Digital content delivery platform

Businesses today no longer compete on price alone. The entire user experience determines whether you have a satisfied or disgruntled customer. As more consumers want rich and engaging journeys, a digital content delivery platform helps you manage your content for a consistent experience across all digital channels.

What is a digital content delivery platform?

Sometimes also called a content distribution platform, digital distribution platform or electronic software delivery system, a digital content delivery platform is the way you distribute or deliver digital content to users. Content can include media like audio, video, images, text or even delivering new software to customers.

Unlike digital content management systems, digital content delivery allows you to optimize all your content marketing for easy distribution on any type of device. Your digital content delivery platform should also integrate with the rest of your technology stack, speeding up your time to market. You can connect your digital content delivery platform to your marketing, sales and development systems to streamline the entire content creation, staging and distribution process while working in the same environment.

How does a digital content delivery platform work?

A digital content delivery platform aims to manage all your content-related tasks in a single ecosystem. Developers and designers can build individual pages, stage media and optimize content delivery for different devices like computers or mobile phones.

Customers are looking for optimized experiences and convenient user journeys, but also expect great content marketing that represents the vision of your brand. Using componentized delivery and content modeling tools, editors can create engaging media and test the delivery across all available digital channels.

Streamlined interfaces for different scenarios help you to keep track of all your content from full-page layouts to simple blocks of text. You can define your brand experience and have your content creators deliver consistent experiences by previewing each design before releasing it to consumers.

Benefits of a digital content delivery platform

Using a digital content delivery platform helps organizations create interactive media and develop new content experiences that increase customer engagement. The platform provides you with all the features you need to optimize your content, including conducting multivariate testing to ensure you create engaging content before you deliver it to all your customers' digital channels.

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) will include a digital content delivery solution that connects all your content tasks to your critical business units like sales and marketing. With today's consumers expecting new and exciting content that resonates with them, a digital content delivery platform helps increase revenues, attract new visitors and engage customers with highly personalized user journeys.

Some of the key benefits available from digital content delivery platforms are:

Broadening the reach of your content to attract more customers
Providing access to your content at any time and on any device
Reducing the costs and resource requirements of your content creation, testing, approval and delivery processes
Delivering consistent content across all digital media channels with an easy-to-use, integrated platform

Digital content delivery platform best practices

The main objective of using a digital content delivery platform is to attract new visitors, retain existing customers and continuously improve your digital experiences to support growth. When choosing a platform, you should consider factors like support for apps, pages, interactive media and customer surveys as a minimum.

You can also deploy a digital content delivery platform internally to improve your business processes like onboarding new staff, running employee engagement programs or communicating any updates to your corporate policies. Just like with experience optimization principles, you should always consider the journey of the user when designing and delivering digital content. This may require carrying out A/B testing, conducting user surveys and personalizing content based on specific user segments.

Digital content delivery platform process

Digital content may reach users organically or through promoted channels. It may include owned content distribution, shared content distribution or paid content distribution. To build an effective content delivery system and maximize your ROI, you'll need to develop a digital content delivery strategy. You can then configure your platform to support the strategy and orchestrate all your content-related processes in a single solution.

Develop a digital content delivery strategy

Your strategy should focus on delivering content to the right people at the exact time it will have the biggest impact. Generating analytics on your content's performance will then inform where you can optimize your processes for greater reach and increasing revenues.

To build your strategy, consider the following:

Investigate the different digital content delivery platforms available
Identify all the distribution options available including web, email, social media or apps
Segment your customers into categories and start creating content for specific personas

Select your digital content delivery platform

Based on your chosen strategy, you can evaluate what platforms will provide you with all the required features and capabilities. While the delivery capabilities are important, you'll also need to consider the administration of the platform and its ease of use to support your content teams.

Look for a platform that provides:

Configurable workflows to control the creation and delivery process
A media library that helps you manage all your content efficiently
A quick and easy search and retrieve capability of all your content assets

Test and optimize your content delivery

Finally, you'll need to test different content types, delivery strategies and personalization capabilities. Once you have the platform and strategy in place, you can test and iterate your delivery to maximize its engagement. You should also reassess your strategy and make changes based on the analytics you gather through your digital content delivery platform.

Optimizing your digital content delivery platform with Optimizely's DXP

Optimizely's DXP gives organizations the ability to build better customer experiences with a comprehensive set of tools. You can experiment with journeys, content, layouts and delivery systems. Using Optimizely allows you to iron out any friction points, develop consistent brand identities and engage with your customers to grow your revenues.

You can connect Optimizely to your existing content management systems or build your system from scratch. Optimizely also integrates with other marketing and sales tools, helping you keep track of all your content and measure your performance with granular analytics that improve your targeting capabilities.

To see how Optimizely can improve your user experiences with our digital content delivery platform.