Top 5 benefits of an effective content supply chain

In a recent blog about unlocking your content supply chain, we covered the essential building blocks of an effective content machine – and how you can make a big impact by taking a mini-ecosystem approach.  

With the fundamentals nailed down, you can start looking at what you’ll achieve with a well-oiled content supply chain. On this page, we’ll cover the top 5 benefits of a successful content supply chain and how your new approach will drive business growth.  

1. Increase productivity

First and foremost, productivity. According to Adobe’s 2023 State of Work report, 87% of businesses struggle to manage content through the lifecycle. A functional content supply chain will help to alleviate this challenge by clarifying processes, roles and responsibilities to ensure that each team member is contributing as part of a transparent workflow.

This is more relevant than ever in the current business landscape. The Bluprintx Enterprise Growth Report revealed that just 4% of business leaders are prioritizing staff retention and team growth. For the vast majority of businesses, that means the existing team represents the resource available going forward. In this environment, doing more with less from a staffing perspective is critical. Build a content supply chain that maximizes skillsets and shares the load equitably to avoid burnout.

2. Accelerate campaign production

Your content isn’t generating leads or driving ROI until it’s in the market. So long as it’s sat behind production roadblocks and approval cycles, it’s nothing more than sunk cost.

A streamlined content supply chain accelerates campaign production by clarifying the delegation of individual tasks, improving communication between teams, and simplifying content approval processes. In many cases, elements of the content lifecycle can be automated, with automatic notifications alerting users of their next task or review to reduce the reliance on manual input. Once it’s working, your campaigns will flow much faster from ideation to launch.

3. Reduce cost of ownership

A 2022 Gartner survey found that the average marketer utilizes just 42% of their martech stack capabilities. For 30% of respondents, this was due to the overlap of marketing technologies. Where there are redundancies and overlaps in your martech portfolio, it’s not just a missed opportunity – it’s excess cost and a drain on revenue. 

As part of your content supply chain setup, you’ll meticulously review every element of the content process. You’ll identify which platforms are delivering value, and which are no longer necessary. By consolidating licenses and maximizing core resources, you’ll reduce total cost of ownership and even improve platform adoption by simplifying the stack that your team uses. 

4. Boost campaign ROI

Cutting costs through license consolidation is one way to boost campaign ROI – but it’s not the only revenue benefit you’ll see from an effective content supply chain. By virtue of improving campaign velocity, and leveraging better insights to deliver higher quality campaigns, you’ll see greater impact from your content. More traffic, more leads, more conversions. More of the metrics that matter.

With a digital asset management integration as part of your content lifecycle, you can step up content reuse. Do more with your most successful assets, or personalize and iterate on existing content to serve new audiences. This way, you’re creating more content without investing in production from scratch. Lower cost to create, better ROI.

5. Improved compliance 

Introducing a content supply chain involves creating more robust processes and an audit trail for approval management. Everything that goes live across your marketing channels will be checked and approved with a paper trail to prove it. This mitigates risk from a compliance perspective, and supports a quality approach across the board. Depending on your industry and its requirements, our recommendation is to document an approval matrix which clarifies which topics and assets require which approvals. For example, high-risk content might need the green light from your legal team, whereas day-to-day social media discourse might sit with your marketing team alone. This way, no matter what you’re publishing, you know you’re covered.  

With demand for content growing, it’s never been more important to take a structured approach to your content lifecycle. Your content supply chain will unlock benefits across the business, from individual improvements that reduce workload to hard hitting revenue growth that supports the bottom line.