Is your content management strategy really working for you?

The market for content creation is booming. Content marketing generates three times as many quality leads as other traditional marketing channels at a third of the cost. Content creation is reshaping how companies work due to this high-value delivery. Today, 73% of companies have a dedicated decision-making position for creating and executing a content management strategy. 

In today's digital marketplace, over six million new blogs appear on the internet every day. Consumer audiences have more options than ever before, and it's getting harder to stand out in the crowd. The global content marketing market will expand by more than $400 billion in the next four years, with a sustained compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16 percent. Marketers and content providers should expect the pace of content creation to pick up as more funding enters the market. At the same time, the sheer number of choices adds to the difficulty of being visible in a crowded market. Today, online readers spend an average of 37 seconds perusing a blog for the content they're looking for. Video adverts can only keep a user's attention for 15 seconds on social media.

Thriving in this accelerated world of content creation requires a data-driven well-tooled content management strategy. Whether your organization has an existing strategy or you're still just winging it, there are core performance features that should undergird any effective strategy. In this guide, you'll learn what a content management strategy should be and how you can adjust and enhance your own.

Key takeaways

• The pace of content creation is accelerating, flooding the digital marketplace with options.

• Thriving in this fast-paced, changing space requires implementing an effective content management strategy.

• Finding the right content management strategy involves asking the right questions about your organization's identity and the needs and preferences of your target audience.

What is a content management strategy?

A content management strategy represents a plan for achieving your business' objectives in content creation – blogs, audio, and video. An effective content management strategy will engage with your target audience at every point of the funnel, even after they've made a purchase.

A content management strategy should organize your processes for creating, publishing, and managing the content and data your teams create. It should enable real-time collaboration for multiple users and teams so that everyone works on the same page and coordinates for the same objectives. Thus, a  content management strategy is crucial to an organization's competitiveness because it underlies good digital asset management.

Effectively putting a strategy into motion requires implementing a system. In digital content creation, content management systems (CMS) are typically software applications that allow many contributors to generate, update, and publish information. A CMS stores content in a database and displays it in a presentation layer based on a collection of templates.

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Common CMS features include:

• Content Creation: Users may quickly create and format material.
• Content Storage: Storage keeps all your content in one location and in a consistent format.
• Workflows: Predetermined authorizations grant access for managing content to writers, editors, and administrators based on their roles.
• Publishing: The CMS will push content live based on a predetermined schedule. 

4 questions to ask to refine your content management strategy

A CMS will give you the tools you need to put your content management strategy in motion, but you still have to write the strategy based on the goals you want to accomplish. Here are four essential questions to ask yourself to better understand how your organization can most effectively create and use content.

1. Who is your target audience?

Who is your content's intended audience? How many different audiences are you trying to reach with your content? Your content strategy can appeal to multiple types of users, just as your organization may have multiple types of customers. You can distribute personalized material to each persona by using several different content types and channels.

2. What does your audience want from you?

People seek information, products, and services as solutions to problems. What problems do you solve for your target audience? Quality content will help your audience identify problems and start finding solutions. Additionally, you want to create content that speaks to both existing and potential customers. 

3. Which content channels do you prioritize?

The content channels customers prefer evolve rapidly. Global trends for the last few years exhibit significant change.

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• Video: Ninety-four percent of content creators report that video content drives customer understanding of products and services. 
• Podcasts: Podcast consumption in the US rose 25% in 2021 to 15 billion total hours.
• Virtual Reality: VR adoption has doubled since 2017, and the number of regular VR users has risen to 85 million. 

Even tracking global trends can still leave you a bit in the dark, depending on your line of products and services. To deliver great content, you'll not only need to know what your target audience wants. You'll need to know how they prefer to consume that information and focus your content creation on those channels. 

4. How do your teams work, and how do you distribute responsibilities?

In a small outfit, these may seem like questions with obvious answers. However, in larger organizations managing a content creation calendar can be daunting. In your CMS, you want to clearly define:

• Who writes and creates what
• Where do you publish – which channels and syndication partners
• When do you publish

Here's where selecting and configuring your CMS is most critical. Your CMS can truly enable collaboration and break down barriers to system-wide visibility. Multiple users can log in, contribute, schedule or control published content. As software-as-a-service (SaaS),  your team can access the CMS from anywhere because the interface is web-based. 

CMS can also enable non-technical team members unfamiliar with coding to generate and manage their web content. CMS drag-and-drop features allow users to submit text and upload images without knowing HTML or CSS. Using a CMS to publish your digital content reduces the strain and dependence on front-end developers, and teams can work more effectively and independently.

Manage your content with Optimizely's digital experience platform

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