What is Content Management?

Content management includes assembling, organizing, delivering, retrieving, and governing website or enterprise business content.

The internet is the world’s largest resource, featuring trillions of videos, blogs, images, and other multimedia like PDFs. Without content management processes, the digital content lifecycle would go haywire—leaving content on the internet unstructured, inaccessible, and disorganized.

Businesses also generate an enormous amount of data on a daily basis. Few organizations today are prepared to handle the exponential growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of their enterprise data. Fewer still are equipped to manage and account for that data and make the resulting records accessible to the organization as a whole. While information governance is a well-established practice among government entities, it has typically not compelled private sector organizations to invest in enterprise content management (ECM) systems.

In this content management overview, you’ll learn about all the aspects of content management and its integral role in structuring the World Wide Web and enterprise business data.

The importance of Content Management

Content management is essential because it enables you to control digital information creation, publication, and distribution. In other words, it helps you organize your thoughts and ideas so that others can find and consume your content.

Without content management, the internet would be one big jumble of information without rhyme or reason. In the same way, if your business is like most today, you also store data in a number of systems and information repositories—an approach that has become the norm over the past two decades with rapid advancements in information technology. But as data volumes continue to increase, you face significant business risks and loss of efficiency because you simply can’t control all the information contained in siloed repositories. Time is wasted looking for a specific document that has not been managed appropriately—and you may not be fully aware of what other information you actually have. But with a content management solution, you can put all that information into an orderly system that’s easy to access and navigate.

Content management usually follows a seven-step process:

1. Plan: This step involves deciding what kind of content you want to create and where to publish it.

2. Create: This step is about developing ideas and then turning those ideas into content, such as videos and blog posts.

3. Store: Once you have your content, you need to store it so others can access it. Businesses typically store content on a website, repository, or blog.

4. Establish a workflow: This step helps to create content that aligns with organizational policies and maintains quality consistency.

5. Edit: Editing is one of the most critical phases in creating ready-to-view content for both people and search engine crawlers.

6. Publish: This step involves delivering content to users, including website visitors across the internet or employees using a business’s intranet.

7. Archive or delete: The final stage of content management is removing or archiving content when it's no longer relevant.

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What are the benefits of Content Management?

Content management isn't a fruitless endeavor. There are many benefits of content management, both for businesses and individuals.

Some of the benefits of content management for businesses include:

• Increased efficiency: Content management helps businesses automate and organize content publishing and editing processes. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity.
• Improved customer service: With content management, businesses can create self-service portals where customers can find answers to their questions without contacting customer service.
• Reduced operating costs: Automating tasks with content management strategies can help businesses save money on labor costs.
• Enhanced online visibility: Streamlining the content management process enables search engines to rank websites and display them to potential customers.

Some of the benefits of content management for individuals are:

• Convenient information: With content management, individuals can find the information they need without searching through a jumble of unorganized data.
• Greater content control: Individuals can use content management to determine who has access to their content and how it's used.
• Simple dissemination: Content management makes it easy for individuals to share their content through social media, email, and other channels.

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What are Content Management strategies?

Because managing online and enterprise business content is an in-depth process, organizations must have strategies to control their digital content. Following these strategies is vital to ensuring the success of any content management framework:

• Map your priorities: It's essential to understand what’s important to your organization and then align your content management strategy with those priorities. Do you want to educate users or point them to one of your organization's products or services?
• Define your target audience: Identifying a relevant audience for your content is critical in ensuring accurate delivery and engagement. You can define a target audience through market research, keyword research, and sentiment analysis on social media platforms.

• Determine your content channels: Determining which content channels are essential to your audience is critical. Whether via email or social media, finding relevant content channels helps create the proper content management framework.
• Establish a content creation process: This involves the phase of creating content, from ideation to publishing.
• Leverage the right technology: It takes a website development platform, analytics tools, and other asset management tools to assist with website content creation, organization, dissemination, and performance analysis.

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What are Content Management frameworks?

A content management framework is a platform that supports digital content creation, management, and delivery. It includes the processes, policies, people, and technologies needed to manage digital content throughout its lifecycle.

There are five main types of digital content management frameworks:

1. Web Content Management Systems (CMS): A web CMS is a platform that helps you create and manage websites. It provides a way to store website files, track changes made to those files, and publish changes to a live website.

2. Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM): An ECM is a platform that stores, manages, and delivers enterprise-level content. This includes documents, images, videos, and other forms of content that are important to an organization.

3. Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM): A DAM is a type of CMS used to store and manage digital assets, such as images, videos, and audio files. It helps organizations keep track of their digital content and ensure that it is organized and accessible.

4. Social Media Content Management: This framework involves planning and publishing content on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The goal of social media content management is to help create a robust social media marketing strategy with clear goals.

5. Mobile Content Management (MCM): An MCM platform makes information available on smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices.

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Structured vs. unstructured content

Content can be either structured or unstructured. Structured content is heavily formatted, and computers can easily read it. It includes databases, spreadsheets, and XML files stored in a relational database. Unstructured content is not formatted in a specific, predefined way and is more difficult for computers to read. It includes text documents, images, and videos stored in data lakes.

Most content management tools work with both structured and unstructured content. However, some systems are better equipped to handle one type of content over the other. For example, a DAM system is better equipped to handle unstructured content, such as images and videos. On the other hand, a CMS is better equipped to manage structured content.

All organizations have different needs and priorities, so choosing the proper structure is about preference.

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Content Management examples

Organizations use content management strategies for a variety of purposes. For example, a company might use content management to:

• Share information internally: Businesses use content management strategies to share information internally via a company intranet, such as documents, images, and videos.
• Publish a website: You can use content management to publish its website. This would include storing website files, tracking changes made to those files, and publishing changes to a live website.
• Create an online store: A company might use content management to create an online store. This would include managing product information, such as descriptions, pricing, and availability.
• Develop a mobile app: Businesses can use content management to develop a mobile app. This would include managing app content, such as text, images, and videos.

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Learn more about OpenText Content Management solution

Content management is crucial in delivering information to the right users at the right time. Using an enterprise content management system is ideal for fast-tracking this process.

The OpenText governance-based content management system helps organizations ensure seamless content delivery. We also offer a SaaS based cloud content management system for excellent compatibility, flexibility, and policy automation features, OpenText offers the perfect enterprise content management tool for your growing needs.

Submit a product inquiry to learn more about our content management tool.

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