Consolidating Content Across Multiple Brands

As content companies grow by either creating new internal brands or acquiring external brands, management of the portfolio can become a headache. Most external brands are running on self-contained publishing platforms such as Wordpress or Drupal. These systems work well in isolation; the trouble comes when running multiple brands on multiple CMS platforms. Now the challenge is managing multiple instances of each CMS with distinct technology stacks and disparate implementations. This creates a siloed approach to digital publishing that can limit the reach of the entire portfolio.

From an administrative point of view, searching for content requires users to independently query each brand’s instance and compile the results manually. A real-world example of this might be the marketing team compiling links to content across all brands with the tag “fintech”. Once manually compiled, the marketing team can now publish the curated content to a newsletter or cross-link the common search term between brands in the portfolio.

From an editorial view: having access to only one brand does not allow insight into the other brands. The editor will need a separate login on a different URL to access other brands and those brands’ unfamiliar CMS workflow. An example of this might be an editor writing an article about Design Systems. Knowing what articles have already been written by other brands in the portfolio could reinforce or complement their new article. This unified approach to content organization and storage could also minimize the creation of redundant content and stop brands from competing for views.

What’s the solution? In this guide, Digital Media industry experts Christoph Khouri and Trey Harb explore just that. Continue on and see how to consolidate brands the right way.