If you are new to a content management role, need to formalise and strategise your content management practices, or just feel confused by content management strategy and its related concepts, keep reading to learn the basics about content management and different types of content strategy.
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. Let's 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:
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’” or the purpose of the content. As in, why create this content at all? What do you want to achieve?
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 governance deals 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” based on a documented definition of what the "right thing" is.
In contrast to governance, content management is the “How?” and “Who?” of content. It’s about the way things are done and the people who are involved. It focuses on the day-to-day content production process and handling of content, from creation to archiving and updating.
Content management is 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 are all of the above, and more. It’s concerned with everything that happens between content strategy and content delivery. Content operations encompass the people, processes, and technology needed to systematise, automate and scale content.
All organisations that produce content will have some form of content operations. But having effective operations 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, 78% of organisations take a strategic approach to managing content. And the top reason organisations don't take a strategic approach to content management is the lack of processes (63%).
Establishing and documenting content processes is essential to strategic content management. 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 the target audience's needs.
If you want your content marketing efforts to be effective, you'll need to ensure that your content management is aligned with your content strategy. Here are five tips to help you manage your content more 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. The longer you wait to organise and categorise your digital marketing content, the more likely you are to miss opportunities to use this content to your company's advantage.
But for content managers, managing content is 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, targeting, and personalising content.
Here are some ways to categorise and organise your content strategically:
At GatherContent, we redesigned and migrated our blog. Although it was a slog, it was an essential process 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.
When you’re managing the content production lifecycle, establishing accountability in your content team helps you avoid massive hidden problems appearing too far down the line. It also allows you to ‘clean as you cook’ so to speak, and spot opportunities along the way.
But what does it look like day-to-day?
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:
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 process 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.
Here are a few relationships to consider, and tips on managing these relationships in the content creation process:
Truly successful, user-centered content will always be the result of proper collaboration throughout the content 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 creating an environment where high-quality content shines through is 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.
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 space to ideate and create content. It also isn't always the best editing environment or a place for feedback. Not to mention, your CMS will not allow you to build workflows or provide status updates. But then again, neither is Microsoft Word, and relentless email chains.
GatherContent was designed to make content management more efficient and effective by giving your content or marketing team one place to collaborate on content throughout the pre-publish phase. On the platform, you can collaborate in real-time, make comments during the revision process, and notify collaborators on when content needs their attention.
You can also build repeatable content workflows where responsibilities and actions are clear. The platform also offers status updates that allow team members to communicate their progress, helping ensure that content moves through the pipeline smoothly. These features help you avoid bottlenecks that can delay the publishing of your content.
There are different types of content strategies that you might use depending on the type of content you're creating and the approach you are taking to creating that content. Since content management needs to align with content strategy, it's important to understand the different types of strategy and when to use each.
A lead generation content strategy is focused on generating content that is used to get people to opt-in to an email list. This strategy focuses on two main elements: driving traffic to the piece of content and developing an opt-in that's enticing for potential customers.
Lead generation content often isn't as long or in-depth as other types of content like thought leadership or SEO content. The goal is to give the reader something quick they can take away and put into use so they can recognize the value of your brand.
A lead generation content strategy includes content that's focused on educating customers on their pain points so that they can begin to move from the awareness to the consideration phase. But the opt-in needs to be interesting and valuable enough for a lead to hand over their email address.
When you want to be recognized as an industry leader or expert, you'll develop a thought leadership content strategy focused on increasing your reach. In order to be known as a thought leader, you need to get your content in front of as many people as possible.
A thought leadership content strategy focuses on content that's innovative, attention-grabbing, in-depth. It needs to say something new about the topic rather than rehash what has already been said by others in the industry.
The second part of developing a thought leadership content strategy is coming up with a solid plan for distributing and getting eyes on the piece. You'll need to get the piece of content in front of people who are outside of your typical readership. This might include publishing on guest blogs, industry publications, or sites like LinkedIn or Medium.
An SEO content marketing strategy focuses on driving lead traffic to your website through search engines. While you are ultimately creating content for humans, taking search engine optimization into consideration when creating your content strategy can help ensure that the greatest amount of humans can see and access your content.
One of the main considerations for an SEO content strategy is knowing what people are searching for. This often requires an SEO expert to do some competitor and keyword research. This reveals SEO opportunities for your content that you may have not realized were available.
The second part of SEO content strategy is ensuring that the content you're creating is formatted in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl your content. Understanding how to utilize headings, find the right keyword density, and create effective metadata are all important to your SEO strategy.
An enterprise content marketing strategy is designed specifically for large companies with over 1,000 employees. When building this type of content strategy, marketers will need to consider the company's needs, budget, challenges, and team members. Whereas a small business content strategy will prioritize doing the most with the least resources, and enterprise strategy will prioritize creating content at scale.
This type of content marketing strategy is focused on providing relevant content to the organisation's audience. The goal is to speak to specific pain points and needs while aiming to build rapport with the reader.
With an enterprise content strategy, you'll want to consider what resources you have to help add value to the content. For instance, you may have subject matter experts with who your writers can create content or get input from other teams.
Ready to develop your content management strategy? Regardless of which tool you use to manage the content process, you'll need to include certain details in your strategy to ensure that everyone is clear on their responsibilities and deadlines.
You can use this content management strategy template to get started:
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 content creation.
Here are some features you can use to strategically manage your content on GatherContent:
Well-managed content ultimately means that content fulfills the 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 ties back to business objectives and innovation as well as proving ROI (rather than the focus being on the content creation process itself). With the right content management processes in place, your business can create a well-oiled content marketing machine.
If you are new to a content management role, need to formalise and strategise your content management practices, or just feel confused by content management strategy and its related concepts, keep reading to learn the basics about content management and different types of content strategy.
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. Let's 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:
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’” or the purpose of the content. As in, why create this content at all? What do you want to achieve?
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 governance deals 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” based on a documented definition of what the "right thing" is.
In contrast to governance, content management is the “How?” and “Who?” of content. It’s about the way things are done and the people who are involved. It focuses on the day-to-day content production process and handling of content, from creation to archiving and updating.
Content management is 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 are all of the above, and more. It’s concerned with everything that happens between content strategy and content delivery. Content operations encompass the people, processes, and technology needed to systematise, automate and scale content.
All organisations that produce content will have some form of content operations. But having effective operations 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, 78% of organisations take a strategic approach to managing content. And the top reason organisations don't take a strategic approach to content management is the lack of processes (63%).
Establishing and documenting content processes is essential to strategic content management. 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 the target audience's needs.
If you want your content marketing efforts to be effective, you'll need to ensure that your content management is aligned with your content strategy. Here are five tips to help you manage your content more 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. The longer you wait to organise and categorise your digital marketing content, the more likely you are to miss opportunities to use this content to your company's advantage.
But for content managers, managing content is 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, targeting, and personalising content.
Here are some ways to categorise and organise your content strategically:
At GatherContent, we redesigned and migrated our blog. Although it was a slog, it was an essential process 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.
When you’re managing the content production lifecycle, establishing accountability in your content team helps you avoid massive hidden problems appearing too far down the line. It also allows you to ‘clean as you cook’ so to speak, and spot opportunities along the way.
But what does it look like day-to-day?
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:
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 process 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.
Here are a few relationships to consider, and tips on managing these relationships in the content creation process:
Truly successful, user-centered content will always be the result of proper collaboration throughout the content 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 creating an environment where high-quality content shines through is 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.
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 space to ideate and create content. It also isn't always the best editing environment or a place for feedback. Not to mention, your CMS will not allow you to build workflows or provide status updates. But then again, neither is Microsoft Word, and relentless email chains.
GatherContent was designed to make content management more efficient and effective by giving your content or marketing team one place to collaborate on content throughout the pre-publish phase. On the platform, you can collaborate in real-time, make comments during the revision process, and notify collaborators on when content needs their attention.
You can also build repeatable content workflows where responsibilities and actions are clear. The platform also offers status updates that allow team members to communicate their progress, helping ensure that content moves through the pipeline smoothly. These features help you avoid bottlenecks that can delay the publishing of your content.
There are different types of content strategies that you might use depending on the type of content you're creating and the approach you are taking to creating that content. Since content management needs to align with content strategy, it's important to understand the different types of strategy and when to use each.
A lead generation content strategy is focused on generating content that is used to get people to opt-in to an email list. This strategy focuses on two main elements: driving traffic to the piece of content and developing an opt-in that's enticing for potential customers.
Lead generation content often isn't as long or in-depth as other types of content like thought leadership or SEO content. The goal is to give the reader something quick they can take away and put into use so they can recognize the value of your brand.
A lead generation content strategy includes content that's focused on educating customers on their pain points so that they can begin to move from the awareness to the consideration phase. But the opt-in needs to be interesting and valuable enough for a lead to hand over their email address.
When you want to be recognized as an industry leader or expert, you'll develop a thought leadership content strategy focused on increasing your reach. In order to be known as a thought leader, you need to get your content in front of as many people as possible.
A thought leadership content strategy focuses on content that's innovative, attention-grabbing, in-depth. It needs to say something new about the topic rather than rehash what has already been said by others in the industry.
The second part of developing a thought leadership content strategy is coming up with a solid plan for distributing and getting eyes on the piece. You'll need to get the piece of content in front of people who are outside of your typical readership. This might include publishing on guest blogs, industry publications, or sites like LinkedIn or Medium.
An SEO content marketing strategy focuses on driving lead traffic to your website through search engines. While you are ultimately creating content for humans, taking search engine optimization into consideration when creating your content strategy can help ensure that the greatest amount of humans can see and access your content.
One of the main considerations for an SEO content strategy is knowing what people are searching for. This often requires an SEO expert to do some competitor and keyword research. This reveals SEO opportunities for your content that you may have not realized were available.
The second part of SEO content strategy is ensuring that the content you're creating is formatted in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl your content. Understanding how to utilize headings, find the right keyword density, and create effective metadata are all important to your SEO strategy.
An enterprise content marketing strategy is designed specifically for large companies with over 1,000 employees. When building this type of content strategy, marketers will need to consider the company's needs, budget, challenges, and team members. Whereas a small business content strategy will prioritize doing the most with the least resources, and enterprise strategy will prioritize creating content at scale.
This type of content marketing strategy is focused on providing relevant content to the organisation's audience. The goal is to speak to specific pain points and needs while aiming to build rapport with the reader.
With an enterprise content strategy, you'll want to consider what resources you have to help add value to the content. For instance, you may have subject matter experts with who your writers can create content or get input from other teams.
Ready to develop your content management strategy? Regardless of which tool you use to manage the content process, you'll need to include certain details in your strategy to ensure that everyone is clear on their responsibilities and deadlines.
You can use this content management strategy template to get started:
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 content creation.
Here are some features you can use to strategically manage your content on GatherContent:
Well-managed content ultimately means that content fulfills the 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 ties back to business objectives and innovation as well as proving ROI (rather than the focus being on the content creation process itself). With the right content management processes in place, your business can create a well-oiled content marketing machine.
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.