Many companies are charged with managing marketing content for particular products or services. “Marketing content” can be anything from graphics and brochures to multimedia and television ads. But what are the characteristics of a good Market Content Management System (MCMS)? Experts agree on the basic attributes a good MCMS should possess:
- Enables firms to speed up their worldwide channel marketing campaigns
- Lowers or eliminates the distribution costs of marketing
- Uses each distributor to increase product visibility and market share
- Increases efficiency through the smart reuse of content all over the globe.
These attributes apply equally well to services. For instance, a vendor that sells restaurant equipment may want to have marketing information at his fingertips, ready at a moment’s notice. Purveying merchandise requires access to timely data that only a MCMS can provide. That’s because an effective MCMS improves the speed at which content is communicated and distributed. A good MCMS will use an industry-standard protocol, like SOAP, to allow users to customize their interactions with the system and allow them to integrate the data across many different systems. Workflows from different activities should dovetail around a MCMS without causing users to change how they operate. After all, what good is a system if it is so inflexible that it doesn’t allow you to do want you want, when you want?
The MCMS should manage materials from inception to distribution. The data model should automate content distribution, so that a firm can synthesize safe, online portals for sharing and circulating marketing materials to various users, including distributors, internal groups, outside agencies and even consumers.
Depending on what group you belong to – vendor, distributor, agency or consumer – you want to have an optimal user interaction with a MCMS. That means that the MCMS should display only the information in which you are interested, while filtering out unnecessary noise. This helps users with the ever more difficult task of working out the logistics of marketing materials correctly, so that materials end up arriving on time to the right location.
Other features you would want in a MCMS would include:
- a web-ready interface that automatically generates a thumbnail preview of every system file
- secure access on a material by material basis
- the ability to describe each system field
- content indexing
- the ability to convert content formats at will
- allow complete version control to monitor changes over time
- a full set of audit reports that show where content is being used and who is downloading it.
A well-conceived, properly-executed MCMS can save an organization countless dollars in increased efficiency and fewer mistakes.