What Exactly Is Enterprise Content Automation?

Enterprise content automation is one of the hottest buzzwords in tech and for good reason! Who doesn't love making things easier and faster?

But hold on, what is it exactly? Well, it can do lots of awesome stuff — from streamlining those pesky manual workflows to flagging errors so you don't have to. And the best part? You can customize it to fit your team's needs and goals!

Let’s dive into how automation is shaking up the game in enterprise content management and how it can take your collaboration, workflows and asset management to the next level.

What Is Enterprise Content Automation?

Enterprise content automation is a digital creation process that empowers individuals (designers and non-designers) to efficiently produce and distribute high-quality, on-brand content and get to market quickly. It automates production tasks such as copywriting, design, editing and publishing. This technology helps organizations streamline content marketing processes, improve content quality and reduce production costs by eliminating tedious tasks.

Not only that, but it also…

• Eliminates human error by scaling design work.
• Frees up budget and resources within your teams.
• Helps to move the workload from the central team to the distributed teams so they can focus on more strategic, active, go-to-market activities.
• Helps to scale marketing efforts.

It’s all about efficiency and scalability, and a major component of this is automating the creative production process to make the most of your time and resources. Your team can transform a single template into hundreds of personalized pieces of content within minutes with just a simple CSV input.

Where an Enterprise DAM Comes Into Play

By combining top-of-the-line content automation software with the world's finest digital asset management (DAM) platform, you can maximize your content's value and achieve record efficiency levels. This powerful capability will drastically reduce the time and effort required to create a high volume of personalized content, allowing you to take your marketing game to the next level.

Benefits of Content Automation

Let's face it— humans are prone to error, and mistakes are all too common when it comes to manual content production. On top of that, it requires significant resources, including time and effort spent by your team performing the same repetitive tasks.

By streamlining creative production workflows and automating content, your team will spend less time and resources training on redundant tasks and instead have more time to dive deep into the innovative, cutting-edge work that drives real results.

Here are the major benefits of enterprise content automation.

Stay On-Brand and Nimble With Market Conditions

Content automation ensures consistent branding, making adhering to legal requirements such as disclaimers or terms and conditions easier. When the pandemic happened, businesses had to comply with social distancing and masking standards. Instead of manually creating signs and collateral to reflect those changes, enterprise content automation made it easy.

Using locked-down templates, you can respond to market changes within minutes, not days or months. Designers only alter what’s necessary, guaranteeing brand control.

And that’s just what one Australian bakery franchise did. Bakers Delight, Australia's most successful bakery franchise implemented Brandfolder's Content Automation and exceeded their monthly export goals by 30%, positively impacted relationships and created opportunities for growth and innovation.

Scale Your Content Production

Brandfolder Content Automation enables multi-edit and CSV input functionality, which allows for rapid changes across multiple pieces of collateral on one hand and then major scalability on the other. For instance, users can change headlines or images across multiple social media assets simultaneously, streamlining the content creation process and allowing for efficient A/B testing while also scaling a template in many different ways, i.e. regions, names and titles, branch names, etc.

Think of it this way—you've got a CSV file with a hundred different attendees' information for an upcoming event, and you need to make flyers. With CSV input, you can quickly apply all this data to the templates without manually inputting details like names or the location.

Let’s say you already had a template created for the event with last year’s information on it. With multi-edit, you can update all those event flyers with this year’s info and use CSV input to populate all new attendee information. Imagine how much time and effort a task like that would take without that feature!

Enable Non-Designers to Create On-Brand Content

By empowering cross-functional teams like sales, marketers and HR with the ability to create content themselves, you can reduce reliance on design teams while putting out more on-brand content. This ultimately frees up your creative team's workload and allows departments to create their own content without submitting time-consuming requests.

Take a mortgage broker or real estate agent, for example; with content automated solutions, they can only change their personal information on a proposal, whereas a marketer can still modify headlines and the body copy. This means non-designers can’t break the original design thanks to the ability to lock down certain elements.

Streamline Compliance and Minimize Risks

Content automation offers a solution for maintaining brand control while adhering to strict rules and regulations in industries where compliance is paramount, such as financial institutions and government organizations.

By automating essential elements like disclaimers, font sizes, terms and conditions and other critical components, content automation reduces the risk of human error and ensures users meet necessary compliance standards.

This not only streamlines the content creation process, but also offers peace of mind for marketing and brand teams who can trust in the accuracy and consistency of their content.

Key Components of Enterprise Content Management With Automation

Enterprise content management platforms offer a variety of features designed to enhance your workflow. Among those features, automation plays a significant role in streamlining content creation and distribution.

Below are some of the fundamental features that make up enterprise content management.

User Access Control and Permissions to Prevent Brand Chaos

Avoid brand chaos by implementing a secure system that prevents unauthorized changes to your brand identity. This approach ensures brand consistency while still providing the necessary flexibility. With activity views, admins can monitor usage and maintain oversight, effectively preventing rogue actions that could dilute your brand.

Analytics to Uncover Hidden Insights

Are you storing your content in an unstructured or siloed format? If so, you may be missing out on valuable business insights. Even without accounting for human error, important patterns within datasets are not always immediately evident.

With the ability to view activity, you can easily monitor who uses what templates and gain deeper insights into how they use your content across the organization.

Digitalization of Business Documents

If your organization generates a lot of physical paperwork, ensuring that these documents have a digital counterpart is vital for easy discovery, accessibility and actionability. This is where enterprise content automation comes into play. By automating paper document digitization, you can streamline the process of scanning and categorizing invoices, contracts and other important papers, ensuring that important data is easily discoverable in a digital format.

This saves valuable time and effort by eliminating manual data entry and allows faster, more efficient access to important documents. The information you need to input for your content automation process will be in one place.

Holistic Document Storage

Your content could be spread across multiple storage repositories if you rely on different tools or workflow processes. This could be due to vendor lock-in or organic growth resulting in using several systems without proper data reconciliation. Enterprise content management provides a single source of truth by providing one location for all digital storage needs.

Not only does this help with content discovery and data analysis, but it also helps you to comply with regulations surrounding data storage and deletion. You can track, delete and file documents so they comply with all relevant regulations regarding data handling. That’s hard to do with manual processes involving data spread across multiple locations.

Automation of Document Workflows

The key aspect of enterprise content automation is how automated workflows can be built and run on top of them.

For example, automation can vastly speed up the accounts payable process. Invoices, purchase orders and other documents may be digitized, consumed and then have payments automatically authorized with little to no manual intervention.

Automation can cut processing time significantly and give your team their valuable time back. In cases where there is ambiguity or something unexpected occurs, the system can automatically flag that particular invoice or purchase order for manual review.

Reducing the amount of human involvement can increase the volume and speed at which your team can process and manage important documents.

How to Implement Enterprise Content Automation

Regardless of how deeply you wish to integrate these automated processes into your business workflow, content automation needs to become part of your enterprise content management. Your teams (creative and non-creative teams alike) will thank you.

Automated solutions work exactly as they are instructed to and operate consistently without needing breaks, sick days or time off. These solutions allow you to refocus your employees on work that better uses their skill set (and they’ll be happier in the process).

If you’re looking for content automation for your business but are unsure where to start — let us help. Our friendly and knowledgeable team can show you all the ways to help creatives, managers and cross-functional team members get their time back.

Curious about what Brandfolder Content Automation solutions can do for your team? Check us out, or reach out to one of our experts today!