In today’s digital universe, content is one of a company’s most precious assets. Just as your company has a system in place to manage its financial assets, it needs one for its content assets as well.
An enterprise content management system allows you to create, collaborate on, publish, analyze, store, and search for all the content your company owns. It includes all the strategies, processes, and controls you need to perform all those tasks.
Efficient Enterprise Content Management Produces Results
It’s essential for large companies to have a content management system that can maximize their chance of reaching their business goals. Content, especially marketing content, must produce results to justify its creation.
With the right system, you have everything you need to make your content earn its keep. An ideal content management system can turn your content production and distribution into an efficient revenue-producing machine.
Centralize and Simplify Your System
The larger the company, the simpler the content management system needs to be. As The Association for Intelligent Information Management points out, easy accessibility is critical for milking the most value out of each piece of content in your library.
So is transparency. When you can ideate, schedule, collaborate, create, edit, and review on a content marketing platform that everyone involved can see, it eliminates the time-consuming task of messaging or emailing back and forth among collaborators, creatives, and editors. And, with complete transparency, everyone can see what stage a piece of content is in, giving them added motivation to complete their part of the work ahead of the deadline.
When you centralize all of your content workflows, along with the strategies and tools to accomplish every task, you have both simplicity and transparency, saving both time and money. With the sheer volume of content an enterprise must put out, that’s savings at scale.
Audit and Repurpose Past Content
When you have a central hub on which you can not only create new content but also store older pieces, you’re likely sitting on a gold mine. If your content management system includes robust content analytics, you can conduct a thorough content audit to discover all your hidden gems.
- Relevant content that is not performing as it once did: Many of your older posts still provide value for today’s audiences. If they aren’t performing as they once did, these “evergreen” pieces might need a few changes to optimize them for modern search engines. Or, on the other hand, although some of the information might be relevant, other parts might need a little updating to reflect recent industry changes.
- Content that should be relevant but doesn’t perform up to par: The topic might be spot-on, the research thorough, but somehow some pieces just don’t connect with your audience. If it’s a clickthrough rate issue, it could be simply a matter of a headline or meta description that doesn’t grab their attention. If, on the other hand, your numbers show that people begin to read the post but drop off halfway through, look for ways to inject attention-grabbers throughout. Use visuals, videos, subheadings, and bullet points to guide your readers’ eyes. Or, if the post contains too many passive-voice verbs, wordy descriptions, or other yawn-inducing prose, assign your best writers to revamp it. Alternatively, repurpose it in another format. Turning blog posts into podcasts, condensing information into an infographic, or turning posts into videos or ebooks can breathe new life into underperforming content.
- Outdated content: While the topic might be relevant to today’s audience, the data you cite or the trends you highlight are as dated as VCRs and dot matrix printers. Put your research teams to work on updating it to today’s standards.
- Irrelevant content that never got off the ground: Some pieces of content simply don’t cut it and never will. Even the information they contain is no longer relevant to your audience. Purge them from your public-facing content so that they don’t drag down your overall performance. Archive them in case you need them for future reference but keep them out of the public eye.
Automate Routine Content Processes
With the massive amount of content you must put out every week, prudent content management must include automating everything you can. From amplifying your blog posts’ reach on social media to segmenting your email lists, automation will make your life a whole lot easier.
Publish at the optimum time and channel for each audience segment
Automation makes it easy for you to publish content you create for specific audiences at a time when they’ll most likely see it and on their preferred channels. This capability is especially welcome when you have customers and prospects living in different time zones.
Automate routine writing tasks
Although language-capable AI models, such as GPT-3 and BERT, are no substitute for a human writer, they can serve as your creative team’s research assistants. AI’s ability to search vast amounts of data to find pertinent information and create rough drafts or outlines can free your writers’ hands to concentrate on the final product. Language-capable AI can also suggest headlines, create short posts, and serve as an advisor on grammar.
Just be sure to have a human check its work before you click “Publish.” If you’ve ever shaken your head at a few Grammarly glitches or Google Translate fails, you know how cringe-worthy machine-generated text can be.
Optimize content at scale
Testing your content is essential. But let’s face it, who has time to A/B test all the variations that could take a piece of content from “meh” to amazing? With AI-driven tools, you can increase the number of variations exponentially, greatly reducing the time it takes to optimize each post.
Additionally, AI tools factor in users’ previous behavior, what step a user is at in the buyer’s journey, demographics, and other data to calculate the likelihood of the user becoming a paid or repeat customer. So, if a likely customer reacted well to an image or headline, that reaction would count more than that of a random user.
Uncover Past Content on Your Topic
Sometimes, you plumb the depths of your inspiration well and come up dry. Or, you remember that you’ve done extensive research on a specific topic, but you can’t remember what blog post it was for.
With a comprehensive enterprise content management platform, you have a complete repository of your company’s past content right at your fingertips. Just type in some keywords relevant to your topic, and you can find that elusive piece in seconds.
Not only can you use past content to spark inspiration and add depth to your research, but you can cite it in your current content. Adding links to your other posts, especially your top performers, boosts your new article’s SEO.
Provide a Single Source of Truth for Internal Documents
If your company deals with sensitive or confidential information, you have policies in place that employees can refer to when they handle such information. Whether it’s a required form or a specified workflow that employees must follow to satisfy compliance rules, your employees can access that information quickly, provided you always keep the latest version of those documents in your content repository.
Enterprise marketing teams, too, need a documented content workflow so that chaos doesn’t stand a chance. It should include your corporate style guide, as well as easy-to-understand directions about the process your teams must follow and who must approve what.
With a comprehensive, enterprise content management system, you can document all that information right where the process occurs – on your content platform.
No more leafing through dusty notebooks or hunting through spreadsheets. No more having to ask 12 different managers about the process, getting a different answer from each. Just an updated document that outlines every step of the process from ideation to publication and beyond.
Simplifying that process is what we’re all about at DivvyHQ. With all the complexity involved in enterprise content production, having a way to streamline content management frees your teams’ hands to concentrate on their work.
DivvyHQ is that platform. Covering all aspects of content production from ideation to analytics, it’s the answer to your search for the ideal content management system. Get your 14-day free trial today!