Five ways a modular content model empowers marketers

Content marketing is no longer limited to the marketing and editorial teams who conceptualize and write content for the top of the funnel. It now serves the entire customer experience, spanning different departments and delivered via multiple channels. Training, education, customer retention, and sales enablement are just some of the areas of business that need a constant influx of new content. However, this huge jump in content complexity hasn’t been met with the content model, tools, workflows or processes to match.

When companies rely on outdated legacy CMSes, teams have to work twice as hard. Older platforms weren’t built for complex content operations and multi-channel delivery. Constant workarounds, workflow bottlenecks and redundant processes are just a few of the challenges that teams experience on a daily basis. Without the right tools, content and the people who produce it aren’t able to bring much value to an organization.

Content platforms and modular content models are one of the best ways of maximizing not only the value of both content and teams. Content is organized to support streamlined content operations, while increasing the quality and reach of each piece of content.

A content platform provides a modern way of managing content: it empowers teams to build without any limitations, thanks to a structured yet flexible approach. It starts with a modular content model that breaks down content from rigid chunks (such as a blog post) into individual components (such as title, author, body, multimedia). Editors can easily use and reuse these components to spin up new pages and layouts quickly and without a developer.

Content platforms like Contentful separate the content from channel-specific layout and code. This makes it possible to manage content for multiple channels from a unified content hub, reducing redundant work and increasing consistency. A powerful editorial app empowers nontechnical users to manage and deploy content across channels without waiting on their development team. They can spin up landing pages, make SEO optimizations, launch new campaigns and even build localized landing pages quickly.

Developers and engineers no longer have a backlog of editorial change requests and time is freed up to build more digital experiences.

#1: Autonomously publish and make changes to content

With a content platform, the process of publishing content is separated from the development pipeline so content operations are streamlined. Content and design elements are modular for easy reuse and are organized into a unified content hub. Editors can make changes, preview and publish content without a developer.

Impact: Marketers and other content creators can focus on content creation and quality instead of the logistics of managing content in different places and coordinating with developers. This saves time and provides a better internal user experience and more consistent customer experience.

#2: Create new localized pages quickly

Modular content with strong governance helps editors manage content being touched by different teams, even when those teams are located around the world. If you’re working with content in multiple languages, your developers can help you set up locales. Once completed, it’s simply a matter of selecting where you’d like to publish content. Translation can be done through integrated tools or through workflows that govern how local teams translate and localize the content. International team members can be granted access to exactly the content they need for their specific locale, without interfering with anyone else’s work.

Impact: Companies can build on the existing content platforms to expand into new markets faster with localized content while keeping global elements consistent.

#3: Optimize content and landing pages for SEO

Since Contentful's content platform is extensible by nature, it’s easy to add an SEO tool to help nontechnical users optimize content easily. Within Contentful, one example is Amazon AWS Rekognition, which is available as a UI extension. The tool identifies objects, people, text, scenes and activities in images and videos. It also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial recognition. This makes images stored within your content model searchable and automatically creates metadata for branded videos.

Impact: The flexibility and extensibility of a modular content model empowers users across the organization to quickly optimize content for SEO without developer assistance.

#4: Launch new campaigns faster

With a modular content model approach, developers no longer have to wrestle with rigid CMS architecture, babysit aging infrastructure, or build the same functionality from scratch for each new product. Without the backlog, developers can continuously ship new features and digital experiences that help content reach further and make it more reusable. And because content platforms allow parallel workflows among teams, all of this can happen while content creation is underway. When editors and marketers are empowered to manage content autonomously without developer hand-holding, both teams are completing meaningful and impactful work faster.

Impact: Content platforms and modular content modeling increase both developer and editor pipeline speed and decrease time to market.

#5: Perform A/B testing and optimize content as needed

With legacy CMSes, A/B testing requires heavy developer involvement to create and manage multiple landing pages and digital experiences. It’s a slow and cumbersome process which can offer results that are often too little too late.

Thanks to UI extensions like Optimizely, A/B testing on Contentful is a breeze for nontechnical users. Editorial teams can create different versions of content and layouts and monitor how each performs from within Contentful, with minimal developer help required.

Impact: Marketers can quickly launch multiple versions of digital experiences, test and optimize to meet customer needs.