Digital content is the backbone of our online world. But for many businesses, managing the ever-expanding volume of digital assets has created “Content Chaos.”

If you are feeling swamped by the sheer amount of content spread across multiple channels, struggling to maintain brand consistency while personalizing experiences, and being challenged to measure the true impact of your content efforts, then you are feeling the impact of Content Chaos.

Contentful just released the findings of a joint survey of 1,000 C-Suite executives across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. The research evaluates the state of strategic content management and discovers opportunities to bring order to a company’s content strategies.

One big highlight is that 80% or more of survey respondents found a shared list of the top five challenges to managing content at scale:

1. Lack of centralized oversight leading to inconsistent branding
2. Scaling content strategies across varying markets
3. Training teams to deliver consistent customer experiences
4. Managing content production
5. Maintaining consistency across markets and cultural differences

The path to strategic content management

The days when companies only had to worry about publishing something once on a central website are long gone. For international brands, it’s not just all the various channels to manage. There’s also regionalizing everything across local markets, presenting content accurately in different languages, and following local regulations. 

To address these challenges, organizations need to shift their approach to content management in several ways.

1. Maintaining a unified global brand identity across diverse markets (a struggle for 81% of brands) requires strategic governance. By putting strategic governance into place, you allow for controlled variation within defined guidelines, ensuring both global consistency and local relevance.
2. Businesses should treat their content as a valuable asset, intrinsically linked to business goals and customer experience. Aligning content strategy with these objectives ensures content contributes to measurable business outcomes and delivers impactful customer experiences.
3. Establishing a cohesive content supply chain that maps out workflows, ownership, and stages from planning to measurement is crucial for streamlining content operations and maximizing efficiency. Fragmented content operations with siloed teams and processes only hinder agility and impact.
4. Embrace MACH architecture for agile content delivery. Legacy systems often lack the flexibility and scalability needed for modern content demands. Migrating to composable content stacks built on MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) enables agility, seamless integration, and adaptability to emerging technologies. 

Technology as an enabler

With content management, strategy precedes technology. While tech is essential for managing millions of assets and rapid production cycles at enterprise scale, it’s not a silver bullet — you still need to know what your strategic goals are, and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Once the strategy is defined, these technologies can help address content challenges:

• Content Management System (CMS): Modern CMS platforms are expected to do more than ever before, from enabling collaboration to orchestrating omnichannel strategies. However, only 35% of leaders find their current tech stack effective at facilitating flexibility and scaling.
• MACH Architecture: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless (MACH) architectures offer increased agility and scalability. While 90% of respondents are familiar with MACH, there’s still room for improved understanding of its benefits.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM): 88% of leaders see improved productivity for marketing and content teams as the top benefit of DAM solutions.
• Customer Data Management: Integrating customer data with content strategy is crucial, but challenges persist. Seventy-nine percent of respondents struggle with data silos and inconsistent data quality.

Moving forward 

Today, the content management landscape has gone through a seismic shift. What was once a predictable, marketing-centric function has evolved into a complex, multifaceted challenge that touches every aspect of your business. 

The “chaos” many brands are experiencing isn’t a sign of failure, but rather growing pains as they adapt to this new content-rich reality. As content continues to play an increasingly vital role in digital experiences, organizations will have to evolve their approach to content management.

This means:

• Shifting mindsets to view content as a strategic business asset.
• Implementing flexible, scalable content supply chains.
• Leveraging composable technology stacks to balance control and agility.
• Using AI judiciously to augment human capabilities.

Remember, effective content management isn’t about finding a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s about creating a flexible, scalable process that enables collaboration, ensures consistency and allows for measurement and optimization. With the right approach, you can navigate the complexities of modern content management, delivering engaging experiences across channels while maintaining brand integrity.

By embracing these strategies and technologies, organizations can tame content “chaos” and unlock the true value of their content for both customers and the business itself. The future of content management is composable, agile, and strategic. Are you ready?

To learn more about the results of this study, Download the report: Controlling Content Chaos.

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This article originally appeared in Forbes.