What is a content hub?

A content hub is a centralized online collection of content. It acts as home base for all your digital content, helping streamline and simplify every part of a marketer’s job as part of an all-in-one solution.

In many organizations, marketing content is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Divided across many workstreams, digital marketing teams usually have a lot of high-quality digital content in various formats and locations.

How can you get a 360-degree overview of your assets? How do you manage and share them while driving a cohesive and impactful content strategy? A marketing hub for your content is the answer.

A content hub primes you to better tackle today’s marketing operations challenges. Many use a hub-and-spoke model to provide a clear view of specific content, organizing it into main topics and subtopics, so that users can find and repurpose specific content to maximize interaction, optimization, and engagement, while improving the user experience.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Having a massive volume of relevant content or digital assets available for your organization’s marketing efforts is often a point of pride...right up until you need to access a piece of content on a specific topic. You might have case studies on a laptop, in-depth whitepapers on a USB flash drive, infographics and photos on an external hard drive, landing pages on your website, templates in your CMS, and webinars, videos, and podcasts in the cloud.

You know it all exists somewhere, but you ultimately lose time and resources, and risk duplication in your attempts to find and wrangle it all. This is where digital asset management (DAM) steps in to save the day:

It acts as the single source of truth for the distribution of marketing assets and allows your team to curate a content library for existing content.

Done right, a DAM offers more than just basic storage. It should be fully equipped to handle elaborate digital asset management scenarios, including complex metadata, security, and digital rights management.

Far beyond simply being a valuable addition to a company’s marketing efforts, a robust DAM is an indispensable commodity for brands today, from startups to enterprises.

Content Marketing Platform (CMP)

Do you have all the content you need to support your marketing efforts? Where are the gaps in content – by audience, region, channel, or campaign? What types of content do you need to create? A content marketing platform helps you answer these questions and makes it easy to plan and execute your content marketing strategy. With this tool, it’s easy to plan your content creation roadmap, assign resources, and create workflows to collaborate, review, and approve these content pieces for publication across your different channels.

Product Content Management (PCM)

As the name suggests, Product Content Management (PCM) is a system that stores information related to products in product-oriented, SKU-heavy organizations. PCM systems focus on customer-facing product information, such as commercial descriptions, benefits, translated content, and media.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

MRM platforms have a unique role: they support and measure marketing operations, from strategic planning to project management and measuring impact.

MRMs are solutions that have a broad scope of capabilities, from marketing calendars, creative reviews, approval management, performance dashboards, and more. When they’re leveraged to their full potential, they are as impressive as they are comprehensive.

As we’ve reviewed, a content hub blends and replaces traditional silos of DAM, CMP, PCM, and MRM as well as other capabilities. It acts as a home base for all your digital assets, as well as for collaboration and creative project management tools. Storing all that content and making it available is one thing; fostering creative coherence is another.

Supporting and streamlining the underlying processes for bringing assets together, optimizing content for search engine optimization (SEO), and creating new content that drives conversion rates, improves lead generation, and reaches your target audience at critical points in their customer journey is just as important.

Getting teams to work together better

Merging creative and marketing processes and foster collaboration in a quickly shifting environment with multiple stakeholders on tight deadlines is a challenge nearly all organizations face.

A content hub offers tools that support both the project managers and the creative team, such as dashboards, calendars, task lists, and more. These tools give project managers insight and help them add structure to the creative process, while keeping milestones, metrics, and KPIs in sight. Features that allow teams to upload, preview, and comment on assets also facilitate collaboration between internal and external teams.

When choosing a content hub, make sure it has a can-do attitude toward making connections — in other words, one that easily integrates with other platforms. Next to generic APIs, your content hub should have out-of-the-box implementations for third-party marketing technology such as ERP, e-commerce, and content management systems (CMS) platforms.

That way, every platform’s owner can work on the side they know best, because the content is available without technology or protocol roadblocks.

Learn how Sitecore Content Hub can help you deliver it all in one comprehensive, user-friendly solution.