If you’re new to marketing, you may have have been told you need content management. And thanks to a quick Google search, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a software program. While it’s true, you need a software program to manage your content, that’s not all that content management means.
The Basics
Essentially, content management is the term used for the process of collecting, managing and publishing information—in any form or medium. This can also be known as digital content management when all the content is online.
Content can be:
Blogs or articles
White papers
Graphics
Infographics
Videos
Case studies
All of this content is housed in a CMS, or content management system, which is what people normally think of when they hear content management. And the system is important.
What Is a CMS?
A CMS is software that is used to create, edit, organize and publish digital content. Some examples of popular software include:
Hubspot
Craft
Wordpress
Squarespace
Wix
Weebly
Joomla
Magento
Drupal
When you choose your CMS platform, it’s important to ensure that it integrates with your marketing automation tools. (In a nutshell, these are tools that help you create and send email campaigns.) You want to be able to track all of your data in the same place: organic website traffic, paid website traffic, marketing automation traffic, etc. Plus, it makes marketing easier on you in the long run. (And you won’t have to remember a ton of usernames and passwords!)
So What Is Content Management Then?
Content management is basically how you manage the lifecycle of your content. The lifecycle generally goes:
Ideation
Creation
Editing
Publishing
Promoting
Maintenance
We will touch on each of these in more detail in other articles, but for now, let’s get a general overview.
Ideation
Ideation is where you come up with the topics you want to create content about. Seems pretty easy, right? It’s actually tougher than you think. When you are coming up with topics, you need to consider several important things, including:
Who is your audience, specifically? You should know the age range, gender breakdown, years of experience, profession, etc.
What is your niche? Do you create dog toys only for Boston Terriers or maybe you want to help new moms get back in shape? Think small for your niche.
Where is your audience in the buyer’s journey? Are they still in the research phase or are they in the ready to buy phase? You should have the right combination of top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel pieces.
What’s the call to action or CTA? What action do you want your audience to take after seeing your content? Do you want them to schedule a meeting, request a sample, order your product or read another piece of content?
Once you know know the answer to all of these things, you can come up with some great ideas for content that your audience will want to digest.
Creation
Once you have your ideas, you need to actually, you know, create them. This is something that can be done in-house, or you can hire a professional writer instead. Some companies will hire a writer to create the content for infographics, and then do the design in-house.
When creating content, you want to make sure it lands in the “sweet spot” for length. Most people agree that you should aim for 1,500 to 2,000 words. A big HOWEVER: word count is not the end-all-be-all to get your content noticed. Make sure your writer is also thinking about your company’s voice, your niche, what your audience’s pain points are and how you are going to solve them, and what action you want this content to drive your audience to do.
Editing
Whether the content is done in-house or by a freelance writer, you should always have someone edit the content. They should look for things such as:
Spelling and grammar
Adherence to the company’s style guide, both in terms of voice/tone and of graphics
Written to the correct audience
Length is appropriate for being picked up by search engines (generally 900 - 1,500 words long for blogs/articles)
Graphics for Facebook/Instagram adhere to their policies (not too much text, etc.)
All links used are appropriate and correct
Any graphics used are free-use images or that you have permission to use them
Publishing
Once you are sure your content is ready for the world, you need to post it on the correct platform, whether it’s your CMS or a social media channel. If posting to your CMS, make sure you optimize the content for SEO; if posting to social media, make sure to use the appropriate hashtags and experiment with posting at different times to see when you get the most engagement.
Promoting
So you came up with ideas, brought them to life and then shared them with the world. Now what? Now you need to promote the content you spent time and effort creating. You can do this through PPC ads (Pay-to-Click) or social media ads, like Facebook ads. Once you post content to your blog, you should promote it on your social media channels.
You should know that organic reach on Facebook and Instagram isn’t what it used to be. So if you really want to generate traffic, you should consider paying to promote your posts on these channels. Thanks to their targeting tools, you can get your ads in front of your exact target audience, down to the right age group, gender and geographic location. This is especially great for small businesses who focus only on the local area.
You should also try to get some backlinks to your content. Backlinking is an SEO term, and basically, it means when other, reputable websites link to your content in their content. You want to focus on quality backlinks, rather than quantity. There’s a lot more to this, but I’ll be honest, SEO is a beast so we’ll have to tackle it another day.
Maintenance
Once you have your content in your CMS or posted to social media, your job is done, right?
Wrong.
You need to create a maintenance schedule for your content. This includes updating older content to ensure it’s still relevant. Checking for broken links, both to your own content (because you should definitely link to your other content pieces in your current content pieces) and to other people’s content that you may have linked to in your content. You should check that your SEO background work is still good and tweak it if it’s not.
Depending on your product or service, your content may be cyclical (think tax season), so be sure to revive older content that’s still useful but may not have been promoted recently.
Now What?
So you created your first content piece. Great job! However, you need to stick to a consistent posting schedule in order to stay relevant, both in search and with your customer base. The best way to do this is to create an editorial calendar. That’s a fancy way of saying assigning due dates to your content ideas.
If you don’t currently have a lot of content on your site, you should probably start with posting a piece of content once every two weeks. Once you have a decent catalog of content, switch to once a month. And don’t forget, if you have a new product launch or special event, include those things in your editorial calendar! Especially events, as they’ll humanize your company and help your audience relate to you.
Getting Started
With all the moving parts related to content management, it can be hard to get started. If you need help creating your strategy, and then implementing it, Voll Content Marketing can help. Click here to contact us to get your FREE estimate and start your content marketing journey today.