A Content Management Strategy encompasses the planning, creation, publication, management, and governance of content. Planning and implementing it correctly means being able to simultaneously engage target audiences and drive your business goals. A Content Management Strategy helps make the set of techniques that have enhanced marketers’ work over the years more effective.
A Content Management Strategy creates a system of the methods and tools used for content production and distribution within a single workflow. If well executed, this has the power to attract and engage target audiences and to cultivate and qualify leads, allowing you to be able to respond to specific problems. Therefore, it plays a strategic role in guiding the company toward achieving its results.
Before focusing on the benefits of a Content Management Strategy, let’s pause for a moment for a quick overview of some distinctive features of current content marketing.
Marketing strategy: the centrality of content marketing
Content marketing encompasses all the actions and initiatives that are necessary to create and share content that is aimed at improving a company’s activities. This content, in order to perform the function for which it is designed, must be perceived as meaningful, relevant to the overall brand message, consistent across text, video, and audio formats, and enjoyable (entertaining, interesting, exciting, or informative) by the people for whom it is intended. The main purpose is to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, guiding them through a series of conversions to a sale and retention over time.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy.
Ninety-one percent of professionals surveyed by Semrush said they achieved extremely positive results in 2021 through content marketing initiatives.
A series of reports focusing on the experiences of marketers around the world between 2022 and 2023 published by Statista found some interesting results:
- companies must always be active when it comes to their customers (this is a priority of 62% of respondents);
- content-based communications are most effective for personalized targeting purposes (according to nearly a quarter of the sample);
- content marketing is already part of the overall marketing strategies for 90% of respondents (this figure increased by 20 percentage points compared to results in 2019).
A Content Management Strategy is even more necessary today both because content marketing continues to be central within any overall strategy, and because, in the face of the growth in the channels manned by brands, the amount of content produced daily by an organization continues to increase. Therefore, brands must provide an innovative mode of contact, where the effort to maintain a constant digital presence is combined with the search for new and more immediate opportunities for interaction. Before going any further, let’s clarify once more what a Content Management Strategy consists of.
What is a Content Management Strategy?
A content management strategy is a structured plan, developed within an organization, that prepares and guides the creation, publication, and management of content. Today, it is a key component of a company’s organizational survival as it forms a kind of operational matrix for effective information management. Consistent information management is critical for navigating through the complexities of the hyper-connected and hyper-digitized environment that we live in today. In this sense, a Content Management Strategy is a necessary element to support an organization’s growth.
When supported by advanced digital technologies, a Content Management Strategy helps build interactive and personalized experiences, transforming communications—even purely transactional communications—into real conversations. Through these, a company can get to know its customers better and offer them the content, products, and services they really want. By integrating personalization and interactive features into a content management strategy, we introduce a critical factor in building strong and lasting relationships: we engage the customer with relevant content, encourage direct interactions, optimize conversions, and ensure high success rates.
Why develop a content management strategy?
There are many reasons why marketers need to create a content marketing strategy:
- Audience Engagement. A content marketing strategy helps marketers effectively engage with their target audiences. By creating valuable and relevant content, marketers can attract and maintain the attention of their audience. This engagement can lead to increased brand awareness, customer loyalty, and ultimately generate conversions.
- Brand Building. By carefully managing marketing content, you can shape and reinforce the brand identity. Through a consistent message system and storytelling where information is placed within familiar and recognizable narrative structures, you can also confirm the institutional narrative and make sure that it is perceived as authoritative and trustworthy.
- Targeted coverage. A content marketing strategy enables marketers to more accurately reach their target audiences. By understanding the needs, interests, and pain points of customers (acquired and potential), marketers can create content that resonates with them. This targeted approach increases the chances of reaching the “right” people, generating qualified leads and increasing conversions.
- SEO and organic traffic. High-quality content is key to improving search engine optimization (SEO). Creating optimized content that is in line with relevant keywords and topics increases website visibility. This leads to increased organic traffic and higher chances of gaining new customers among the users who enter queries that are in line with what your company is offering.
- Lead generation and conversion. A Content Management Strategy is an extremely effective tool for lead generation. By providing valuable and well-crafted content in an ongoing, organized, and systematic way, marketers can capture the attention of potential customers and encourage them to continue along the sales funnel.
- Customer retention and advocacy. Content marketing strategies focus on acquiring new customers and also on retaining existing ones. It strengthens the relationship with customers if you are able to consistently provide content that is designed to educate, inform, and persuade. In the event that customers are satisfied, they are more likely to become advocates for the brand, promoting its positive image on their channels and thus contributing to its organic growth.
- Adaptability and agility. A Content Management Strategy enables companies to adapt to market trends and consumer behavior. By monitoring and analyzing content performance, marketers can identify what works and what doesn’t and make more accurate decisions because they are data-driven. This flexibility helps organizations stay ahead of the competition and respond effectively to changing customer needs.
What are the key steps in a content management strategy?
Developing an effective content management strategy requires a systematic approach that is in line with the company’s goals and values. There are many steps in this approach and they vary depending on the type of company. However, we can identify five ì steps that are crucial, regardless of the industry and size of the organization:
- Set clear objectives and understand the target audience. A successful content management strategy always begins with a deep understanding of the target audience. By conducting in-depth research and creating buyer personas, organizations can identify the needs, challenges, and interests of potential customers. With this knowledge, they are able to develop tailored, relevant, high-quality content with which to engage the audience, build trust, and strengthen brand reputation.
- Identify the type of content and distribution channels on which to convey messages. On the strength of the analysis of the company’s audience and overall goals, a content marketing strategy should contain precise indications of the resources to be employed, the platforms to be used, and the initiatives to be organized to achieve the intended results (social media, email marketing, search engine optimization techniques, and so on).
- Content creation. Content designed to captivate and resonate with the target audience is developed at this stage. Consistency is key: it’s the regular publication and maintenance of a consistent voice that make the brand credible.
- Content distribution. The company uses the platforms and channels selected in the second phase to maximize the visibility of the content produced and intercept the target audience in the virtual places where they are most likely to encounter it.
- Monitor and measure results. By analyzing key performance indicators and feedback, organizations can refine their strategy, intervene with improvement actions, optimize content, and ensure that they are able to continuously adapt with changes in the target audience’s purchasing and consumption habits.
The entire process of building a Content Management Strategy is faster, more streamlined, and enhanced through digitization. The last three steps, in particular, have been consolidated and enhanced through the introduction of certain important tools. Let’s look at the most effective ones.
The essential tools in a content management strategy
A successful content management strategy requires a comprehensive set of tools to create, organize, distribute, and analyze content:
- A robust content management system (CMS) can provide a basic centralized platform to create, edit, and publish content to various channels (from websites to newsletters to social networks) and enable seamless collaboration, version control, and workflow management.
- A marketing automation solution that automates workflows makes it possible for companies to optimize their communications, increase the effectiveness of multichannel mailings by dynamically segmenting target groups, and initiate lead qualification processes.
- A “calendar” application helps with planning and ensuring a realistic and shared publishing schedule. Keyword research and SEO applications help optimize content for search engines and drive organic traffic.
- Analytics tools provide valuable insights into the performance of individual content and entire campaigns, user engagement and conversion rates, enabling data-driven decision making.
- Finally, a content repository or digital asset management (DAM) system ensures easy storage, organization, and retrieval of multimedia assets, such as images, videos, and audio files.
So far we have provided a brief overview of the most widely used solutions today. Of these, two deserve further attention.
Content Management System and marketing automation: from simple management to creating new contact opportunities
Today, making the process of creating and distributing personalized communications more efficient, based on the real needs of customers is an important company priority. The need is to collect, sort, store, and manage huge volumes of data, grouping the content produced—from emails to documents, from graphics to communications (and the list could go on…)—in one easily accessible place. The need to cut management costs is therefore accompanied by the desire to build long-term relationships.
Today, we are all immersed in an incessant flow of content and communication, which is often chaotic, redundant, and intrusive. Capturing the attention of audiences, who are increasingly demanding, selective, and disinclined to listen, is no longer a challenge but has become the challenge to be met, and quickly. Marketing automation solutions were born precisely to get companies results faster and less expensively by speeding up and simplifying otherwise highly time-consuming processes.
To achieve these goals, organizations, whether large or small, are increasingly equipping themselves with a Content Management System (CMS), a platform that allows them to create, edit, and publish content on a website and other digital channels without the need for any coding knowledge.
While WordPress is perhaps the best-known example of a content management system—it’s used to create blogs, landing pages, online courses, and e-commerce—the Doxee Content Hub enables companies to manage the entire content production and publishing process by enriching spaces in digital objects with visual content (banners, images, text, icons, …) and create new contact opportunities: upselling, onboarding, institutional reminders, loyalty programs, nurturing, caring and more, all through a simple interface. It’s a solution that is designed to enhance the initiatives created with other Doxee products, such as Doxee Pvideo® and Doxee Pweb®.
Similarly, Doxee Booster, the new marketing automation option that empowers the brand voice and makes it memorable, is also closely linked to the use of Pvideo and Pweb. Customers can use Doxee Booster to implement campaigns for optimized delivery of communications (not only email but also SMS, mobile push, web notifications), identify the most interested contacts through lead qualification processes, dynamically segment customers based on their interests, and build workflows that trigger automatic reactions in response to certain actions. This is a real enhancement that is applicable both to transactional use cases, such as smart invoices and digital debt collection, and to constantly expanding processes such as lead generation and lead nurturing in the onboarding, upselling, cross-selling, and loyalty phases.
The tools we have discussed effectively support any Content Management Strategy and enable organizations to create and manage interesting, useful, and meaningful content easily and efficiently.
Conclusion: content management strategy at your service
In conclusion, a well-defined content management strategy encompasses content planning, creation, publication, management, and governance. Implementing it allows you to attract your target audience, meet their needs, and drive business objectives at the same time. Throughout this post, we have seen how a Content Management Strategy, in order to make a real change and deliver a service to the business, must necessarily provide a roadmap, and a set of practical directions, a method, and a set of tools. Each element of the content strategy, when embedded in a clear, organized, and shared flow among project participants, plays a crucial role in engaging customers (existing or potential) to create brand awareness, generate leads, drive conversions, and foster trusting relationships that last.