Content makes you competitive. Traditionally, what was “nice to have” as part of a marketing strategy is now central to demonstrating your value and getting customers to fall in love with your brand.
Plus, given the estimated speed of data produced per day being around 1.145 trillion MB, your content needs to be timely, it needs to be accurate, and it needs to be good.
For multinational, omni-channel companies that have complex digital infrastructure, sharing accurate content across all communication channels is your bread and butter. Not only does it maintain brand consistency and engage your audience, but good content marketing generates around a 6x increase in overall conversions.
Plus (no surprise) customers love it.
So how can you make sure your content is accurate, strong and delivered quickly? We’re breaking down 3 things you can do to improve your content management process, to save time, money and stress.
1. Keep content on the right system
The first step to cutting costs and wasted time is to employ a decent process to manage your content. This may sound obvious but it is surprising how often we come across extremely convoluted procedures around even the simplest content. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything needs to be in one location, but using the correct system for the correct asset and setting up the workflow processes so that you avoid duplicated documents, multiple published versions and half-finished drafts sitting in your drives across numerous departments is essential.
Invaluable time is often wasted reformatting content, chasing stakeholders, emailing amendments or copy and pasting work to the platform. Moving towards a system that is dedicated to managing your content, so that you can focus on the words you write and not the format in which it will be displayed will you can free up your time to focus on the actual content creation rather than the process.
Chaotic content management is responsible for teams losing track of the newest version of work, allowing outdated or inaccurate content to be published. With no logical storing system, your writers and designers waste resources recreating things which have already been completed.
Many CMS have built in media libraries, but introducing a Digital Assets Management System (DAM) is also a great way to ensure that you are keeping your core media relevant, accurate and easy for any staff to locate. Ensuring that brand assets, such as logos, product shots, company videos, data sheets or other key information is easily accessible ensures that your written content can be enhanced with the latest and most up-to-date media – again saving content creators time and improving accuracy.
Critically the right platforms and the right processes ensure brand consistency across all your digital platforms, no matter how many sites, apps or other digital experiences you and your teams decide to have.
2. Allow people to focus on what they do best
In prioritising content, you’re likely to hire the best writers, designers and editors to do what they’re best at, with minimal roadblocks. So if your technology doesn’t support fast, omnichannel content creation, you can expect stressed-out teams and major delays in your content process.
Concerning your writers with meticulously checking form and appearance rather than the quality of content slows your creation process, especially if the piece is being delivered across multiple platforms.
The solution? Use clean and user-friendly templates and workflows that allow the copywriter to paste and hit “upload” with the hard work of formatting already done for them.
A system that enables writers to simply type their content so it appears correctly wherever it is uploaded can not only make things easier for writers but can speed up a system that originally may have meant agonisingly slow turn around times and delays in getting to market.
This is especially helpful in instances where expert copywriters are outsourced for specific projects. Writers need only focus on the writing itself, without having to think about where it is going. The financial outlay is also reduced since 3rd parties don’t have to go through lengthy tech and CMS training in order to upload content; it can simply be added to the relevant pages and published.
A headless service, Contentful allows content to be uploaded to multiple platforms in minimal steps without having to worry about how it will be displayed.
When you allow your writers to do what they do best, they are able to work creatively without restrictions of where it may be going.
3. Create workflows that match your business process (not match your tech)
A lot of large companies are dictated by regulations which require legal teams, managers or editors to review content before it is publicly released.
Whether this is to comply with internal rules, observe national/international legislation, or even maintain brand consistency, cross-departmental approval is common practice in the content process.
This raises the challenge of how best to transfer data to each relevant team to manage content along this process quickly, working with the most up-to-date and accurate version.
Without workflows to make this process simple, secure and efficient, you can end up making costly adaptations to the way you work rather than simply investing in the correct technology to allow multiple teams to complete their tasks.
If you’ve been forcing everyone to use the same software, making clunky data transfers or adding in additional steps to your process to make sure everyone can carry out their job, changing some or even your whole business to suit your technology comes at a hefty price.
Investing in a composable stack allows you to easily set up integrations across your digital ecosystem to allow for seamless integration between each teams’ favourite systems, without changing the way the business runs.
For example, you may use software for your legal teams to review and sign off documents, without having to give admin access to the entire tech stack to simply make a check. This will also keep control of recent versions, rather than passing content between emails, drives and even chat channels. Content can also be checked externally by additional third party software providers without ever compromising the security of your systems.
By designing workflows within your business that match your business process, and selecting the best technology to enable this, you are able to have a system which supports your business rather than your business adapting to your technology.
Need help?
If you’re ready to improve your content process, but need a little help getting started, why not get in touch?
Nemetos Tanasuk is a full service digital agency who have over 14 years of expertise helping clients to realise their goals in a way that totally transforms their user experience.
We’re small but mighty, working as your teammate and partner, not just as an anonymous external agency.
From discovery and design to delivery and optimisation, we collaborate with your digital stakeholders to ensure that you can create beautiful, user-focused digital experiences which help you to hit your goals. As a client, you receive a hands on, honest and ambitious approach to strategy, which empowers your team to get results through cutting-edge innovation and technology.
We’d love to invite you in to visit our office, meet our team and ask your digital questions. Coffee and Croissants Consultations are a great way to do this, and you can book a slot any Wednesday or Thursday morning to drop in and say hello (with the best pastries Borough has to offer – in our opinion!) Book here
