Anyone involved in the planning, creation, distribution, or measurement of content knows how time consuming and expensive it can be. It doesn’t make sense to simply publish something, promote it, and never look back. That’s a terrible way to get the most from your investment – not to mention that approach often results in a poor experience for your prospects and customers.
Think about the last time you went to a website looking for answers, and instead of stumbling upon something current and helpful, you found ROT – redundant, out-of-date, and trivial content. Did you poke around to find better info or did you go someplace else?
ROT occurs when you fail to plan what happens to your content after you hit publish and do the initial promotion. This one-and-done approach is costly to businesses – and, as your content library grows, it often makes the readers’ experience less than ideal.
If you come from the tech world, think about how the product is managed over the course of its life. Product managers address multiple stages including planning, creation, launch, updates, and retirement. Content professionals need to do this as well.
Where to begin? View content as a business asset – something that you need to manage strategically so you’ll get the best return on the content investment.
The good news is that 92% of respondents from the inaugural Content Marketing Institute Content Management & Strategy Survey indicate that their organization does indeed view their content as a business asset – “an asset or process where there is a direct investment and a goal of increasing value over time.”
The bad news? Few marketers have the processes and tools to make this a reality.
Let’s dig in to the results to see what is going on – and, more importantly, let’s pinpoint opportunities for marketers to truly manage their content as a business asset.
How scalable are marketers’ efforts, really?
Marketers who manage their content as a business asset not only give their customers a better experience, but they also feel less stress because they have the systems and processes to create content in a scalable way.
Repeatable processes are essential so you’re not spending time figuring out how to do the work and have time to do the work. Systems also help eliminate the intensive time needed to recraft every piece of content by hand.
But, our research shows that only a small minority of marketers have the processes to be completely scalable.
While this may seem like a bad thing, it’s a great opportunity for the marketers who figure it out. If you have the right processes, you are one step closer to creating better content, faster.
Opportunities abound for forward-thinking marketers
Document your strategy for managing content as an asset. Just as we talk about the importance of a content marketing strategy, it’s also essential to have a documented strategy for managing your content as a business asset. But only 46% of respondents have such a strategy.
While no one-size-fits-all template exists for creating a content management strategy, the next section talks about some structures you may want to document.
Have the right structures
Marketers must have numerous structures to effectively manage content as an asset. However, according to our survey, less than half of respondents have many of these structures.
Let’s look at each of these in order of how often they are currently used.
Style and brand guidelines
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