The modern-day economy is symbolized by quite a few factors; such as increasing market saturation, and the presence of cut-throat competition in nearly every niche and industry.
Hence, the need to stand out has led brands to create and publish more content than ever – leading to an overload of information for consumers.
Particularly for manufacturers, the relentless stream of content has made it harder for brands to cut through the noise, and gain the consumers’ attention.
A previous study revealed that consumers are exposed to 5.3 trillion display ads per year – and the number has only risen ever since.
In addition to display ads, the consumer is flooded with information through different channels that marketers use to position and advertise their products.
How Information Overload Impacts Manufacturing Companies
The human brain has evolved to process information, and retain knowledge in a certain way. The speed of technological change is yet to impact the rate at which humans consume information.
In such a data-driven atmosphere, information overload has had a negative impact on businesses around the world.
Stressed Workforce
We are creating far more data than we can put into use – and that’s a well-known fact.
According to Forrester, 60 to 73 percent of all data in an organization goes unused for analytics. Despite the fact that more companies are talking about big data, using technology to gather data, and acknowledging the value of this information – they are unable to get the most out of this data.
However, this has not lowered the expectations of employees; losing a critical piece of information due to the presence of so much data, such as a product description, can affect the entire organization adversely. Coupled with decreasing response times, the information overload has hampered our ability to complete tasks.
For example, research has found that 25% of workers experience significant stress and poor health due to the volume of content that they’re required to process.
If this wasn’t enough, a similar study was conducted across the world where participants from the US, England, Singapore, and Australia described the impact of content overload.
The study reported that a whopping 73 percent of managers stated that their job required them to process a lot of data, and the resulting information overload affected their stress levels.
Overall, it’s quite clear that there is a need for organizations to streamline their stages of content creation and distribution.
One Solution To Your Content Problems: A Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system is one of the best investments that a business can make to solidify their digital presence.
Apart from ensuring great content that works, businesses need to prioritize proper content management to attract their target audience and keep their employees stress-free.
Here are some benefits of using a content management system.
Allows Multiple Users
In a product marketing organization, different people are assigned responsibility for each stage of the content strategy: this includes content creation, publication, deriving insights, and keeping a check on content quality.
Without a proper channel to log in and record your session, it is a continuous struggle for administrators to keep a check on the input provided by content managers.
A CMS not only allows multiple users to access the platform at the same time but also keeps a record of everything that occurs for future reference.
Streamlines Scheduling
Be it product pages, additions to your site or new blogs – a CMS allows you to review updates from your content department in one glance.
Scheduling and continuous check-and-balance of the overall content strategy are the most important tasks for a product manager. Devoid of a CMS, this task becomes much complex.
As product marketing continues to become more integrated, with several communication mediums overlapping one another, streamlined scheduling has become more important than ever. Now, modern product managers need to be aware of the status of all projects in real-time – and this is exactly what a good CMS system allows them to do.
Helps You Manage Content
According to IDC, 71 percent of marketers now create more than 10 times the amount of content they did previously.
The rate at which content is being produced also gives rise to another problem – the pace at which the content is rendered obsolete. As consumers tend to filter through information, they expect to receive data that is currently relevant.
For many product marketing businesses, content management is not just the creation and segregation of different types of digital content – it also includes the ability to remove out of date information.
For example, if you are running a festive promotion for your product (Christmas or Thanksgiving), you need to be prepared to archive the data once the season ends.
Without a CMS in place, this task can take hours’ worth of time as you have to carefully identify and archive all posts about the promotion.
A good CMS has such data grouped in one place, where all menus and links are updated automatically. In other words, the removal of time-sensitive content can be easily done in a few clicks.
You’re The One in Control
To sum it all up, the biggest advantage of a CMS is the absolute control that it lends to product marketing organizations.
Instead of relying on external sources or having a chaotic content feed, a CMS delivers organization, discipline, and uniformity to the process of content creation.
With the right CMS platform, you can update, approve, and deploy content as fast as needed on any scale – without this affecting your performance. In other words, with the help of a CMS, managing content and assets then becomes all about quality, efficiency, and velocity.
The rise of content marketing has been meteoric, to say the least – in fact, modern buyers rely five times more on digital information when making a purchasing decision.
Consider the fact that an average buyer is likely to interact with 10.4 pieces of content before buying a product, and the importance of CMS becomes clear as day.
