How to ‘COPE’ with a multitude of content

Content is hitting us from every angle. But creating it can be time consuming. Learn more about the COPE concept, a way to revolutionize your content publishing and content workflows, including its benefits and downsides.

When you think about how many pieces and types of content you produce, then think about how many different channels you manually have to schedule them in to. The amount of hours you’re spending on it quickly adds up. What if you could get back a lot of that time?

What if you could create content once and then have it appear in a multitude of channels instantly? Well, it’s a reality and it’s called the COPE concept.

What is the COPE concept?

“Create once, publish everywhere” - that’s the premise of the COPE concept. Basically, take any content you create and have it pushed live or scheduled to whichever channels you want. Publish web content to emails, to social; take tags, descriptors, headlines, anything, and have them go live effortlessly across different touchpoints. Easy.

The COPE concept is kind of like magic. Instead, it’s brought about by some clever development work. Without going into it too much, it takes content out of being code and, for example with Amplience, you can integrate this content and your channels through APIs and webhooks, in either a push or pull style system. You can learn more about customizable webhooks here.

The benefits of COPE

The COPE concept brings about some obvious benefits, the first of which being the ability to save time and money. Every content producer knows the pain of creating content then slowly but surely having to replicate it across all the different channels. Having that all done in an instant creates a load more efficiencies meaning you can focus more of your time on content creation and strategy and not implementation. As well, the cost of change is a lot lower given changes are pulled through a lot quicker too.

By not having your content and all its components hosted across multiple systems, it means your channels can perform a lot better. Basically, by not adding the extra “weight” to all the content management systems, they will all load faster giving your customers a much better online experience. You can get some more tips on how to streamline your content production here.

Sounds great, but what are the negatives?

As with anything, there are a few downsides to the COPE concept, albeit none are too hard to tackle. The first downside is that to implement COPE you do need a bit of development work, but in the scheme of things depending on how digitally mature your business is and what platforms you are working with, it’s not necessarily overly extensive work.

Given the concept is different to how people have been working, adopting a COPE process can require some business change. COPE can help unify a lot of different teams previously working across different parts of the content production process. By changing that and bringing everyone together it can disrupt the “normal”, and change for some can be hard to adapt to, especially if for them the process didn’t seem overly broken to begin with.

As it stands each one of your channels will behave and display content in slightly different ways, so while it’s easy to say you can publish your content everywhere, you’ll need to think about how it will come together. You’ll need to consider how your channels can behave in the same way so your customers get a consistent customer experience across the board. As well, if you have any additional elements like personalization on some platforms, you’ll need to give some thought around how this will work. For example, you might have personalization on your emails but not on your website or vice versa, so when publishing across both, you’ll need to think about how the personalization will be dealt with.

Let’s get COPE working for you

As more and more channels come into the mix, the COPE concept has the ability to really streamline and enhance a business’ content possibilities. Think about the content efficiencies and possibilities across perhaps point-of-sale, in-store screens, voice-activated devices, help desks, just to name a few.

If you would like to discuss how Amplience could help you implement the technology to adopt a COPE approach, then simply get in touch.