If ever there was a time when the marketing world needed a dynamic, collaborative content solution, it is now — and not only because so many people are working virtually, by choice or by mandate.
The volume of content has been exploding, presenting real challenges for marketing project management. A smart solution that many marketing organizations have discovered is CELUM Content Collaboration, an automated, centralized content hub melded with a team collaboration platform, now available on SAP App Center.
The solution integrates with SAP Customer Experience solutions, delivering an outstanding user experience. It allows teams to continue working in the environment in which they are most comfortable, including SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, and other cloud solutions from SAP that make up next-generation SAP Customer Experience solutions. This leading portfolio puts experience in the hands of the end customer, giving them the freedom to explore while supporting their needs every step of the way.
Agility and Flexibility with a Single Content Hub
To learn more about CELUM and its solution recently onboarded to SAP App Center, I spoke with Michael Sahlender, chief business officer at CELUM, who painted in vivid color a day in the life of a marketing manager in an enterprise marketing department—let’s call her Audrey.
“Audrey is juggling multiple projects, each involving image searches in huge repositories or separate silos, content files in various stages of development and approval, and numerous contributors and stakeholders,” Sahlender explained. “A lot can go wrong, like sending a file to the CMO for final signoff and finding out too late that there’s a more current version. That’s just one example, and it happens all the time.”
As Sahlender put it, CELUM changes the way Audrey interacts not only with content, but with her extended creative team and stakeholders – a completely different way of working that is more agile and efficient.
The content hub contains all the various elements of the company’s assets in one place, with automation applied to make it easier to handle them. When she needs a media file for a landing page that is part of a campaign, for instance, Audrey can easily find the images and videos associated with the campaign and see where else they have been used. When she makes her selection and assigns it to the landing page, the media asset is automatically sized at the proper resolution. Plus the information that is used on this specific page is automatically provided to the original asset, leading to a true 360-degree overview across channels.
And Audrey can do all this wherever she is connected: physically in the office, working from home or perhaps meeting with agency colleagues.
Content Control: No More Version Mix-Ups
Projects come together in the CELUM Workroom, where Audrey can see in a single view every aspect of the content in progress, all open comments, tasks, and the status of the respective campaign or project in general. The workroom is also the heart of the collaboration platform. Anyone with permissions can see a dashboard that helps the team organize itself virtually and enables complete transparency. The agile Kanban dashboard shows the project status and the latest iteration, helping eliminate version confusion and embarrassing mistakes.
CELUM Drive syncs all relevant assets right to the user’s desktop in the background, delivering files via download instantly, providing true live collaboration.
Through integrations with familiar tools, Sahlender explained, “we go into their world. For example, the creatives are typically working in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. They can stay in those applications to search and drag and drop the files from the CELUM content hub widget, allowing them to stay focused on the projects they are working on. The beauty of the solution is that users do not have to leave other solutions they are using, like SAP Commerce Cloud or SAP Marketing Cloud, to add content – it is already there, delivered from the digital asset management (DAM) system.
Live Collaboration and Process Flow of a New Kind
Imagine that Audrey is working on a video and wants to insert her company’s corporate logo in the first two seconds. She adds a comment requesting it to be added in the section of the video in the workroom. When Audrey’s reviewed version reaches the creative guy, he simply inserts the logo. The upload happens in the background via drive, without the need to send an email, make a phone call, or use agency tools. It is simple, live collaboration in action.
Meanwhile, Audrey can be confident that the output is on-brand and 100 percent compliant, and that includes avoiding copyright violations, the cost of which Sahlender has seen run into six figures. Furthermore, the centrally managed content hub enables assets to be pushed out to the right channels automatically to corporate download sections, sales reps’ devices or apps, partner portals, intranet, and other destinations. At the same, the CELUM Content Collaboration cloud keeps everything organized in one place.
Most enterprise marketing organizations work with external agencies, Sahlender noted, which can add to content chaos. As a cloud solution, CELUM crosses corporate boundaries, enabling third parties to share the workroom as equal participants.
“And from a strategic standpoint, the company now has control of all the content,” he said. “The organization is no longer beholden to the agency or forced to work with its proprietary tools. We put our customers in the driver seat.”
Rock-Solid Partnership with SAP
Sahlender and his team are quite proud of the CELUM’s growth over its 20-year existence, as well as its A-list customers. I asked about CELUM’s partnership with SAP.
“SAP is our No. 1 strategic partner, with a rock-solid relationship for 12 years,” he said without hesitation. “We have a huge common ecosphere of customers and partners. It’s a perfect match, with super-smooth integrations with SAP Customer Experience solutions.”
Including CELUM Content Collaboration on SAP App Center was a no-brainer. In fact, CELUM recently closed a deal with a new enterprise customer via SAP’s digital marketplace, adding one more logo to the list of more than 100 customers using the CELUM solution together with SAP solutions.
For SAP, amazing products and partners like CELUM are crucial to meeting customers’ needs in the customer experience space.
The solution features a modular design, so users can choose the most important functionality for their needs and build from there. Check out the demo here.
Anne Yi is general manager of SAP App Center for SAP Digital Commerce.