Sitecore Content Hub is a marketing tool that gives users the ability to manage the entire content lifecycle in one place. Content lifecycle management is the process of planning, creating, strategizing, optimizing, distributing, and measuring content throughout its lifetime in an organization.
Every aspect from planning, authoring and collaboration, through to management and curation, publication, personalization and feedback of analytics can be managed within Content Hub.
Previously called Stylelabs (acquired by Sitecore in October 2018), Sitecore Content Hub consolidates other software such as digital asset management (DAM), content marketing platform (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM), product content management (PCM), and web-to-print into one easy to use platform.
Sitecore Content Hub Components
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<td><b>Sitecore DAM™ </br> (Digital Asset Management)</b></td>
<td>Sitecore DAM™ simplifies storage, management, distribution and control of digital assets.</td>
<td><ul><li>Manage virtually all digital asset file types</li><li>Reduce time to tag, locate, use, and share assets</li><li>Machine learning helps tag your content</li><li>Preview images, videos, layouts, and other file types in context</li><li>Reduce risk by enforcing DRM</li>
| Sitecore Content Hub Component | What it does? | Why you need it? |
|---|---|---|
| Sitecore MRM™ (Marketing Resource Management) | Sitecore MRM™ allows you to manage, budget, and control every phase of a marketing project. |
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| Sitecore CMP™ (Content Marketing Platform) | Sitecore CMP™ streamlines content strategizing, planning, creation, and publication. |
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| Sitecore PCM (Product Content Management) | Sitecore PCM helps you stay on top of all your product content for ecommerce and other downstream apps. |
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| Sitecore W2P (Web-to-Print) | Sitecore W2P allows users to self-serve and automate collateral creation. |
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The capabilities of Content Hub include the set up of online commerce, the management of omnichannel campaigns and content marketing, all in a streamlined fashion. This allows marketers to deliver the volume and quality of content they need at every touchpoint in a customer's journey, all in the one location.
What problem does Content Hub solve for marketers?
In order for marketers to offer personalized experiences for their customers and prospects, they need a large amount of content tailored to different personas at every stage of their journey, while also published to a number of different channels.This amount of content can be difficult to create, especially when a use of multiple tools, disjointed systems and high performing content are used. This is often made more difficult as content is frequently generated in multiple areas of the organization resulting in duplicated content and dysfunctional processes.
Sitecore's Content Hub allows marketers to work in synergy by:
- Streamlining their processes of strategizing, planning, creating, approving, and publishing content across all channels
- Managing content processes and workflows
- Giving marketers one platform to support these streamlined processes
- Encouraging collaboration
- Allowing them to understand what content is performing and underperforming, so strategies and plans can be put in place for future content
1. Planning
Sitecore's Content Hub allows marketers to plan seamlessly depending on their organizational setup. This may be campaign, persona or topic driven, or structured in other ways that make sense to your business.Using Content Hub, marketers can plan their content production and publication for a number of channels on a calendar, right down to the individual assets of the content that need to be created. A publication time, and production time are derived by back-planning from the publication time, to ensure all assets required for a campaign are ready on time.
This planning phase can also include the creative concepts and planning of the content, or it can be included in the next step: authoring and collaborating.
2. Authoring and collaborating
The next step of the Sitecore Content Hub involves authoring your content and collaborating between stakeholders to review, annotate, comment and approve content. You can author content directly onto the platform, or you can copy and paste it from platforms such as a Google or Word Doc.
Content Hub also contains features that make working collaboratively a breeze, such as:
- Sharing files
- Version management
- Preview of different file types in the browser
- Check-in/check-out, real-time collaborative editing
- Online review, comments, annotation, and proofing
3. Content management and curation
Once your content has been authored and approved by stakeholders, it will need to be managed and curated. Content curation refers to the process of continually adding value to your content to ensure it stays relevant.Some activities that are commonly completed in this step include:
- Version management
- Making source files available
- Adding metadata
- Applying personalization and localization tactics
- Adding structured data to content
Content management and curation is made easy in Sitecore through the use of editorial tools that allow content authors to highlight the most relevant pieces of content and best examples of their work.
4. Publication, personalization, and measurement
Other users can easily find content inside Content Hub to edit and publish it, even through offline processes. Systems can be connected in order to publish content to different channels, and content can either be made available for use in curated channels, or published directly uncurated.An example of an uncurated publishing scenario is content that is validated to be published automatically to the channel, without the need to be adapted and combined before it is published. A typical use case is product content to commerce.
Content Hub users can use a mix of both curated and uncurated methods for different pages or campaigns, i.e. automatically publishing product detail pages to the commerce platform, while also actively curating a set of landing pages.
Also, by leveraging Content Hub's analytics capabilities, users can measuring how successful a piece of content is in a certain context, using an effectiveness score.
