Enterprise content hub: Centralizing your content & assets

Content marketing is critical for modern businesses. That’s because when they get it right, it can provide a competitive advantage, enabling them to differentiate themselves from competitors and providing valuable insights to their customers.

Businesses are finding such value from these campaigns that, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 28% of large enterprises shifted their paid advertising budgets to content marketing within the last year. However, to facilitate these content marketing campaigns, businesses need to rely on a large volume of content assets.

Enterprise companies have several digital content assets scattered across multiple locations. Centralizing them through a content hub can improve productivity internally and increase performance for localization and internationalization campaigns.

Let’s dive into the specifics of a content hub and explain how a headless CMS like Storyblok can provide the foundation for your content hub.

What is a content hub?

A content hub is a data repository that centralizes all of your content and digital assets in one location. Not only does it provide a home for your content, but it also enables content teams to streamline campaigns and distribute content more efficiently. There’s no need to search through multiple systems to find a piece of content; everything can be located centrally and is easily searchable.

When you use a headless CMS as your content hub, it allows you to centralize and distribute that content anywhere it’s needed. Since a headless CMS is API-based and front-end agnostic, your content hub can be used to deliver content to multiple digital channels. This includes not only your main website or social media channels but also mobile applications, digital kiosks, and several other IoT-connected devices in pursuit of omnichannel distribution.

Benefits of content hub

Using a content hub to centralize your digital assets makes them easier to find, but it also provides other benefits:

Removes silos

Many enterprises have siloed systems, including digital asset management (DAM), content management systems, content marketing platform (CMP), and more, scattered across different departments and siloed away. With a content hub, these silos are removed, and everything is gathered in one location to be more easily accessed.

Provides omnichannel reach

Organizations need to be able to provide content across several channels all at once. But that content must also be personalized and connected to enable seamless transitions from one channel to the next for consumers. A content hub provides that omnichannel reach and allows organizations to be more adaptable as new channels are introduced.

Easier integrations

We’ve mentioned how a content hub removes the silos that are commonly found in legacy enterprise systems. This also makes it easier for organizations to integrate new technologies and systems by using APIs. Which allows businesses to add other third-party systems relevant for a modern enterprise, including eCommerce systems, ERP, and more.

Better content quality and consistency

When digital assets aren’t centrally located, it can be challenging to maintain consistency. When an asset can’t be found, a marketer might be forced to use a poor substitute to complete a campaign. A content hub prevents such issues from derailing campaigns and enables an increase in quality and greater consistency across the board.

Increased speed and productivity

Marketing campaigns need to be quickly deployed to capture a user’s attention. This requires internal teams to be fast and productive. An enterprise-level content hub facilitates this need for speed and fosters greater collaboration and productivity.

Key considerations for a content hub

As an enterprise business, a content hub centralizes assets. But that’s not all you need it to do:

Workflows

Having the right workflows makes the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that doesn’t go quite as smoothly. With Storyblok, you can create your own content staging workflows for each stage of your content journey, allowing internal teams to test content before it goes live and ensuring that only approved changes are published.

Collaboration

With multiple people accessing your digital assets, effective collaboration is essential. Storyblok allows your teams to edit content in real-time and collaborate to ensure efficient content production.

Localization

At the enterprise level, content doesn’t only need to be distributed to one region or group of customers. It helps when you localize your content to meet the requirements of different cultures. With Storyblok, you can build an internationalization and localization strategy with the help of translations and other internal tools to serve multiple audiences across different languages and countries.

Digital asset management

Allowing your team to manage digital assets is an essential part of a content hub. Storyblok provides simplified asset search, image resizing and editing, metadata management, and more that allows you to store and handle all of the content assets needed to enhance your marketing campaigns.

Content governance

Content governance is a critical element of your content hub. Without it, content doesn’t receive the necessary checks for accuracy and consistency that can make or break your brand. Storyblok simplifies content governance so that your brand can ensure that the right eyes review content before it’s ready to be published.

Security & permissions

Security is a requirement for brands at the enterprise level and ensures the safety of all of your content assets. With a content hub, you can ensure that only content users have access to the content they need without interference from other assets. With Storyblok, you can manage users in a central place, implement single sign-on and even customize passwords and more to match internal policies. User access can also be monitored to ensure that only authorized users are in your content hub.

Content centralization and distribution

Your content hub shouldn’t just be a place to store and view content. It also needs to distribute content to multiple channels as necessary. As a headless CMS, Storyblok has the API-based architecture that a true content hub requires.

Storyblok: Your enterprise content hub

Storyblok is a headless CMS that provides all of the features you need in an enterprise content hub and more. You can organize your content and distribute it wherever it is needed, improving internal teams’ productivity and eliminating silos that plague many enterprise organizations.

For instance, UPC Business had been suffering from time-consuming workflows that made updating content difficult. Editors couldn’t add new content and make changes as quickly as they needed to, without assistance from an IT team. This resulted in longer production times to release new pages and marketing campaigns.

After implementing Storyblok, they immediately saw a shorter time to market and could more easily react to changes that needed to be made on their sites without having to rely on external developers. Also, a multi-layer approval workflow removed content errors and ensured a proper review system was in place for each piece of content.

Another Storyblok client, Education First, was able to replace multiple CMS vendors and centralize their content using Storyblok. They’ve since benefited from our Visual Editor that provides WYSIWYG editing, enabling independent content updates and reducing the number of bespoke sites by over 70% through reusable content.

Discover more of Storyblok’s enterprise content hub capabilities and see how we can elevate your enterprise content management.