Today’s marketers are charged with delivering personalized brand experiences that are locally customized, tied to customer history, and delivered through a variety of online and offline channels while maintaining consistent brand design and messaging and, in some industries, ensuring every word complies with local or federal regulations.
As if that wasn’t a tall order itself, marketing teams are doing all of this with fewer resources than ever. According to Gartner, marketing budgets fell from 11% of company revenue in 2020 to just 6.4% in 2021. But as the budget dwindles, the demand for content—and results—continues to skyrocket. The pressure is on for local and national marketers to meet customers’ needs for personalized, localized, omnichannel engagement on a shoestring budget.
With no room for inefficiencies like long development processes or review cycles, and no budget for significant investments in single-use assets, savvy marketers are looking for ways to streamline content creation and deliver big results with minimal expense.
The solution? Modular (or templated) content.
What Is Modular (or Templated) Content?
Modular (or templated) content is content that’s been divided into the smallest possible “blocks,” reusable components that can be remixed into any number of assets for any number of channels. Think text blocks like disclaimers, value statements, or product descriptions, and visuals like product shots, videos, or infographics.
These modular templates are created, approved, and distributed so that anybody with a hand in marketing campaign creation has easy access whenever they need it. This ensures national brand consistency—eliminating any temptation to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel—while customizable modules and fields give users the flexibility to create relevant promotional assets in local markets. Effectively, modular, templated content goes a long way in empowering every brand rep to create powerful campaigns.
How Modular Content Optimizes Marketing Operations
First, modular content means saving money on outsourced content creation. Skilled designers and copywriters are no longer spending their time (and the marketing department’s minimal budget) creating dozens or hundreds of one-off, single-use assets; instead, each modular template they’ve created can easily be repurposed in any number of ways, and that time and money are freed up for more high-value and evergreen content.
Meanwhile, modular content means anyone—from the CMO to a franchise owner or local sales rep—can create well-designed asset with minimal support or oversight. There’s no longer a need to start from scratch or go digging through emails for those brand and messaging guidelines. And, if an asset doesn’t come out quite right, there’s no more starting over with a blank page. Rather, with all the modules marketers need right at their fingertips, it’s easy to create beautiful—and on-brand—assets for every channel.
Finally, modular content takes most of the wait time out of the approval process, because each module can be pre-approved for use. When marketers use the content blocks available to them, they—and the corporate marketing and legal teams—can rest assured the assets they’re creating will meet brand standards and, where applicable, local and federal regulations. And a flexible system can allow for an approval workflow to be implemented, ensuring that if your corporate marketing team wants to review an asset, it can easily be automated.
Implementing a Modular Content Strategy
Modular content is a game changer for marketing departments looking for ways to streamline operations without sacrificing quality. However, modular content can’t exist in isolation—after all, the content blocks are hardly useful if users can’t access them quickly, or if they’re disorganized or out of date. Modular content only works as part of a company’s holistic marketing management ecosystem, with a centralized content repository or digital asset management system at its foundation. OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect platform is just that (and much more). From its content hub to its budget and inventory tracking capabilities, order management center, and more, U.Connect helps companies take control of their brands, serving as a central command center for flawless marketing execution and supply chain management.
If your organization is looking to streamline its marketing operations, starting by embracing modular content, we encourage you to contact us to talk with our experts about how OneTouchPoint can deliver phenomenal results at a great price.