Many organizations produce enormous amounts of content that is mostly redundant. There is a need for a service capable of aggregating different types of content across multiple sources to connect disparate applications. Content services provide guidelines on how content should be managed in business processes.
It discards the contemporary way of getting all your content on a single platform. It relies on your business strategy and new initiatives, such as cloud computing technologies, to store your data. Content services provide solutions for increasing quality website traffic and encouraging conversions by helping you focus your efforts on the right place.
Organizations are looking to consolidate their content services using cloud-based services that are easy to deploy, configure, and operate.
What Is a Content Service?
According to Gartner, “content service is a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.”
Content services are integrated or available as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories to exploit diverse content types and serve multiple use cases in the organization. Content services contain platforms, applications, and components that manage your content.
These are the building blocks upon which you build your solutions. Businesses can use content services to leverage their needs. Vendors or business partners can devise a tailor-made solution to address specific horizontal or verticals if there are repeatable actions.
Content service platforms provide innovative ways to manage content across organizations. They don’t record every bit of information. Rather, they create expansive repositories that are linked with APIs to different elements of the organization.
Platforms, Applications, and Components
A content-service platform consists of a platform, application, and component. Content service platforms have their own repository and can easily integrate with other repositories. They perform document management, searches, indexing, workflow, version control, calculate analytics, and maintain other content service software. It supports various deployment options, such as on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.
Content service applications are developed for specific use cases that are industry-specific or business-specific and integrate various workflows in the organization. Overall, it provides a solution to a distinct, content-driven business problem. Examples of content service applications are correspondence management, case and claims management, contracts management, and patient records management.
Content services components are additional plugins or extensions that extend the capabilities of the application or platform. Services may come from multiple platforms or providers, and you can add functionalities by including plugins in the platform.
Content Service Platform vs. Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provides a single repository for disparate applications, like documents, web pages, and rich media files. Maintaining disparate applications in a single platform is difficult as the difference between their use cases is drastic.
The focus slowly shifted to content management, which was later termed content services, which are focused on business strategy rather than technology. This platform considers upcoming technologies by providing plugins, keeping in mind what is happening currently in digital marketing.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has evolved into a content service platform for content management. The content is saved in huge storage repositories, eliminating the problems of versioning and redundancies.
Content Services Offered
Businesses take advantage of content services by allowing the integration of different content services, platforms, and applications to save time and money while producing lasting operational benefits.
Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management
It is a daunting task to ensure that the content created in the organization falls in line with compliance standards. Content creators, designers, social media managers, videographers, and other creative content developers play a pivotal role in developing marketing regulatory compliance.
The content management process includes content creation, versioning, real-time modifications, and approvals from stakeholders that require many marketing compliance responsibilities, like:
- Circulate the updated content version in the right sequence for review and approval.
- Storing source files and final versions in an acceptable format and location.
- Ensuring that your brand’s content development meets your standards, such as the colors and logo.
Content service platforms provide a way of automating the content marketing strategy that replaces the routine processes so that it doesn’t slow down creativity and productivity.
Retention and Dissemination of Business Knowledge
Content services provide a platform to share real-time and automated knowledge. Employees with expertise can pass on their knowledge to different teams, breaking down knowledge silos. It retains the relevant information and discards the content that’s no longer important.
An AI-powered content service platform ensures that your employees can easily access and share knowledge from one centralized place. An integrated content service platform gives you the right tools to empower the team.
Process Efficiency
The unified content service platform manages the workflow efficiently as it:
- It makes accessing the right content easier.
- It helps to bridge information silos.
- Integrates content from multiple channels.
- Develops a faster application development process for content management.
- Adheres to the frequently updating compliances.
Innovation and a New Way of Working
Instead of providing an in-house solution, all the information can be migrated to a cloud platform. Businesses can utilize cloud computing tools for easy access and retrieval of information. Content marketing strategies include working with orders, legal documents, and client correspondence.
All these require AI-powered tools to classify documents, and data extraction, reduce manual processes, decrease errors and increase efficiency.
Repository Agnosticism
An agnostic repository is a generalized element that is interoperable and does not stop the content from coming from different sources. The burden of identifying, capturing, and centralizing can be done from where the content was originally created. The content can be easily accessed and properly governed while breaking down the information silos. It also facilitates applying advanced analytics to improve decision-making.
Empower Knowledge Workers
The content service platform provides a platform for delivering the required content to the management at the right time. Users can access and interact with the data they need from within the organization using a customized workspace.
Improving Information Access and Sharing
The content service platform is enabled by intelligent, automated metadata and cataloging capabilities that ensure the content is managed throughout its entire lifecycle. Also, it enables quick search, retrieval, and processing services with content service solutions. The main aim is to automate and manage the flow of content within and across different departments to meet business requirements.
How to Boost Traffic Using Content Services
A content management strategy includes research, planning, writing content, editing, publishing, and optimizing. The content cycle combines various AI-powered applications or tools for writing an article and tweaking it with SEO factors. The research, competitor analysis, editing, and publishing software are embedded in a unified platform.
Content Strategies
The most dominant phase of the content cycle is content creation. Blogs are the most liked form of content, including other types of content, such as gifs and jpegs. Podcasts and videos add value to your post and keep your readers on your page for longer.
The ultimate goal of the content strategy is conversion and sales. In the sales funnel, the user is at the top, and the blog articles bring awareness to your brand. Social media posts give your brand the right exposure and take the users to the next level of the funnel.
Newsletters include product releases, company news, industry news, and product guides to keep your audience engaged. The same information can be conveyed through emails to your customers, or they can be downloaded as PDFs.
Social Media Marketing
Marketing on social media channels targets different stakeholders of the business. Facebook is effective for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-customer) businesses as it supports different types of content that attract other businesses and customers. You can reach users through Facebook Ads and connect to a similar audience.
For several reasons, Twitter is a great marketing tool for sharing short messages on news, stats, links, and updates. Interactive content, statistics, and trends attract more engagement, and you can easily share and promote your brand.
LinkedIn is a B2B platform for qualified lead generation that puts out informative content, identifies potential leads, engages with them, converts them to customers, and drives traffic to your website. Here, you can connect with like-minded individuals, know the latest news in the industry, and follow influential people across the globe.
Apart from entertainment, YouTube fosters businesses by creating organic promotional videos. Not all businesses market on YouTube, so you can harness this platform with good personalized video content.
Link-Building
From an SEO ( search engine optimization) point of view, links demonstrate a site’s popularity. Google notices the links from another website to your website and concludes that the site provides quality information and rewards it with high rankings when it finds a site with many other sites pointing to it.
Backlinks provide referral traffic, which is the traffic to your website through a different site. They didn’t type your URL in their browser but are taken to your site because they clicked on the anchor text link to your website. Referral traffic has a higher conversion rate than regular traffic as the people have landed on your site since they want to know about your product.
The content service platform integrates all the applications required for achieving the content strategy through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), plugins, and connectors. All the logistics involved, from posting on the business websites or social media to managing and measuring the content and the metrics, lie with content service packages.
Key Features in the Content Service Platform
Scalable
Each business churns up billions of data and has its own way of storing it. The stored data must be managed properly to be retrieved efficiently. The content service must be able to store huge amounts of data.
Flexible
Businesses make use of docs, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets. The list does not stop here, and based on the type of services you build, the content service must accommodate digital file formats, such as MP4, MOV, WMV, AVI, FLV, HTML5, and MPEG2.
Inter-Connectivity
The different elements in your business must have a common platform to store, manage, and access. The content service platform must provide a central hub for all business information, applications, and interfaces. It must allow interconnectivity among applications and also blend with your content optimization strategies on your content stack.
Cloud-Based Solution
It’s wise to move your content to cloud-based content services for many reasons, such as scalability, security, cost, and accessibility. You can leverage cloud features, such as storage, database, elastic scalability, dynamic pricing, and web-based services in an easily configurable manner in their native form without requiring large-scale conversions from the on-premise legacy system.
Automation
The content service platform has to move on to have automatic learning and deep neural networks that can perform automated classifications, production, automation, and recognition. The latest systems incorporate cloud solutions to streamline the previous manual process to increase productivity.
FAQs
What is a content service?
Content services are services and microservices packaged either as a single suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories. It is designed to exploit different content types, serve multiple audiences, and use cases across an organization.
What are content marketing services?
Any software, service, or application that integrates the process of creating a content marketing strategy, content creation, distribution, promotion, and tracking to achieve a specific business goal. Content types such as blog articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and ebooks are the real content that realizes the content marketing tools.
What are content creation services?
Content creation services create high-valued custom content that informs, educates, and influences the target audience. Ebooks, blogs, and websites are content that can be formatted and repurposed.
What type of content boosts traffic?
Written content in the form of blogs, ebooks, newsletters, reports, and whitepapers boosts traffic as they provide answers that your audience seeks. Before making an online purchase or engaging with your business, they wish to know about your services or products by reading your blogs. Videos and visual content appeal to your audience and bring traffic to your website.
What is a content services platform?
Content services platforms are integrated platforms that provide content-oriented services, repositories, APIs, solutions, and tools that support content planning, creation, and publication.
Wrapping Up
Content services automate the work process, storing in a centralized repository, and finally, knowledge extraction. Migrating towards the cloud cuts cost, streamlines efficiency, and ensures seamless availability of systems and services. Integrating new technologies must be easier, unified, and agile.
Content marketing strategies can be disseminated across the organization better. They will lead to a result-driven approach when business strategies, plans, technologies to implement, and marketing integrate on a common platform.
Check our recent blogs to know more about content management and the strategies, tools, and tips.
