How to Streamline Content Workflows with Content Orchestration

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the content you produce and post? Content marketing is an essential part of any business strategy, with 97% of marketers saying their content marketing brought success in 2023. However, when you’re managing multiple social media platforms, your website, and other channels, it can sometimes seem that content management is a Herculean task. 

Managing workflows efficiently and remembering what needs to be posted, where, and when can be challenging. Businesses benefit from having workflows streamlined where possible to make things easier on the teams responsible for them. The best way to achieve this with content workflows is with content orchestration. But what exactly is content orchestration, and how do you use it?

What Is Content Orchestration?

Think of a symphony orchestra and a conductor bringing together multiple instruments to produce a beautiful piece of music. In effect, content orchestration is about combining multiple sources of content marketing, aggregating content, placing it in a centralized workflow (or workflows), and then distributing it to endpoints such as websites, social media platforms, and apps.

Why Choose Content Orchestration?

Imagine that same orchestra but without a conductor. Even with brilliant musicians, a lack of organization creates chaos, and content is no different. Even the best content can get buried by your current workflows if they are awkward and disorganized, causing confusion. One solution is migrating your content management system (CMS), which can be costly.

Content orchestration allows you to create a more efficient process that avoids those costs and makes your processes and systems more efficient. It organizes and centralizes your content, whatever the type, so you can more effectively distribute it to your end sources. This can dramatically reduce the likelihood of any errors and can help make your CMS more efficient.

You can also use automation and AI to distribute content to multiple channels and platforms, making content management more manageable, especially if you’re producing high volumes. Content orchestration can also help with your personalization efforts, allowing you to achieve this from a centralized source rather than doing so for each platform you use. 

How to Use Content Orchestration

Content orchestration is vital for your business, whether as a standalone strategy or as part of a wider IT modernization that includes enterprise architecture EA. As with any new systems or changes, you need to plan out the process carefully and identify each step you will take. 

1. Integration 

Your content may be in multiple places, so you must connect these locations via a DXP (digital experience platform) and an iPaaS (Integration platform as a service) platform. This is the starting point of your content centralization, as the iPaaS platform will use RESTful APIs to connect with the various CMSs you use. 

Once those connections have been established, you can access any content you have created, synchronize it, and migrate it between different points. This is a significant improvement on traditional point-to-point systems, which are susceptible to bottlenecks. Integration allows easier packaging of all your digital content and immediately streamlines your workflows. 

2. Aggregation

Now that you have integrated all your content data with your iPaaS, data aggregation will help you gain insights from it. The iPaaS platform will have various tools that you can use to map the data between the various CMS sources and define any transformations that occur. 

This enables you to build automated workflows which in turn trigger actions based on predetermined events. For example, when you update the content in one CMS for a blog on business process transformation, this can be set to trigger actions in any other CMSs so that your content is adapted to the target CMS. 

3. Orchestration and Governance

Once you have a centralized repository for data and connected CMSs, the next step is to automate the management of your content workflows and processes. You can define and automate various jobs related to your content, such as creation, approval, distribution, and publishing. You can also automate workflows that log information about any updates (who, what, when, etc.) and highlight any errors made. 

For example, if you want to make a specific post three times a week, you can analyze your data to learn that 10 am on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are the optimum times and days for your targets. You can then automate the content posting so it automatically appears on those days and at those times.

You can also assign permissions to avoid mistakes such as duplication. This can be especially helpful for larger organizations with multiple content outlets such as email marketing, websites, and social media platforms. By orchestrating and governing every step of your content process, things become easier for everyone involved.

4. Content Segmentation 

Just as you apply segmentation to your marketing tactics, you should consider doing the same with your content. You do not necessarily want every piece of content you produce to go to the same audience, which means you need to segment it according to different factors. For example, you may have Enterprise search content specific to certain segments of your target audience. 

During the orchestration process, you can tag different content and assign metadata based on defined criteria or rules, allowing your editors to link that content with the various segments you have created. This means audiences from a specific segment will see associated content when they visit your social media platforms or website. 

Content segmentation is a way of personalizing content to ensure that your audiences see the content that is most relevant to them and most likely to be engaging. This can be a crucial factor in a successful content strategy. 

5. Content Delivery 

The final stage in using content orchestration to streamline your workflows is to ensure content delivery to the right targets. You may have multiple channels in use, so knowing that the right content goes to the right place is of paramount importance. There are two different ways in which you might use content delivery:

• One-way: With one-way content delivery, you produce (i.e., write, edit, schedule, and publish) your content and then deliver it to the target channels from one place. You can communicate with other websites using components or use APIs to communicate with apps and social media channels. 
• Two-way: In a two-way process, you use an iPaaS platform to pull content from multiple sources. This content is automatically aggregated, managed, and edited before you send it back out. It may be sent to the source it came from or to different targets. This allows you to manage accuracy and consistency across all content channels more effectively.

Barriers to Effective Content Orchestration

As with any process change, content orchestration comes with challenges. Knowing how those challenges affect you means you can plan for them and mitigate any negative effects. Larger organizations tend to mean more challenges as larger businesses tend to produce extremely high volumes of content. Potential challenges include:

• Legacy systems: If you have an outdated legacy system, you may face challenges in building effective workflows. Consider modernization or migrating your system to the cloud. 
• Silos: If you have siloed teams and departments, you will likely have siloed systems. This can be a major barrier to collaboration and can make orchestration difficult unless addressed. 
• Lack of standardization: If your infrastructure lacks the ability to use standardized configurations, your orchestration may fail on a business-wide basis. 
• Disconnected workflows: Even if your workflows are parallel, disconnection may lead to duplication and inconsistent customer experience. 
• Outdated systems: If your infrastructure and systems lack an adequate level of digitization and the ability to automate, you may need to consider bringing them up to the required level. 
• Time: If you want to streamline your workflows, you will first need to streamline the stakeholder communication and approval processes. 
• Spread: If you have a high volume of digital assets spread across multiple storage systems, you may need to consider consolidating that storage.
• Manual: If data entry and management are still done manually, you may need to look at integrating that data with your CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), or PIM (product information management) systems. 

The Takeaway

Every business understands the importance of quality, timely content. Whether textual or visual, it helps engage with customers and partners and is a crucial component in any organization’s sales and marketing funnels. However, as the volume of content grows exponentially, it becomes more difficult to manage it efficiently and avoid bottlenecks.

Content orchestration can help you to achieve efficient management. It allows you to streamline and automate workflows so that the right content gets to the right people every time. While of particular use to businesses that produce high volumes of content, a good content orchestration strategy can help any size of business achieve content efficiency.