What Is Sitecore Content Hub?

Content is a powerful tool that modern organizations utilize to promote products and services, attract and retain customers by keeping them engaged, and increase sales. But when multiple departments generate tons of marketing materials using various tools and incompatible systems, it becomes challenging to plan, create and control the information flow efficiently.

In this article, we discuss Sitecore Content Hub — a tool that provides 360-degree visibility of your digital media files and keeps you sane while dealing with them.

Sitecore Content Hub Definition

The very term “hub” means the center of some activity. Sitecore Content Hub is the center of content management activity. This is a unified platform that allows marketing teams to manage all stages of content production, including planning, authoring, publishing, editing, categorization, storage, creation of marketing campaigns and more.

How does Sitecore Content Hub work?

• The platform integrates with upstream software platforms that aggregate data, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), product content management (PCM), product information management (PIM), marketing resource management (MRM) and other legacy systems.
• Collected data is digested and transformed into valuable content.
• Through full integration with Sitecore Experience Platform and Sitecore Experience Commerce, the Hub delivers personalized information to your social media channels, CRM, POS, CMS systems, eCommerce websites, mobile apps, retail software solutions, and other touchpoints.
• You can analyze the performance of publications across all channels with the help of ML-based tools and use reliable data to improve content production strategies on the fly.

As you can see, the content marketing process is complicated, especially for large organizations that have to gather and handle copious amounts of fragmented data.

Sitecore Content Hub resolves these issues and acts as a facilitator, allowing multiple departments and teams to work as one. The platform provides a comprehensive overview of your digital asset landscape, covering all your digital touchpoints, audiences and markets globally.

Single, integrated, collaborative, all-in-one — these adjectives characterize the Sitecore Content Hub platform.

Components of Sitecore Content Hub

The platform integrates five solutions aimed at marketing and commerce.

1. Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM)

The DAM solution offers a range of opportunities for efficient and easy management of your digital assets.

Creation

DAM tightly integrates with design tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can upload images, videos, templates and other files, or create unique content and add metadata. Preview is available right in your browser.

Storage

All digital assets are centralized and stored in one place where you can share them with other users. Categorization and automated content tagging with the help of AI technologies streamline the storage of large volumes of data.

Search

You can quickly and easily navigate extensive media file collections and search for any file in a few clicks due to a faceted search system. It allows users to apply multiple filters based on tags, location and other classifications, limiting search results.

Users can also customize queries with advanced Query Builder or search through image libraries by thumbnail. The ML-based image similarity system can identify similar assets in a snap.

Digital rights management (DRM)

When working with numerous assets, don’t forget about usage rights. DRM makes it possible to document your content usage rights and check third-party assets to eliminate compliance risks.

2. Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP)

Marketers use this platform to organize the efficient process of content production, distribute data across all channels with a couple of clicks and monitor the performance of publications.

Strategy

You can visualize your content strategy on the special board and plan campaigns and posts in the publication calendar. Proactive creation of relevant marketing materials for various channels, regions and audiences will undoubtedly add value to your business.

Collaboration

CMP is a collaborative environment where marketing specialists, authors, designers, editors and other team members can work simultaneously. There’s no need to send emails back and forth, confusing file and document versions. Instead, you can instantly react to changes (comment, approve, reject) in the shared environment, and each member will be notified immediately. This means efficient workflow management, transparency of the entire marketing process and minimization of confusion during content production.

Distribution

The platform allows you to reach your target audiences at the right time, with the right information and via the right channels.

Performance control

Using KPI dashboards and metrics analysis, you will always have an overview of the progress of your campaigns and publications.

3. Sitecore Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

Use this platform to manage all marketing resources, organize marketing campaigns and control every marketing project stage.

Planning

You can plan complex marketing activities, including budgeting and scheduling for various channels and regions.

Production

With a set of out-of-the-box templates and built-in project management tools, you can create content for various brands and languages from scratch.

Team management

The platform’s collaboration tools align internal marketing teams (copywriters, product managers, marketers) and external agencies, allowing them to work as one. Thus, all projects are synchronized and each member gets insights into all activities and is aware of their progress and success.

4. Sitecore Product Content Management (PCM)

Centralize all information about your products for eCommerce websites, apps, catalogs, digital signage and other channels in a single PCM platform.

Integration

In this unified platform, you can integrate existing product data aggregated from ERP, PLM and other systems with new content to create a single source of truth. This allows product managers and merchandisers to stay up-to-date with the latest information.

Management and automation

Marketers, product managers and commerce specialists can collaboratively perform any operations with product content, establish business rules for content publication, access and automatically generate spec sheets and other product documents. They get a holistic overview of what materials have been published in what channels.

Localization

The translation and localization capabilities of PCM allow you to personalize your content for audiences in various regions.

5. Sitecore Web to Print (W2P)

With W2P, you can automatically transform content into printable material. The solution simplifies the design process and ensures brand consistency by checking that all print or digital distribution data complies with brand regulatory requirements.

In one browser, you get professional editing features, advanced typography and smart templates for various channels and languages that save you invaluable time on graphics production.

Due to full integration with the DAM platform, you can check content for errors and omissions.

What Can Marketers Do with Content Hub?

Let’s look at the practical usage of Sitecore Content Hub in a nutshell.

Strategy Planning

Source: getfishtank.ca

Marketers create a content strategy plan based on channels, topics, or other characteristics depending on their business needs. They can allocate publications by date and monitor their production status (idea, in progress, in review, completed) to ensure that needed materials are ready on time.

Authoring

Source: softwaresuggest.com

Another task that marketers perform with the help of the Hub is content authoring. They can create versions directly on the platform or copy them from other sources, share different file types and preview them in the browser, and review, comment, edit and approve materials in real time. It should be noted that multiple team members can work collaboratively.

Publication

Source: softwaresuggest.com

Stakeholders can access created content in the platform and publish it to different channels either automatically or after editing and customizing.

Management

Source: velir.com

To keep authored content relevant, you should have the ability to add value by making changes whenever needed. Sitecore editorial tools allow marketers to manage versions, add metadata and tags, apply personalization and localization, add new data and more.

You can also classify your media resources by numerous parameters and apply filters for quick and accurate searching through asset collections.

Measurement

Source: softwaresuggest.com

Smart analytics in Sitecore Content Hub allows users to measure the success of content across channels, visualizing performance in dashboards.

Benefits of Sitecore Content Hub

• Single platform — all digital assets related to your business are centralized in one place.
• Visibility — transparent marketing workflow simplifies content creation and management.
• Efficiency — unified data and improved project management result in increased efficiency of marketing activities.
• Collaboration — numerous teams work in the shared environment, eliminating silos, so everyone is equally responsible for the outcome.
• Integrations — Content Hub integrates with other Sitecore products and third-party commerce and marketing systems, providing more opportunities for marketers.
• Up-to-dateness — full integration with systems and collaboration between teams and departments ensure continuous up-to-date information across the organizational landscape.
• Saved time and resources — the benefits mentioned above result in reduced time, effort and money in producing and managing content.

Sitecore Is Worth Your Attention

A full-fledged system like Sitecore Content Hub would be an advantageous acquisition for any large-scale business with dynamic marketing processes and distributed teams. Since Content Hub is based on the Sitecore Experience Cloud platform, it also leverages cloud software development opportunities to the benefit of your company.

If you want to talk about Sitecore eCommerce development in more detail, contact our specialists, who have more than 10 years’ experience in developing excellent Sitecore projects.