What is shared content and why is it important?

May 21, 2021 Stan

Do you feel like you’re constantly creating your common pieces of content for your emails and landing pages over and over again? Do you see the assets your team members are creating, using that same content, and thinking, “Why are we duplicating our efforts? Isn’t there a way we can share our content?”

The answer is, yes you can!

With Eloqua Shared Content, you can create content once and then use/reuse it across multiple emails and landing pages, as well as share it with all the members of your team. This content can include text, images, hyperlinks, and field merges.

By creating and using Shared Content, you can increase your efficiency since you are only writing the content once and then re-using it. You are also able to ensure consistency and enforce standards in your marketing collateral. Shared Content enables you to respond to changing business needs more quickly. Rather than having to do an audit and update multiple assets, you just make your changes to the Shared Content piece(s) and it automatically updates all assets where it is being used. This is a huge time-saver, especially if the needed changes are urgent. You can update your assets in minutes as opposed to hours or even days.

A few examples of ways Shared Content can be used is to promote upcoming events or sales, to provide access to additional content, and to drive registration. If you are promoting an upcoming Trade Show for example, you can create your Shared Content piece and it can be used not only in your trade show campaign, but added to other emails and landing pages as an additional promotion or reminder. If you have an article, ebook, or on-demand video that would be a great value-add, consider asking your team to use Shared Content to promote these assets in their campaigns as well.

You can also use multiple pieces of Shared Content in the same email or landing page to quickly and easily build out your content. By using images and hyperlinks in your content, you can provide an easy way to click-through to other content or to landing pages, forms, and your social sites. Create buttons to link to other content and increase interactivity.

How do you create Shared Content?

Well, it’s actually quite simple. Let’s take a walk through it:

Go to the Component Library and click on “Shared Content”.
I’m big on folders, so let’s create a folder so that your content can not only be shared but found easily!
Next, click on the “New” button – go to Actions – and click on “Settings”.
Give your content a name and provide a brief description.
Click “Done” and you’re ready to go!
You can add your copy, images, links and field merges right in the rich text editor or click on Source (Src) and paste your html code there.
Click “Save” and you’re all set!

Some things to remember

A few things to remember when creating/using Shared Content:

Make sure that the design elements are consistent with those in the marketing collateral (same color scheme, buttons, fonts, etc.).
If using personalized field merges, be sure you have clean data; if you’re not certain of your data cleanliness, consider not using personalization or create a default in your field merge.
Because your content is potentially being shared across multiple assets and used by multiple people for various campaigns, use caution when editing.
Editing Shared Content is done in the Shared Content module. You cannot edit the content directly in the email or landing page.
You cannot delete Shared Content that has dependencies, i.e., it’s being used in an Eloqua asset. You’ll have to check your dependencies and resolve those first prior to deleting.
If your Shared Content has time-sensitive copy, links, etc., be sure to manage with editing/maintenance.

Give shared content a try. I think you’ll find that it can be a real time saver and fun too!

If you’d like to use Shared Content, or any of the other cool features in Eloqua, but could use some assistance getting started, Relationship One is always here to help.

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