Why Media Companies Need to Focus on Editorial Experience

For enterprises in the media and publishing arena, getting their content out there is the key. Media companies are always on the lookout to generate content that is unique, compelling, and visually engaging for their audience. And they need to be able to do this at a fast clip because audience interest is fickle. If they are late to the party, the audience would have already moved on to the next item in line.

In 2020, media businesses aspire to deliver great digital customer experience with increased focus on creating personalized experiences, and prioritising customer retention in the long run. To be able to do this, they not only require the ability publish content fast, also the ability to do this on a large scale, with reduced costs. And one way of doing this is by enhancing their editorial experience. 

Not sure how? Here’s a look at how creating a better editorial experience aligns with media business' goal of delivering great user experiences:

Easy Content Creation and Publishing 

As a media businesses, you publish a huge volume of content pieces everyday, with each piece being a key element of your interaction with different segments of your audience. So you need to ensure that every piece is designed and published in a manner that will make it most impactful and engaging for its target audience.

The two key challenges to ensuring this are:

• The need to rely on a developer every time the editorial team wants a content layout that different than the one already specified/defined in the CMS
• The fact that the established editorial workflow goes for a toss whenever a new content layout is required, stripping content authors and editors of their autonomy and efficiency  

How to Solve:

What can be particularly effective here is to use drag-and-drop interfaces that allows your editorial team to easily design and create layouts for different content pieces. What you need is a rich content model with features that enable editors to not only write, but create visual layouts by themselves. This will reduce their dependency on the developers, allowing them to create new formats on-demand, and also ensure a faster time-to-market. And your enterprise can easily practice content management on-the-go.

Flexible CMS with Powerful Publishing Tools

If your editorial team has to worry about the underlying content layout and display challenges every time they want to create a rich and engaging content piece, they will not be very keen on doing it. And in the absence of impactful content you'll find your customers quickly switching loyalties to competitors.

How to Solve:

The key is to make sure that the editorial experience is solely focussed delivering content in it's best possible form, and that the editorial team does not have to worry about the technical aspects of execution. This would include:

• An adaptable, flexible CMS that can handle it all - from short news items, to long form articles with custom layouts, to landing pages with embedded documents - while integrating this into an overall publication workflow.
• A CMS that is capable of handling SEO, content tagging, inserting images, video, and more from within the publishing interface.
• A solution that enables Content-as-a-Service (CaaS). This essentially separates content and presentation layers in a CMS takes away the major concerns of an editor on how every single front-end would display content. Instead they can work with structured content, that enables them to separate content into independent parts so that every single entity can be edited or repurposed.

AI enabled Personalization and Detailed Analytics

The scope of work of a content marketing team is not just limited to pushing content. They also track engagement on different platforms, and look at the key metrics and analytics to continue with or tweak their content strategy. And this becomes even more important when they are working to deliver a personalized user experience based on interests and preferences.

But in order to make this happen, technology and solutions that enable personalization and analytics should be well baked into the editorial experience. Your editorial team should not have to expend a lot of time and effort in these activities if they are to do it on a large scale strategic level.

How to Solve:

• Choose a CMS that integrates seamlessly with analytics tools like Google Analytics an other available MarTech platforms to help you track your KPIs.
• Adopt tools like Acquia Lift for personalization and helping marketers optimize user experiences. 
• Explore modular solutions that can simplify tasks that are crucial for the editorial team to perform, but tedious or repetitive. These could be in the form of automatic content tagging, automatic content generation, and automatic content summarization, with  AI and machine learning models.

Omnichannel Capabilities

Another critical requirement of media businesses today is the ability to deliver content across multiples digital channels. However, this can become a nightmare for editorial teams when they have to:

• Put in additional time and effort in reformatting a single content piece to fit the display requirements of different channels.
• Work on separate administrative platforms to upload content onto different channels, because it leads to inconsistent user experiences

And when omnichannel is difficult and cumbersome to achieve, the editorial teams will never really focus on ensuring it. 

How to Solve:

Having a CMS with omnichannel capabilities will give your organization the much needed flexibility and space to grow. When your team can run a seasonal campaign on a microsite, publish and track content performance on your website, and push out that same content onto diverse digital consumption channels, all from within a single platform; that is when you have achieved a seamless editorial experience.

Creating Engaging Digital Experiences Using EzContent

While we've outlined what you need to do in order to ensure a good editorial experience, how do you actually bring all of that into practice?

EzContent is easily your best bet in this regard. It is a one-stop Drupal solution which utilizes AI and machine learning algorithms to deliver an enhanced editorial experience. 

It enables you to:

• Create and publish content exactly like you want
• Reduce dependency on the developers
• Use any front-end technology of your choice
• Manage your content and presentation layer separately
• Use AI and predictive intelligence for personalized experiences 

Curious to explore more? Download the e-book. 

Looking to streamline your editorial workflows and ensure your team is ready to keep up with rapidly emerging opportunities? Drop us a line and your expert team will be in touch.