How to Organize Your Company’s Content for Greater Productivity

If you run a business online these days, you have more content than you realize. From structured to unstructured, your digital footprint is massive. And if you aren’t doing anything to stay organized, you’re putting your business at serious risk. You need a content management plan!

What is Content Management?

It doesn’t matter what business you run – content is at the heart of everything. Whether it’s insurance, real estate, online education, or anything in between, content is at the core. And in order to be efficient and productive, you need a plan for managing that content.

As Box explains, “Content management is the process of organizing, consolidating, and collecting information in its various forms, such as documents, multimedia files, and design files. Nearly anything you can save on your computer is considered content.”

Content management consists of numerous individual tasks and roles, including creating content, editing content, publishing content, retaining and storing content, organizing content, managing content permissions, modifying content, incorporating content into business workflows, etc.

The problem is that most businesses don’t have a plan for how they manage their content. They just hope everything works out. Unfortunately, it rarely does. The result is disorganization, inconsistency, and other challenges.

Try These 4 Content Management Tips

Whether you’re a small company that’s just getting started or a large organization with multiple locations and hundreds of employees, an investment in content management is well worth your time. 

Here are several tips to make things easier:

1. Plan for Content Governance and Management

It’s important to understand both content governance and content management. Both play an important role in being successful with content as your business grows. 

As digital marketer Paige Toomes explains, “Content governance is about the governing, controlling, and maintenance of content. It’s about following overarching guidelines and frameworks (which help with consistency of content at best and make sure you don’t get embarrassed or sued at worst).”

Content management is more about the “how?” and “who?” of content. It accounts for how content is created and stored, as well as who is responsible for executing individual tasks. 

You need governance in place to ensure proper management, but content governance and content management are two separate things. Make sense? Good…let’s proceed. 

2. Conduct a Content Audit

It’s a good idea to start with a content audit (and conduct them regularly over time). A content audit is a dedicated process where you collect and analyze all content assets that belong to your company. This includes internal resources (like manuals and HR documents) and customer-facing resources (website assets, marketing content, etc.). 

A content audit helps you get a comprehensive picture of all of your content so you can secure any vulnerabilities and identify gaps that could be present. (If you want more information on how to conduct a content audit, this resource should help.)

3. Plan Content for the Buyer’s Journey

When it comes to customer-facing content, your content management strategy can help you match content to the buyer’s journey. In other words, there should be content that aligns with every stage of the customer’s journey to purchase. 

For example, you need content that’s designed for people who are at the top of the funnel in the awareness phase. This content would be educational and informative. Then as the customer moves further down the funnel, the content becomes more specific and salesy in nature. Rather than focusing everything on the problem the prospect is feeling, the content would shift to solutions and proof (testimonials and case studies). 

Hopefully, you can see the importance of having the right content in place for the right stage of purchase. A content management plan allows you to organize the creation and publication of this content. 

4. Invest in Content Security

Every piece of content within your organization is an asset – and it should be treated as such. In some cases, you may be legally required to protect certain content with proactive security measures. (If you’re in healthcare, for example, internal records are governed by HIPAA laws that limit access.) A documented content management approach allows you to approach content security with a plan.

Adding it All Up

Getting control of your content and developing a plan for creating, organizing, and leveraging your content in a secure, streamlined manner is critically important. Use the tips outlined above to begin improving in this area of your business. 

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