How marketers can speed up content velocity

Speed can be the ultimate difference-maker for modern enterprises and has an impact on everything from the number of customers to revenue generated. Those that move quickly and get ahead of the competition can stake their claim as the leader in a market, industry or even an entire region.

Data and analytics are essential elements of the digital experiences for marketers. However, while traffic and conversions are often the topics of discussion, many forget the importance of content velocity. As Gartner points out in their 2021 Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, marketers must “shift their focus from customer retention to new customer acquisition.” Understanding content velocity and learning how to speed it up can make it easier to acquire new customers while maintaining the ones you already have.

In this article, we’ll dive into content velocity, explain its benefits, and why you should consider optimizing your content workflows to increase velocity.

What is content velocity? (And what are the benefits)

Content velocity is the amount of content a brand produces over a set period of time, and it is based on the speed at which that content gets created and published to specific channels. Knowing content velocity is critical in our fast-paced digital environment as it’s vital to omnichannel marketing campaigns.

When brands have good content velocity, it means that they quickly react to market trends and stay on top of events happening on social media and throughout the world. The quicker they can do this, the faster they can engage customers and hit marketing goals.

Why you need to consider content velocity optimization

Optimizing and improving your content velocity should be a top priority for many companies, but it’s often something that isn’t considered. Here’s why you need to optimize content velocity:

Your competition is reacting quicker

With so many options at their fingertips, customers are likely to choose the brands that can quickly catch their attention. In many cases, your competition is likely producing content faster than you and at a larger scale.

If your content velocity isn’t up to par, you can find your brand drowned out when you produce content like a blog post for one channel and your competitors are producing multiple blog posts and simultaneously repurposing them for different channels.

Improve the content lifecycle

A content lifecycle is the collection of stages that content goes through from creation until it’s repurposed or retired. When the content lifecycle is slow, it can lead to a frustrated marketing team as content silos are created that lead to bottlenecks in production.

According to data from Statista, two of the biggest challenges facing marketers are creating content to generate leads and coordinating content workflows, with 54% and 21% of marketers citing these as their greatest issues. Speeding up content velocity can enable brands to overcome these challenges, remove bottlenecks and keep content production on track.

Create more data-driven content

The ability to gather data and derive insights is fundamental to modern marketing campaigns. Optimizing content velocity helps brands quickly gather more data on how content is performing, which can be used to create data-driven marketing campaigns.

Increase scalability

Enterprises that cater to customers worldwide need to be able to scale their content quickly. Improving content velocity enables them to do just that by speeding up content production so that brands can quickly ramp up campaigns and deliver content to multiple channels.

Better personalization

Personalization remains a major priority for marketers today and also one of the hardest things for them to do successfully. However, optimizing your content velocity makes it possible to produce more content at a faster rate, which gives your brand more ammunition to personalize campaigns. Content velocity also helps with localized campaigns as brands with good content velocity can quickly make adjustments to marketing campaigns and tweak them for different regions, countries and demographics.

Combining culture and tech: How a headless CMS helps speed up content velocity

Improving content velocity requires equal parts technology and culture. Without the proper technical infrastructure or organizational culture in place, content will lack the necessary pace for today’s digital climate. However, some companies may be using a legacy CMS and attempting to speed up their content production but seeing no results. Here’s how a headless CMS can provide the technology and culture foundation to really speed up content velocity:

Customizable workflows

Producing content at scale with speed and quality requires workflows that ensure the right personnel are involved in the process and no step is missed. A headless CMS provides customizable workflows that make it easy to define the content authoring process and get appropriate approvals handled quickly.

Multichannel publication

Content velocity is about publishing content to various channels with speed and efficiency. You can create content once and publish it anywhere with a headless CMS. Marketers can create content for a blog, easily edit it, and repurpose that content for different channels.

Content blocks

By taking advantage of modular content blocks, content repurposing and reusability can be greatly improved. Modular blocks offered by headless systems allow your marketers to quickly create new content (product pages, landing pages, etc.) independently.

Additionally, content blocks also make it easy to implement a strategy based on Intelligent Content.

Silo removal

By definition, legacy CMSs rely on multiple content silos, just to publish your content on different platforms and devices. A headless CMS can provide a singular content hub that makes it easy to access content and eliminate silos. Marketers can know where content is at every stage in the content lifecycle and make adjustments to ensure faster publication if necessary.

Build an agile culture

A crucial factor in speeding up content velocity is embracing an agile marketing culture. After educating marketers and other stakeholders about the importance of agile marketing and how it’s done, a headless CMS can help you to ensure that your team remains adaptable and can quickly respond to customer feedback.

Storyblok: Helping you accelerate content velocity

Swift content production is fundamental to keeping up with evolving customer demand. A headless CMS is a crucial piece of technology for marketers who want to speed up content velocity.

Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables marketers to take control of the content journey and speed up production as content gets published on multiple channels. Workflows are an essential part of the production process, and Storyblok allows you to define custom workflows and rules as part of the content authoring process. This allows marketers to schedule content and create a staging pipeline to automate content publication after content is approved.

Discover how a headless CMS can help speed up your workflows and content production while solving other content problems by reading: Headless CMS - How Does it Solve the Content Problem?