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Content marketing involves lots of moving parts. It requires editorial calendars, posting schedules, approval workflows, and KPIs — and that’s before we even consider managing media assets like videos, blog posts, and social media content.
A solid content management strategy is foundational to keeping all these moving parts organized. Without the right content management processes and plan, managing online content simply becomes untenable. It’s impossible to know what topics are resonating with your audience, whether your posts are moving the needle to your business goal, and which channels are most effective.
If you don’t have a formal content management strategy in place, or if you’re looking to level up your existing one, this guide can help.
What is a content management strategy?
A content management strategy is a plan for creating, publishing, and managing content. It outlines the goals of your content marketing efforts, the types of content your brand will create, the channels you will use to distribute your content, and the metrics you will use to measure the success of your content strategy.
At the core, your content management strategy should match the needs of your target audience to the goals of your business. A content management plan should answer questions such as:
- Who is your target audience?
- What problem does your content solve?
- How does your content help your brand stand out?
- How will your audience consume your content?
- What will make your content successful?
Content management strategies also help you align your resources internally, making sure every team is working towards the same purpose and has the support they need to succeed.
Why is a content management strategy important?
Posting content without a content management strategy is about as effective as throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. Without a digital content management plan, it’s very difficult to learn what messages resonate with your target audience, fine-tune your marketing, and make progress toward your marketing goals. If you don’t have a content management strategy, you will spend a lot of time and money creating and publishing content that is not relevant to your target audience.
A content management strategy can help you to identify your target audience and create content specifically designed for them. It helps you optimize your resources, leverage the right communication channels (e.g., email, social media, or digital ads), and measure the right metrics so that you get the most bang for your content marketing buck. A content management plan can help you to create high-quality content by setting clear goals for your content marketing efforts and by providing guidelines for creating effective content.
A content management strategy also keeps your team organized. With a content management process in place, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and creating a cohesive brand experience for your customers.
How can a content management strategy benefit your business?
A well-defined content management strategy can offer numerous benefits to your business, regardless of its size or industry.
Create a consistent brand experience
A content management strategy ensures that your content is consistent across platforms in terms of tone, style, branding, and messaging. A consistent brand experience helps build trust with your audience. And, by consistently publishing high-quality, informative content, you can establish credibility and authority, attracting not only customers but also potential partners and collaborators.
A tool like Clearview Social can make it easy to share consistent content about your business. Clearview Social’s AI caption generator, Social Shuffle AI, can semi-automate the creative process of determining what to write on your social channels. Teams can use this AI integration to generate new social media copy, customize it for tone and consistency, and share it across channels. It speeds up the creative process of coming up with captions while still allowing your brand voice to shine through.
Generate leads
Valuable, relevant content can serve as a lead generation tool. When you provide valuable content that educates and persuades your target audience, they will be more likely to buy your products or services.
By offering content that addresses your audience’s challenges, you can capture their interest and guide them through the sales funnel. Figuring out the right channels to distribute your content matters, too: understanding where your target audience engages with content enables your brand to engage them more effectively.
Build long-term value
Well-crafted content has a longer lifespan than many other forms of marketing efforts. Content can be repackaged in various ways: a blog post, for instance, can be turned into a social media post, video script, or expanded into an ebook. This makes content marketing one of the most cost-effective ways to communicate with your audience.
With the right content management processes, your content can also reduce some of the costs of customer service. Helpful and informative content can give your customers an option to solve their own problems without having to contact you directly. This can free up your team’s time so that they can focus on other tasks, and still improve customer satisfaction.
Work more efficiently
A digital content management plan streamlines content creation, publication, and distribution processes. With a clear plan in place, your team can coordinate, reducing duplication of effort and saving time.
And, a content management strategy can put your content to work for you by boosting your SEO. Your content management plan should be based on SEO best practices, making your content more discoverable by search engines. This drives organic traffic to your website and improves your website visibility.
Key components of a content management strategy
A formal content management strategy should be detailed and holistic, encompassing the many components that work together to create, organize, distribute, and measure your content. Use your content management strategy to answer these questions.
- Goals: What do you want to achieve with your content marketing (e.g., increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales)?
- Target audience: Who are you creating content for? What are their interests and pain points?
- Content types: What types of content will you create (e.g., blog posts, articles, videos, infographics)?
- Channels: Where will you publish your content (e.g., social media, email, your website)?
- Schedule: How often will you publish content?
- Budget: How much money will you spend on content marketing?
- Metrics: How will you measure the success of your content marketing?
- Team: Who will be responsible for creating and managing your content?
- Process: What is the workflow for creating, approving, and managing online content?
- Technology: What tools will you use to create and manage your content?
There are clearly many different components to consider when setting up content management processes. Start with your business goals and work on the best strategy for achieving them, while considering your audience’s needs too.
3 Content management best practices
Once you’ve answered the above questions, the next step is putting your content management plan into action. Here are a few tips to help you get started.
1. Know your audience
One of the most important parts of content marketing is understanding the problems your audience has and providing solutions through infographics, engaging videos, blog posts, and more. As such, start with an understanding of your audience. When are they online? What are they searching for? What kind of content resonates with them?
Clearview Social’s PeakTime™ can help answer some of these questions. PeakTime™ uses AI to make sure your social media posts are posted at the moment when your audience is paying attention. Using PeakTime™ allows your business to optimize your posting schedule and see the number of clicks, likes, and shares on your content.
2. Create multipurpose content
Look for opportunities to create content that can serve many purposes, such as SEO, thought leadership, email marketing, and more. Making your content work smarter, not harder, gives you more bandwidth to maximize your budget.
Clearview Social can help your team repurpose content in just a few clicks. Our easy-to-use Chrome extension allows any member of your organization to easily grab content on the web and incorporate it into your social media strategy. Use this along with RSS feeds, which allow you to link any webpage with RSS into Clearview Social. Pick top blogs in your industry to see the latest pieces that might be relevant to your audience and employees.
3. Implement tools to do the heavy lifting
Automating as much as possible makes content marketing manageable. And, Clearview Social makes it easy to put your content marketing initiatives on autopilot. Along with PeakTime™, Clearview Social’s Virtual Assistant allows a designated admin to post content to an employee’s social media profile without the need for them to approve every post.
And, our Automated queue creation feature allows you to automatically distribute your blog posts to employees in a newsletter to share, saving you time and driving high-quality traffic.
Learn more about Clearview Social’s many tools for content management. Sign up for a free demo and start letting our platform maximize your content marketing efforts.