Some organizations only create one kind of content. They have one basic thing they need to talk about, and their content operations are reasonably straightforward to manage. That’s true for many small enterprises, and it can be true for some highly focused medium sized enterprises as well.

But large enterprises generally find they need to manage many kinds of content. They have different product lines, divisions, initiatives, and different regional responsibilities. Simple ways of managing content don’t scale up successfully when organizations need to manage a diverse range of content. A fresh approach to managing content is necessary.

Even if a specific content team has well-defined responsibilities and is not accountable for all the content their organization creates, they often find that their capacity to do their work is limited by what others are doing. The work of different teams is not connected and each team is consequently less effective at the task they’re carrying out.

Content as a Service (CaaS) provides a different approach to working with content. It’s much more collaborative. To get the most out of CaaS involves working as a team instead of employing separate individuals. Therefore, it’s important to know if CaaS is a good fit for your organization.

Is CaaS Right for Your Needs?

CaaS may not be a compelling option for small organizations where coordination is not a serious challenge. A traditional CMS can be a good choice for publishers with a single website that communicates a limited range of information. Everyone can use the same CMS, and the complexity that must be managed is limited.

CaaS is a great choice for larger organizations that need to manage a diverse range of content. A diversity of content means that content operations tend to be much more complex. Larger organizations face challenges that are hard to manage with traditional CMSs.

Large scale publishers encounter complexity in different forms. Their challenges include a diversity of content types, many different CMSs, and difficulty maintaining common standards. CaaS can help large organizations that need to manage a wide range of content and accommodate a wide scope of business users and audiences.

Benefit #1: Solving the Problem of When Initiatives Are Not Connected

Large organizations often have different concurrent—yet overlapping—marketing initiatives. They find their content sprawling across various silos because it has been created and managed in separate systems by many groups. Content related to customer education and service initiatives may be managed separately and disconnected from content associated with sales and marketing initiatives.

When enterprises have multiple websites, content teams are often unable to share content used by different websites that may be organized differently. CaaS supports the sharing content across the entire enterprise and can promote the use of a common structure for content so that it is consistent.

Benefit #2: Solving Multichannel and Omnichannel Publishing Challenges

Another challenge is delivering content to different channels. Large enterprises often have a diverse range of customers and need to be able to reach them in whatever channel that customers prefer. Using a CMS that was designed to support a single website does not provide large enterprises with the flexibility necessary to address multichannel and omnichannel opportunities.

Organizations are continually exploring or expanding their use of new channels. They need to be able to reach audiences who are accessing diverse channels, which could include voice, bots, or in-store communications. CaaS is designed to work with any channel. Crucial content can be delivered to many channels at once, and customized content can be tailored to the specific channel that customers are using.

Benefit #3: Delivering Consistent Content on Global Scale

Large organizations also face complexity because they operate in different regions and across national borders. They must deliver content on a global scale and ensure that their branding and messaging are consistent and that data and information are up to date. If different divisions operate separate content management systems to publish content, they run a significant risk that the organization’s content will be inconsistent.

CaaS allows different content teams to manage global content within a central content hub. Content becomes easy to share with teams located in different regions. There is only one version that everyone uses, and this version can be localized and translated as required. So, CaaS is ideal for the needs of multi-lingual publishers.

Unifying Content with CaaS

CaaS doesn’t try to gloss over diversity and recognizes that large global organizations have diverse needs. Such organizations don’t want a stripped down or inflexible solution. CaaS unifies content and opens it up to wider use. Doing so, CaaS allows large enterprises and organizations to take control of all their content.

In the next article, we will focus on how Content as a Service unlocks your websites’ content.