Managing content is not easy. You’ve got to think about people, processes and technology, as well as handling different types of content (internal content, website content, social media content, offline content), where ownership, creation and distribution is often dispersed across the organisation - especially in large organisations.
This article is for anyone who is new to a content management role, anyone who needs to formalise and strategise their content management practices, anyone doing a website redesign project, or anyone who feels confused by content management and all its related concepts.
There are many terms related to an organisation’s content that can seem similar at times, and hard to distinguish. And content management is just one of them. I’m going to define content management along with content strategy, content governance and content operations.
There is some overlap and several, varying, often conflicting, definitions for each out there (plus, it all depends on your context anyway) but I have tried to summarise and break it down:
A widely-used definition of content strategy is “planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content” by Kristina Halvorson over at Brain Traffic. So it actually includes governance, and arguably some aspects of management. In short, content strategy is about planning, and focuses on tying content back to audience needs and business goals. Broadly speaking, it’s about the ”‘Why’” of content. The purpose of content. As in, why create content at all? What do you want to achieve?
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). It’s to do with inventories, ownership, style guides, policies, regulations, risk management, updating content, and accessibility. Content governance is the “What” of content. As in, what do you need to pay attention to? What does good content include? Governance is “doing the right thing.”
In contrast to governance, content management is the “How?” and “Who?” of content, and “doing things right.” It’s about the way things are done and people involved. It focuses on the day-to-day content production process and handling of content, from creation to archiving and updating. It's about allocating the resources (people, processes and technology) for content strategy and governance to take effect. This includes roles and responsibilities, workflow and accountability, storage, editing and approvals, and publishing.
Your content operations (ContentOps) is all of the above, and more. It’s concerned with everything that happens between content strategy and content delivery. ContentOps encompasses the people, processes and technology needed to systematise, automate and scale content. All organisations that produce content will have some form of ContentOps. But having 'good' ContentOps is about improving and investing in your content. It's about assessing “Where” your organisation is in terms of content operations maturity.
Day-to-day content management needs to be strategic – i.e. aligned with content strategy – to be successful. According to Content Marketing Institute’s content management and strategy survey, organisations already doing this cite these top five benefits as a result:
All of that said, a whopping 72% of respondents said their organisation is challenged with managing their content strategically.
Content has the potential to be an organisation’s best asset, and management processes can, and should, do it justice. They should improve efficiency and allow you to focus on what’s important: creating content to meet user needs.
Here are five tips to help you manage your content strategically:
Organising and categorising is a key part of managing content. But staying on top of it is tough, given the sheer volume, velocity and variety of internal and external content that organisations manage - particularly large organisations. Worldwide, humans collectively create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day.
But for content managers, managing content about more than just staying on top of it and keeping it organised. It’s about getting the most out of it and managing it strategically. Taking the time to make sure you uphold a clean content house will pay off in the future when it comes to SEO optimising, targeting and personalising content. Here are some ways to categorise and organise your content strategically:
At GatherContent, we recently redesigned and migrated our blog, and although it was a slog, some of the key reasons for doing this was to get better categorisation, consistency for our readers and for SEO, and better ways to discover related content. Well, it certainly paid off! We can now do all the great content on our blog justice through the way we manage it.
It’s so important to keep track of everything in one place when you’re creating and managing content. An editorial calendar will help you document what content you’re going to produce and publish, and spot opportunities and gaps quickly. It will also help you manage the frequency you publish certain types of content, and ensure you’re publishing high-quality content consistently.
Make sure you include the format, authors, owners, the date it will be published, goals, and the user journey stage/user need the content ties back to. You should also be able to track the status of content easily. You can make this what it needs to be for your organisation, the main thing is just to keep it updated and keep the content flowing. Download our free editorial calendar template to help, which includes a horizon planning tab to give you an overview of what’s coming up.
When you’re managing the content production lifecycle, accountability helps you avoid massive hidden problems appearing too far down the line, and allows you to ‘clean as you cook’ so to speak, and spot opportunities along the way. So, establishing accountability in content teams is important. But what does it look like day-to-day?
When organisations lack accountability, it’s not usually that people don’t care about responsibilities and standards. Maintaining accountability is difficult when you’re creating lots of content, with lots of people creating that content, often across siloed departments. You need to create a positive culture through your processes and technology for accountability to stick.
Related to creating a culture of accountability, is also creating a culture of collaboration. As Liz Moorehead says in her article, tips for first-time content managers: “when you're a content manager, you're also an internal relationship manager.”
Content managers will often encounter friction when trying to manage content that is produced across different silos, by different people, with conflicting priorities. A lack of collaboration can also mean work is duplicated, and the review processes takes longer than it should.
Successful content management is about using tools and processes to help people create and deliver content with a common goal in mind. This will lead to content that provides a great user experience. A few relationships to consider, and tips on managing these in the content creation process are:
Truly successful, user-centered content will always be the result of proper collaboration throughout the production lifecycle. It's about teams coming together early on in the creation process, asking the right questions, then trying to figure out the answers together. Only then will content become an asset to your organisation.
A huge part of building a culture of collaboration, and enabling high-quality content to shine through, comes down to the tech that you use. Your people are only as good as the tech you give them, so it's important to choose tech that works for your organisation.
Yet many organisations lack the right technology to manage content effectively. According to the 2018 CMI survey we mentioned before:
A good content management system (CMS) is integral to managing and publishing content to your website. It's also important to think about distributing and promoting content on social media channels through content calendar tools and automated publishing.
That said, content management is about more than just these publishing systems. Many organisations’ content problems can be traced back to a lack of the right tools for the pre-CMS phase of content management. The CMS isn’t an ideal editing environment, or a place for feedback, workflows and status updates. But then again, neither is Microsoft Word, and relentless email chains.
It's important for organisations to have the right technology for content creation too. After all, you can't manage content effectively if it's not created in the right environment.
GatherContent is a Content Operations Platform that helps you plan, create, and manage content before it gets to the CMS. It helps with strategic content management, whether that’s for a website build, redesign project, or day-to-day, through:
To find out more about how GatherContent can help your organisation manage content better, for productivity quality and compliance, try out our free demo or free 30-day trial.
Well-managed content ultimately means that content fulfils content strategy and governance through everyday processes and technology.
If you can keep an organised content house, keep track of the status and progress of content, ensure everyone follows a clear workflow, increase collaboration and break down silos in your organisation, then you can also speed up the process and ensure only high-quality content that meets user needs is being published.
This all means that content can be created and managed in a way that focuses on how it ties back to organisational goals, innovation, and how it proves ROI (rather than the focus being on the content creation process itself).
Managing content is not easy. You’ve got to think about people, processes and technology, as well as handling different types of content (internal content, website content, social media content, offline content), where ownership, creation and distribution is often dispersed across the organisation - especially in large organisations.
This article is for anyone who is new to a content management role, anyone who needs to formalise and strategise their content management practices, anyone doing a website redesign project, or anyone who feels confused by content management and all its related concepts.
There are many terms related to an organisation’s content that can seem similar at times, and hard to distinguish. And content management is just one of them. I’m going to define content management along with content strategy, content governance and content operations.
There is some overlap and several, varying, often conflicting, definitions for each out there (plus, it all depends on your context anyway) but I have tried to summarise and break it down:
A widely-used definition of content strategy is “planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content” by Kristina Halvorson over at Brain Traffic. So it actually includes governance, and arguably some aspects of management. In short, content strategy is about planning, and focuses on tying content back to audience needs and business goals. Broadly speaking, it’s about the ”‘Why’” of content. The purpose of content. As in, why create content at all? What do you want to achieve?
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). It’s to do with inventories, ownership, style guides, policies, regulations, risk management, updating content, and accessibility. Content governance is the “What” of content. As in, what do you need to pay attention to? What does good content include? Governance is “doing the right thing.”
In contrast to governance, content management is the “How?” and “Who?” of content, and “doing things right.” It’s about the way things are done and people involved. It focuses on the day-to-day content production process and handling of content, from creation to archiving and updating. It's about allocating the resources (people, processes and technology) for content strategy and governance to take effect. This includes roles and responsibilities, workflow and accountability, storage, editing and approvals, and publishing.
Your content operations (ContentOps) is all of the above, and more. It’s concerned with everything that happens between content strategy and content delivery. ContentOps encompasses the people, processes and technology needed to systematise, automate and scale content. All organisations that produce content will have some form of ContentOps. But having 'good' ContentOps is about improving and investing in your content. It's about assessing “Where” your organisation is in terms of content operations maturity.
Day-to-day content management needs to be strategic – i.e. aligned with content strategy – to be successful. According to Content Marketing Institute’s content management and strategy survey, organisations already doing this cite these top five benefits as a result:
All of that said, a whopping 72% of respondents said their organisation is challenged with managing their content strategically.
Content has the potential to be an organisation’s best asset, and management processes can, and should, do it justice. They should improve efficiency and allow you to focus on what’s important: creating content to meet user needs.
Here are five tips to help you manage your content strategically:
Organising and categorising is a key part of managing content. But staying on top of it is tough, given the sheer volume, velocity and variety of internal and external content that organisations manage - particularly large organisations. Worldwide, humans collectively create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day.
But for content managers, managing content about more than just staying on top of it and keeping it organised. It’s about getting the most out of it and managing it strategically. Taking the time to make sure you uphold a clean content house will pay off in the future when it comes to SEO optimising, targeting and personalising content. Here are some ways to categorise and organise your content strategically:
At GatherContent, we recently redesigned and migrated our blog, and although it was a slog, some of the key reasons for doing this was to get better categorisation, consistency for our readers and for SEO, and better ways to discover related content. Well, it certainly paid off! We can now do all the great content on our blog justice through the way we manage it.
It’s so important to keep track of everything in one place when you’re creating and managing content. An editorial calendar will help you document what content you’re going to produce and publish, and spot opportunities and gaps quickly. It will also help you manage the frequency you publish certain types of content, and ensure you’re publishing high-quality content consistently.
Make sure you include the format, authors, owners, the date it will be published, goals, and the user journey stage/user need the content ties back to. You should also be able to track the status of content easily. You can make this what it needs to be for your organisation, the main thing is just to keep it updated and keep the content flowing. Download our free editorial calendar template to help, which includes a horizon planning tab to give you an overview of what’s coming up.
When you’re managing the content production lifecycle, accountability helps you avoid massive hidden problems appearing too far down the line, and allows you to ‘clean as you cook’ so to speak, and spot opportunities along the way. So, establishing accountability in content teams is important. But what does it look like day-to-day?
When organisations lack accountability, it’s not usually that people don’t care about responsibilities and standards. Maintaining accountability is difficult when you’re creating lots of content, with lots of people creating that content, often across siloed departments. You need to create a positive culture through your processes and technology for accountability to stick.
Related to creating a culture of accountability, is also creating a culture of collaboration. As Liz Moorehead says in her article, tips for first-time content managers: “when you're a content manager, you're also an internal relationship manager.”
Content managers will often encounter friction when trying to manage content that is produced across different silos, by different people, with conflicting priorities. A lack of collaboration can also mean work is duplicated, and the review processes takes longer than it should.
Successful content management is about using tools and processes to help people create and deliver content with a common goal in mind. This will lead to content that provides a great user experience. A few relationships to consider, and tips on managing these in the content creation process are:
Truly successful, user-centered content will always be the result of proper collaboration throughout the production lifecycle. It's about teams coming together early on in the creation process, asking the right questions, then trying to figure out the answers together. Only then will content become an asset to your organisation.
A huge part of building a culture of collaboration, and enabling high-quality content to shine through, comes down to the tech that you use. Your people are only as good as the tech you give them, so it's important to choose tech that works for your organisation.
Yet many organisations lack the right technology to manage content effectively. According to the 2018 CMI survey we mentioned before:
A good content management system (CMS) is integral to managing and publishing content to your website. It's also important to think about distributing and promoting content on social media channels through content calendar tools and automated publishing.
That said, content management is about more than just these publishing systems. Many organisations’ content problems can be traced back to a lack of the right tools for the pre-CMS phase of content management. The CMS isn’t an ideal editing environment, or a place for feedback, workflows and status updates. But then again, neither is Microsoft Word, and relentless email chains.
It's important for organisations to have the right technology for content creation too. After all, you can't manage content effectively if it's not created in the right environment.
GatherContent is a Content Operations Platform that helps you plan, create, and manage content before it gets to the CMS. It helps with strategic content management, whether that’s for a website build, redesign project, or day-to-day, through:
To find out more about how GatherContent can help your organisation manage content better, for productivity quality and compliance, try out our free demo or free 30-day trial.
Well-managed content ultimately means that content fulfils content strategy and governance through everyday processes and technology.
If you can keep an organised content house, keep track of the status and progress of content, ensure everyone follows a clear workflow, increase collaboration and break down silos in your organisation, then you can also speed up the process and ensure only high-quality content that meets user needs is being published.
This all means that content can be created and managed in a way that focuses on how it ties back to organisational goals, innovation, and how it proves ROI (rather than the focus being on the content creation process itself).
Paige is an English Literature and Media graduate from Newcastle University, and over the last three years has built up a career in SEO-driven copywriting for tech companies. She has written for Microsoft, Symantec and LinkedIn, as well as other SaaS companies and IT consulting firms. With an audience-focused approach to content, Paige handles the lifecycle from creation through to measurement, supporting businesses with their content operations.
Paige is an English Literature and Media graduate from Newcastle University, and over the last three years has built up a career in SEO-driven copywriting for tech companies. She has written for Microsoft, Symantec and LinkedIn, as well as other SaaS companies and IT consulting firms. With an audience-focused approach to content, Paige handles the lifecycle from creation through to measurement, supporting businesses with their content operations.