Digital Marketplaces Unleashed
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push customers further down the purchase funnel by giving help and advice
build audiences and communities
bring traffic that ideally leads to conversion and thus to sales
give brands something else to post on social media and thus improve their social reach [9].
The foregoing makes it obvious that e‐commerce brands face a lot of challenges and have to fulfil many requirements to perfectly realize content marketing. Those challenges and requirements affect people, processes and technology, and some of them are shown in the next chapter.
28.2.2 Challenges and Requirements for E‐Commerce Brands Becoming Publishers
According to a current study, the investment in content marketing in Europe will reach 2.12 billion euros by 2020 [10]. This corresponds to a growth rate of about 330% in Germany. Nevertheless, spending the whole budget on media would not be sustainable because one of the biggest challenges of brands is to reach “operational excellence” [11] and the ability to compete with other market participants.
Besides, brands are forced to acquire new systems and tools to manage the content assets, define new processes with new or adapted methodologies such as style guidelines and editorial procedures [12] and recruit employees with an appropriate skill set, such as for example writers or brand journalists.
Owned, paid and earned media should interact to reach the aforementioned goals and the best possible effectiveness of a brand’s digital marketing strategy [13]. Using all three dimensions together is a tough challenge for many marketers. How should the process of directing publishing to the most effective content type at the right time be orchestrated? The most successful companies in content marketing generate a high impact because of their mature content management processes.
These processes can be divided into the three different stages – sourcing, publishing and monitoring content – and present many challenges and certain requirements, which have to be fulfilled to achieve successful online publishing. In the initial phase (content sourcing), a brand is focused on gathering information. Afterwards it has to be translated into meaningful content. What is ‘meaningful’ content? As mentioned before, publishing content to sell products is not led by a certain quantity but more so by the quality of content. It is still common to equate scaling content with simply producing more content, regardless of its quality. But that approach is flawed, as it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve more visibility when content is not that great [8]. The fact is that 73% of consumers get frustrated by irrelevant web content [14]. As a result, search rankings go down. However, brands that publish quality content such as helpful information, reviews, videos, blogs and pictures, can engage customers, satisfy their needs, and keep them coming back for more. Further quality content can help put an e‐commerce business on the map for other businesses or publications in the industry and potentially turn it into a well‐known name and trusted resource as well [7].
The second phase covers the publishing of content. While trying to integrate e‐commerce and content management, brands are confronted with the limits of technology. Content such as information on the product, and user‐generated content such as feedback, rates and questions, should ideally be found in the same location as the actual buying options, so both can be mixed manually or automatically and be easily customized as well [5]. Many e‐commerce solutions have become more complex over the years, but almost none combine all needed shop and content management features so far. Thus, a common approach to combining CMS and e‐commerce is to either use one product with simple additional features to cover the other requirements or to take two products and integrate them via different technical temporary solutions such as subdomains [5]. Managing products and content together becomes very important, and making this happen through tightly integrated CMS and e‐commerce systems seamlessly even more important. Thus, synchronizing a CMS with other systems such as the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system should be a regular feature of the development of any web solution that has a business objective, but is also a very dynamic process consisting of different sub‐processes.
In a last step, it is essential to monitor the impact of publications in order to continuously improve the scope of content, to adapt the content strategy when needed and to make sure that guidelines and regulations have been obeyed and will be kept in future by changing them or implementing new ones when necessary.
Table 28.2 gives examples of specific requirements for the content management process. It further demonstrates that insufficient content management – meaning content management that does not take into consideration different requirements – can involve risks to the organization in all three categories of digitalization: people, processes and technology. It also shows the importance of analyzing technological conditions, processes, data and regulatory requirements, because analysis – as a buzzword – will play an increasingly important role in the future of content management. Table 28.2Examples of requirements for the content management process
Sourcing
Publishing
Monitoring
People’s knowledge involved
Protection of copyrights, as the importance of ‘unique’ content has grown (especially since the Google Panda Update)
Protection of know‐how and data to prevent the unwanted access to company‐related data and content
Definition of internal company guidelines that define communication using digital channels and rules for meeting commitments defined therein
Process implications
Implementation of controls in CMS to prevent loss of intellectual property on internal/external platforms and networks, as well as regular proof of edited content to avoid plagiarism for example
Implementation of controls in CMS to ensure dual control and to regulate the release process, resulting in equal treatment of market participants
Implementation of controls in CMS to clearly define effective processes in case of a crisis such as a ‘shitstorm’ that ensures consistent exchange of information between digital communication platforms and a physical department (‘social disconnect’)
Technological requirements
Choice of IT systems that offer the right combination of costs and guarantee for right of use with due consideration of meeting rules and commitments
Monitoring of license agreements and access rights for research portals, picture data bases and more
Definition of authority concept and regular inventory of users in communication systems
Compliance check of tools used (especially freeware) and regulatory requirements (especially hosting)
Obligations to archive and preserve business records: How and at what intervals is public communication archived? What are the considerations for designing obligations, for example pursuant to commercial law or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules?
28.2.3 Content Management of the Future Putting the Customer First
From a current perspective, content management can be seen as a core competency of the digital evolution as its success is dependent on regularly changing technology, processes that have to be adapted in line with regulations and guidelines, and the involvement of people who have to be taught both of the above. As a core competency, it does not only leverage but also harm the progress of digitalization of e‐commerce brands.
What does tomorrow’s content look like and how will it be managed? Communication, sourcing of information and entertainment have become more interpersonal and individual already. This change has to be transferred to a company’s interaction with its customers as well as other business. Hence, customer service has changed and companies have to improve their CRM with due consideration of content management. Besides a neat product data base and real‐time inventory m
anagement, e‐commerce brands have to offer their customers diverse touchpoints such as owned, earned and paid media for example, as well as interactive communication with a focus on quality and meaningful content [15].
As demonstrated, content management is going to consider organizational and regulatory processes and technologies that allow extensive analytics. It is even imaginable that the term ‘content management’ will change into ‘experience management’, ‘customer engagement’ or similar terms that put customer satisfaction first. A direct customer approach will be one of the key competencies of CRM and content management in the future and companies will have to offer more direct, easier and more attractive ways for customers to get in touch with a brand – ideally automatically, as marketing automation is another key word for the content management of the future. That is why intelligent assistants such as chat bots could serve as a major interface between companies and users in future, as an interested party turns into a potential buyer or customer just because of an interesting conversation [15].
28.3 Chat Bots: Content Management System for the Digital Evolution
Chat bots – digital real time channels that are further defined as speech‐driven or virtual communication assistants [16] – analyze the context of the users’ messages and react to them. They usually consist of an input and output form which enables the dialogue with an underlying system or database. Hence, these systems and databases are being filled with knowledge and answers based on ‘typical’ communication and often follow pre‐defined patterns [17] and thus meet the requirements of the buzzword ‘conversational commerce’. Bots constantly learn the users’ needs by adding structure and fast and cheap information to the users’ lives (e. g. answering questions or giving updates automatically). As a result, user satisfaction is not the only benefit, as other brands can save money and time in their marketing operations as well [18].
Intelligent assistants get to know a brand’s customers better and better by exploiting smart data from conversations. Data such as for example gender, favorite colors and travel destinations are full of value for e‐commerce brands as they can be used to create individualized offers in the form of content for their target group based on a clear picture about them and their needs and wishes [15]. Bots are already able to automatically spread content such as news or brochures for a brand matching the information given by users [17].
Usage of applications that integrate chat bots such as WeChat is becoming ever more popular. The instant messenger has been developed much further than any usual messenger and has become its own ecosystem. For example, users can place orders, pay bills, book appointments and much more [19]. Briefly summarized, WeChat directly aims at peoples’ daily routines and satisfies their need for less complexity. Nevertheless, WeChat records lower user numbers than WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. But, an increase of almost 40% has been observed in the number of monthly active users between Q1 15 and Q1 16 from 549 million to 762 million, which is pointing to the way ahead [20].
Still, in the context of the digital evolution, chat bots have to be developed further to keep user satisfaction high. Currently, human intelligence is still strongly involved in the activity patterns of bots, as they either have to be taught by a developer or at least have to learn from conversations and interactions with humans. When it comes to situations that exceed clearly defined processes or simple structures, bots still regularly fail. Nevertheless, bots are expected to address even more (potential) customers in future and fulfill their wishes while working even more automatically and being able to learn and develop themselves further. They might be integrated into the operating systems of smartphones or tablets and thus be able to complete all tasks of a user on their own. Customer service will then reach a new technical level [15].
28.4 Conclusion: Digital Governance Framework for Content Management
Our conclusion is that, from a current and future perspective, content management can and must be seen as one of the core competencies of the digital evolution, as it provides the basis of any information shared with the (digital) public, which increasingly becomes important for digital marketplaces.
By segmenting the digital evolution into the three categories people, technology and processes, and by defining content management as three main processes (sourcing and editing, publishing and monitoring), we set a clear, however incomplete scope for our arguments within this theoretical article.
Within this scope, we illustrate the comprehensive impact content management has on corporate digital marketing instruments and on their economic objectives. We provide recent examples of German e‐commerce brands, relating to investments in all three categories of the digital evolution. On the other hand, we claim that insufficient content management can trigger risks and harm corporations. We show examples of requirements that need to be fulfilled for the different content management processes and the respective categories of evolution.
Chat bots as a scenario for future content management have great potential, but are not a remedy to fulfill the aforementioned requirements. Quite the opposite is expected: for increasing automation of the spread of content all three categories of the digital evolution, namely technology, processes and people, have to be equipped with profound know‐how. Enough resources have to be provided, and commitments, guidelines and regulations for content management have to be met and their compliance be monitored.
One basic element that focuses adherence to these rules is the development of a ‘digital governance framework’ for content management systems that defines clearly structured processes, addressing stakeholders both internally and externally. Such a framework contains the objectives of a brand’s digital communication as well as risks of content management, the programs used, structural and procedural organization and processes to guide monitoring and reporting operations in a particular direction. At the same time, this framework contains practicable guidelines for a company’s communication in general and enables decision makers to develop and live programs for the promotion of a digital culture. Fig. 28.1 provides as an example an overview of all the aforementioned elements.
Fig. 28.1Elements of a digital governance framework considering three areas of the digital evolution. (KPMG 2016)
The example of chat bots makes it clear that technology is going to develop further and will improve continuously and fast. From an ethical and economical point of view the question arises as to how big and uncontrolled the gap between technology and its users will grow. Accepting content management as a core competency for digital transformation will not be sufficient to fill this gap in the long term. An active, well considered implementation of a governance framework for content management and thus adaption of existing governance instruments would be suitable to meet modern responsibilities in this area and would provide an adequate basis for the future of a brand’s digital communication.
As stated above, we have only looked at selected examples to examine content management as a core competency for the digital evolution. In order to support the argument with sustainable data, we suggest to further examine this area in a scientific manner, e. g. through comparisons of investments within the three areas of evolution with key performance indicators (KPIs) or a mature existing content management with requirements of a given governance framework.
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