The sheer volume of content required for different audiences and buyer personas can be a challenge for any company to effectively personalize their customer experience at scale. When you factor in different channels and languages, content demands skyrocket.

On average, B2C marketers create content for four different audiences, and 28% create content for more than six audiences. Because of the different consumers, it means creating specific content for different buyer preferences.

Speaking at Sitecore Experience Europe 2020, Sitecore Product Marketing Director Jose Santa Ana shared how Star Cooperation led a renowned German luxury automotive manufacturer to success by adapting content for a global audience.

Here’s how the automotive company mastered the art of leveraging one piece of content for use by multiple audiences, channels, and languages; and transformed its organization by scaling to meet the demands of being in 80 markets worldwide.

The CX evolution: From the 1990s to 2020s

Star Cooperation is a subsidiary of Daimler-Benz AG, providing services to global luxury automotive brands, including BMW, Daimler, and Porsche.

To paint a picture of how much consumer buying habits have changed in 30 years for a German luxury auto company that Star Cooperation supports, marketing in the 1990s consisted of promoting eight car models, using one print channel, and only to a single target persona — the more mature, affluent gentleman.

Today, that same luxury auto company offers more than 50 car models and sub-models while targeting more personas, like younger professionals. This requires marketing across multiple channels and in 30 different languages, resulting in a demand for nearly 1,600 content adaptation projects a year, Santa Ana shared.

The challenges the current marketing organization faced were vast. Integrating multiple inputs of technical information, images, text descriptions, and other marketing materials from various agencies, proved difficult. They needed to be able to go through a whole process of converting one piece of approved content to all those outputs in a timeframe of 6.5 weeks.

To make matters even more complex, they also needed to identify the buyer journey stage for each piece of content and track it across various touchpoints. At the same time, they were evolving with the growth of digital channels and adoption of a B2B web portal, in addition to their print channels.

“They needed to create atomic content that can be then mixed and matched,” Santa Ana said. “And that change, while it sounds simple, is actually complex.”

The German car manufacturer needed a better way to organize its content. It also required a change of system, as the on-premises system they had in place was not designed to handle the organization’s evolving content needs.

While Star helped them determine the ideal processes they should be undertaking, they also needed a technology solution to support these processes. “The combination of process know-how and the technology underneath was critical in order to close that gap between where they were and where they wanted to be,” Santa Ana said.

Creating a single source of truth

Working with Star Cooperation and Sitecore, the automaker implemented Sitecore Content Hub, a solution designed to help marketing organizations manage their entire end-to-end content lifecycle across all channels. It enabled the company to produce content at scale for different markets, languages, and personas.

Sitecore Content Hub helped marketing teams create a single source of truth by seamlessly connecting to other existing systems and merging all the different content pieces, taking into account the product, organizational, and geographical taxonomies. This master project is then adapted and translated for all the different markets and languages where it is needed.

“With Sitecore Content Hub, you aren’t just throwing in your content for storage, you’re also using the platform for workflow and collaboration before a piece can be finalized,” Santa Ana said. “It’s actually intelligent in that it knows the relationships between content.”

For distributing to digital channels, Sitecore Content Hub works with a content app known as STAR NAAB, or Not Another Article Builder (a dig at the auto manufacturer’s many past unsuccessful efforts to automate this process). The app now makes it easy to assemble atomic content pieces, such as images, headers, text labels, and descriptions, to create localized product collateral without traditional constraints or time-consuming obstacles.

“You have your marketing content, including media files, images, and videos, and you have your product information and technical specifications coming from SAP. This is the micro-content that you can mix-and-match as needed,” Santa Ana said.

Consolidate, centralize, and adapt at scale

With Sitecore Content Hub in place, the manufacturer now has its content adaptation and translation processes in order, allowing them to create millions of content pieces every year. With over 800 active users collaborating on the system worldwide, they’re able to publish over 2,000 PDFs every day, as their processing time for print materials has decreased from 58 days to 40 days, and for digital output from 83 days to 33 days.

From a brand perspective, because their content can now be easily translated and adapted across markets, they are seeing a faster time-to-market and increased sales. And by consolidating all content and assets into a single source of content truth, the company was able to build consistent brand communication across all channels.

To learn more about Sitecore Content Hub, download our guide “Making the case for a marketing content hub” and explore how to identify when you have a content hub business case, why a Content Hub is more than a DAM, and how it can be a catalyst for organizational change.
