You've meticulously prepared your copy and assets, defined your message, identified your target group, and set your desired outcomes. Now, it's time to connect with your audience wherever they may be. Instead of tediously duplicating content across your website, emails, and social media, it's important to understand the value of reusable content for efficient work and the best possible ROI.
Create it once, reuse it anywhere, update it dynamically
We believe that reusing content is the way to go. Nobody likes to reiterate the same things again and again. And even if you save time by copy-pasting, every smallest update needs to be done in several places. That’s not efficient and mistake-proof. Kentico always supported content reusability. Even in older versions of our DXP, users could save their content in a structured way which made it easier to be recognized by search engines and use elsewhere.
Four reasons for storing your content as reusable
1. Consistency for a satisfying user experience
Imagine a set of FAQs. You want to have them on several web pages where users look for them. If they were created from scratch on each page, you’d have to go to all these places to update them. Nightmare! But if you store them as reusable content, then your DXP pulls the content dynamically from a single place to each page. This avoids forgetting to update a hidden page and confusing visitors with an inconsistent message. Any updates made to the original content automatically propagate to all instances where the content is reused.
2. Efficiency drives innovation
No one likes being in the office enough to enjoy hours of repetitive clicking. Why should you create a product card for your website and then the same again for your marketing email or mobile app? With reusable content, you only do this work once and adjust for different channels if needed, reducing the time and resources required for new content creation.
3. Loved by marketers, developers and... robots
Reusable content stored as structured data is so much easier to migrate and upgrade than a bundle of text stored as one disorganized rich text. It also provides significant benefits for search engine optimization (SEO) and the accessibility of content to automated systems. If you add your content into fields called “Title”, “Author”, “Keywords”, or “Meta description”, you will make search engine crawlers shiver with joy.
4. Less data storage – less energy
Can you imagine how much space duplicated media takes? We would certainly notice if it was a pile of papers and CDs but digital content hides easily. Even though out of sight, it still takes up space in data centers, consumes energy, and slows your system down. When content is repurposed instead of recreated, it demands less storage space and computational resources, saving our precious energy.
Welcome to the Content Hub
For all the reasons above, it makes perfect sense to have your digital experience platform equipped with an app serving as a central content repository, a place where you store the parts you need to create your message.
That’s why our new DXP, Xperience by Kentico, has a unique Content Hub that does exactly that. It’s an app within the system that includes all kinds of content types, such as images, videos, product features, or company benefits. Updating content in the Content Hub dynamically makes an update on all instances.
The Content Hub is an example of how Xperience by Kentico breaks free from the web-centric thinking of the past and adopts a true multichannel mindset separating content from its presentation.
Creating content in Xperience by Kentico starts by defining your content types. You can understand them as templates used for anything from product pages to events and social media content. And because we believe in the low-code/no-code strategy, marketers can define these content types in a simple field editor. Once you have your content types ready, you can go to the Content Hub and create content items - the smallest building blocks of your content used across your digital marketing channels.
To add content to one of your channels, you fill out a structured form with content pulled from the Content Hub. But if you're creating a new website and don't have the content ready, you can create it directly in the Pages app.
Add reusable content to your WYSIWYG editing
Now, where is our existing customers’ beloved Page Builder? Don’t worry, we’re taking the best of both worlds. Reusable content can be used even in Page Builder widgets. Editors can go to widget properties and either choose content from the Content Hub or create a new one.
Only now is the right time to take care of the design.
When your content is in place, you can play with the design and configure it the way you want. Of course, everything is within the predefined limits of your brand guidelines. For example, you can toggle between light and dark mode, display an image in the background or in a circle.
Change your thinking towards the future
Storing all your content in one place and reusing it across your digital channels means time and energy saved for creating, storing and updating while avoiding inconsistency. Moving from a web-centric approach to multichannel gives us all the freedom to stop thinking about content as food for websites but design scalable, customer-centric digital experiences instead. That’s exactly what Xperience by Kentico is developed for!
Discover the power of Xperience by Kentico and the full potential of reusable content. Learn how our DXP will help you grow your digital presence and connect with your audience. Read our free ebook now.