, we can build on the traditional

DAM business case, with a view to vastly improving it – or

replacing it altogether. Let’s summarize…

The Marketing Content Hub supports and guides your

marketing organization in achieving

operational excellence.

Operational excellence provides practical and tangible

beneits in your marketing operations ROI.

Optimizing the triangle of cost, quality and speed creates

the conditions for your marketing organization

to add value to the company.

Apart from these incremental beneits, the Marketing

Content Hub can help your marketing organization

develop insights that allow your leadership to make

informed decisions and achieve strategic

goals for the company.

57

A key aspect of the business case above is that there is

something that aligns with the perspective and responsi-

bilities of every stakeholder.

Let’s now examine the beneits for some of the key

players.

OPERATIONAL

The Marketing Content Hub empowers operational mar-

keting teams with tools and best practices that provide

guidance. Their work will become more efective and

their jobs will be more enjoyable at the same time.

MANAGEMENT

Marketing management will be able to deliver straight-

forward optimizations, cost improvements and success

in strategic projects. Management will also be able to

measure and report all of this to leadership.

58

LEADERSHIP

Leadership will have better insights, and be able to make

decisions conident in the knowledge that management

will be able to execute them. This puts marketing in a

position where it can be part of the solution when dealing

with strategic challenges.

IT

The Marketing Content Hub leverages proven yet

modern approaches and technologies. It is built on

a convincing scaling and integration model, and can

accommodate corporate requirements for hosting either

on-premises or in the cloud.

59

The inal word

With the business case for the Marketing Content Hub in

place, that wraps it up for our manifesto. We hope it was

insightful, entertaining and maybe even inspiring.

We strongly believe the Marketing Content Hub is the

way to go for a lot of clients across industries that are

dealing with marketing and creative production.

One of the concerns we hear frequently is about change

management and how all of this will impact your organi-

zation.

As a parting thought, we’d like to turn that around and

ofer you a new perspective.

Introducing the Marketing Content Hub can be a catalyst

for change – one that doesn’t impose or snub your mar-

keting organization’s operational teams, management,

leadership or IT. Instead, it can serve as a tool that facili-

tates, empowers and points the way toward operational

excellence. And that, in the end, is the type of impactful

change every stakeholder can rally around.

Thank you for your time. We appreciate it.

60

A CLEAR FOCUS ON MARKETING

TECHNOLOGIES

About STYLELABS

STYLELABS is a marketing technologies software and

delivery company. STYLELABS has a track record of

more than 10 years in delivering enterprise marketing

technologies for leading brands, media, retail and agency

networks in nearly every vertical market.

The STYLELABS headquarters is located near Brussels,

Belgium, right in the heart of the European Community,

with a sales and support oice in New York and Philadel-

phia.

STYLELABS operates globally with clients across Europe

and the U.S.

STYLELABS is the company behind , the Marketing

Content Hub software that is based on the vision pre-

sented in this book.

61

About the authors

Tom De Ridder

Tom is the co-founder and CTO

of STYLELABS. He holds a

MSc(Eng)Arch.

At STYLELABS, he is in charge

of the strategic and technology

roadmap as a cover up for his

true passion: collecting vintage

synthesizers from the ‘80s.

Tim Pashuysen

Tim is the co-founder and

CFO of STYLELABS. He holds

a MSc(Eng)Arch. After an

early career as an architect and

teaching architectural design,

he found himself in the market-

ing technologies space. Tim

focuses on the business value

and user experience aspects at

STYLELABS .

62

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Copyright © 2015 STYLELABS. All rights reserved.

March 2015

Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this document

are copyrighted by STYLELABS. All rights reserved. No

part of this document, either text or image may be repro-

duced, modiied in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical or otherwise without prior written permission.