Understanding a Content Supply Chain and How To Create One

What’s a content supply chain?

A content supply chain (CSC) is a systematic approach to managing the entire lifecycle of digital content. It includes the process of planning, creating, approving, managing, and delivering enterprise content. You need to ensure that your content meets the needs of your various audiences. It should be personalized and efficient, while also achieving your business goals.

Managing the content lifecycle of many different departments, teams, and content types in an enterprise can be tricky. Especially with new technologies like generative AI pushing the need for faster and more controlled content production. As a result, many companies are struggling to implement the right guardrails to safeguard their content supply chain against the risks AI brings.

Why is a content supply chain important?

It’s not so much that the content supply chain is important, because almost every enterprise has one. It’s how it works that’s important. Ideally, you want to turn enterprise content production into a streamlined, efficient process. By establishing clear stages from planning to delivery, it improves efficiency, consistency, and collaboration among teams, including workflows that use generative Al. 

And the thing is, enterprises are embracing generative AI because the demand for content is only increasing. In fact, a recent whitepaper by IBM, AWS, and Adobe predicted a 5 to 20 times increase in content demand in the next two years. But here’s the thing, generative AI can increase the speed at which content is created, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to added velocity in the reviewing process. Enterprises need an efficient way to keep content on-brand and compliant, safely. Which is why just like any traditional supply chain requires a quality assurance step, so does your content supply chain. 

A smooth-running content supply chain allows for personalization at scale, allowing for tailored content that resonates with different audience segments. It also helps with quality control with systematic checks and approvals. This reduces mistakes and costs, and lowers compliance risks from off-brand content.

As content proliferates, a well-governed enterprise content supply chain makes scaling content workflows manageable without compromising quality. Integrating analytics into the supply chain helps business leaders use content quality and performance metrics to make better business decisions. You’ll also deliver a better customer experience by turning a chaotic content creation process into a well-organized, strategic operation. Content governance over your supply chain means greater benefit from the advantages of generative AI – with less risk. 

5 defining aspects of a content supply chain

Each part of the content supply chain plays a crucial role to keep everything you publish strategic, well-crafted, thoroughly reviewed, effective, and continuously updated.

1. Strategy

Start by mapping out your content goals and planning how to achieve them. It’s all about understanding your audience, defining what content you need, and setting a clear timeline for creating and distributing it. If you’re adding generative AI into your content workflows, you should think about how you’re going to maintain the quality and relevance of your output. 

Make sure you watch out for any data privacy and governance issues. This will help you ensure that your AI-generated content meets compliance standards and aligns with your content standards. It’s a good idea to document, not only your content strategy but also, how you plan to internally regulate the use of AI tools. What kind of content governance guardrails will you use to protect yourself against off-brand, non-compliant content? By incorporating AI intentionally rather than just as a gimmick, you can augment the overall impact in your content strategy. 

2. Creation 

This stage is all about bringing your ideas to life. Whether that’s writing blog posts, publishing release notes, or drafting knowledge articles. Writers (and AI) need access to your company style guide during the creation process. That way, it’s easier to keep each piece of content aligned to your style, voice, and tone, and ensures consistent use of the right terminology. In the creation stage, it’s common to optimize the content supply chain with technology like generative AI, digital style guides, and writing assistance technology that can provide real-time suggestions on how to improve content. 

3. Approval and quality assurance

Before your content can go live, it needs the green light. This stage involves getting feedback and approvals from the relevant stakeholders. It’s about making sure everything looks good, aligns with your goals, and meets quality standards. Think of it as the quality check before the big launch.

Quality assurance is an essential part of every physical supply chain, so why not apply the same principle to content? 

4. Delivery 

Now that your content is polished and approved, it’s time to share it with your target audiences. This stage focuses on distributing your content through the right channels, to deliver the maximum impact. How do you know it will perform well? Ideally, you’ll have documented in your content strategy what kinds of content (and themes) resonate for particular audiences, via different channels. You can also be more certain that it meets your expectations before you publish it, especially if you use content governance software like Acrolinx. Acrolinx scores content against your quality standards during creation. You can also review it automatically at different stages of the content lifecycle to prevent low-quality content from being published.

5. Analytics

This involves tracking and analyzing metrics like views, engagement, and conversions, as well as number of support tickets, user adoption, and shares. Governance over your enterprise content is based on the principle of continuously improving content, by understanding how quality correlates with performance. Tracking the right kind of metrics tells you what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve in the future. 

Content supply chain best practices for the enterprise

• Implement content governance in the form of quality assurance checks at different stages of your content’s lifecycle. When incorporating LLM-generated content into your content supply chain, content governance becomes a non-negotiable part of your enterprise content strategy. 
• Make your style guide accessible to writers wherever they write, not in a PDF, spreadsheet, or company intranet that takes deliberate effort to research the right style and terminology. 
• Add automation into your editorial review process. Can you guarantee that 100% of the content you publish has been reviewed? Automated checks don’t replace humans. Instead, they help allocate resources efficiently to the weakest part of your content supply chain. This makes improvements where they’re likely to have the biggest impact on your business. 
• Set up AI guardrails for your content standards. Without them, you won’t be able to validate if AI-generated content is following your standards. Just because you uploaded a style guide before you started prompting, doesn’t mean generated content consistently meets the same quality standards. 
• Don’t let AI replace humans entirely. As AI evolves, it will require more data to train different models. Research by MIT shows that the performance of these models deteriorates
  

What tools are used in a typical content supply chain? 

1. Content governance software

Both human and AI-generated writing must meet your enterprise standards for content quality and performance. This includes consistency, clarity, terminology, inclusive language, and other brand guidelines.

2. Content Management Systems (CMS)

Manages and delivers content across multiple channels, ensuring a unified and seamless content experience.

3. Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems

Centralizes the storage and management of digital assets, using metadata tagging, indexing, and search functionalities. Improves collaboration and management.  

4. Project and task management tools

 Streamlines content workflows by organizing tasks, tracking progress, and managing team collaboration.

5. Content marketing and analytics platforms

 Can be used at any stage of the content lifecycle, although typically used to measure performance. Mainly used to prove ROI on content initiatives, make content strategies more effective, and improve engagement.

Acrolinx: Built for scalable content supply chain management

Acrolinx is an AI-powered content governance software that captures and digitizes your style guide to make your writing standards, standard. It governs new and existing content written by people and generative AI. 

Governance over your content supply chain helps you scale as your business evolves. It assures quality assurance over 100% of your content, and helps you make evidence-based decisions around content that boost engagement and ROI. 

Best practices like accessible style guides, automated reviews, and strategic use of AI will help you optimize your content workflows. And deliver an exceptional customer experience. As generative AI continues to evolve, a well-governed content supply chain will help to stay ahead in a competitive landscape, with emerging legislative requirements around AI.