As we have discussed in previous blogs, your content is alive! Regardless of type, format or channel, your content naturally moves through a lifecycle framework.
And at every stage of this lifecycle, marketers must utilize technology to help effectively ensure there are no bottlenecks to delivering accurate, engaging content.
So which technology solutions should you use to manage the content lifecycle? It will depend on your current systems and processes. But there’s one approach that’s vital to every organization’s MarTech strategy: maintaining a single source of truth for content across its entire lifecycle.
Solutions for Early Stages in the Content Lifecycle
It all starts with an idea. The first phase of the content lifecycle is strategizing and ideating how to use content to drive business goals. With this in mind, marketers must use solutions that make it easy to be creative and flesh out ideas in a collaborative fashion.
Whether your organization utilizes common collaboration tools like Slack or Trello, it’s important that technology allows content leads and creative directors to visually share, iterate and conversate across a single interface so great ideas never get lost and can be produced faster.
Content Creation and Approval Visibility
Once your ideas are fleshed out, it’s time to move onto the next phases of content lifecycle. This involves reviewing ideas, budgeting, assessing resources and agreeing on a production, maintenance and evaluation plan. Being able to take an abstract idea and create a concrete plan that’s stored in a single source of truth allows for visibility across the organization so everyone knows where and when content will be distributed, and where it will be maintained.
With a solid plan in place, your creative teams can pull the critical details about the content strategy from the plan itself and kick off the required workflows to design and create. Technologies that enable workflow and collaboration enhance the ability of creative teams to create content faster, acquire approvals sooner, and increase speed to market. Once content is created, it needs a home. For enterprise companies, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform provides a single source of truth for all of your content, no matter the file type.
Distribution and Performance Management Technology
The way consumers make buying decisions has changed. Brands need to be present, relevant and consistent across a wider range of channels. Your plan will lay out the appropriate channel strategy for distribution. A Content Management System (CMS) is the front-end interface that allows users to add, modify, and remove content from a website or other distribution channels. Having a DAM connected to your CMS, however, allows you to push the most up-to-date and relevant content to your CMS for timely distribution as well as removal. These tools prove invaluable to your content lifecycle team and your website manager because they can use them to ensure they’re on the same page.
But a pivotal part of the content life cycle is taking a step back and evaluating the performance of your content. Referring back to your plan and evaluation benchmarks, it’s time to measure and learn what’s working and what’s not. A powerful way to do this is to utilize metrics dashboards in analytics technologies that allow for deep insights. These insights should then guide your go-forward strategy as it relates to a piece of content: update, repurpose, or retire.
Content Management System: Life Cycle of Content Focus
With a concerted focus on the lifecycle of content as it related to business goals, utilizing technology at every step of the content lifecycle is crucial today more than ever before. A streamlined MarTech stack that empowers marketers with a single source of truth across the content lifecycle from ideation to distribution is key to effectively managing the life of your content.
Watch our latest webinar on demand, “The Fully Baked Content Experience: How a Fully Developed Content Lifecycle Enables Superior Brand Experiences,” to learn more strategies for optimizing your tech stack to better content lifecycle management.