Signs You’re Ready for a Content Management Platform

Managing your organization’s content can be daunting. Between juggling authors, approvers and workflows, addressing hot industry topics, and tracking engagement, any marketer can feel overwhelmed. Modern marketers, however, know when their organization may be ready for a content management platform.

Content management platforms vary in functionality but all work to accomplish a similar goal: make content creation, distribution, and analysis easier for an organization.

If your marketing organization is focusing its attention on content marketing, and you’re considering ways to amp up creation and optimize engagement, you may be ready to invest in a content management platform. Here are a few signs that it’s time to take the leap!

You know your audience

At Relationship One, we recently went through a persona creation exercise. We then audited our existing blog content to identify which audience members (personas) had the highest amount of content and greatest engagement. This helped us identify our content gaps and areas for improvement, paving the way for future content marketing plans.

Identifying your personas, target audience(s) and content opportunities is a big step towards a content management platform. Once you identify who it is that you want to read your content, it becomes easier to structure and distribute content in the most effective way. Many platforms allow you to target specific demographics, which requires a thorough understanding of your target audience.

Your current content has recurring topics

Would you benefit from a platform that helps you organize and generate new ideas based on your current content sweet spots?

In most content management platforms, you can create topic bundles to help team members contribute new ideas that stay focused on your organizations area(s) of expertise. Focus is crucial for reader trust. When it comes to content it is better to master a few topics than dip your toes in all of them.

Some content management platforms provide the ability to define keywords and phrases for target topics. When an author chooses a topic to write on, they are presented with the pre-defined list of keywords to pick. Those selected keywords can also be used to augment SEO.

You want to expand your content types

Many organizations get caught focusing their content efforts in one medium. This may include focusing solely on PDFs, blogs, videos, webinars, etc. When you get comfortable working in one type of medium, it may be difficult to experiment with others.

Content management platforms allow you to see the holes in your content types and often provide tools for other mediums. Whether you want to focus more on curation, infographics, or anything else, having a central place to store all of your content is a good place to start.

You’re struggling with complicated workflows

Workflows and approval processes are often a huge struggle with content management. If you often miss deadlines or run into issues because of a complicated or non-existent workflow, you definitely need a content management platform.

Having the ability to assign tasks and monitor progression on content pieces not only minimizes the risk of mistakes, but also ensures you stay consistent on releasing content. Having workflows also allows you to have lesser-experienced authors get their toes wet in content creation since you can enforce strict approval processes.

Rather than creating messy email threads and trying to remember one-off conversations about a specific piece of content, let a management platform move you along effortlessly.

You value analytics

This one hardly needs an explanation. Every modern marketer knows the value of analytics when it comes to anything your brand puts out there. A content management platform allows you to analyze the performance of your content marketing.

Rather than pulling website traffic or Google Analytics info, keep all of our content analytics in one place. Having one central location for old and new content will ensure you create content consistent with high-performing pieces.

You use marketing automation

For organizations that use marketing automation, it can be cumbersome to incorporate existing content into campaigns run through a MAP. Many content marketing platforms integrate with marketing automation platforms, allowing for a seamless transfer of content. This can significantly streamline your publishing process and enable your organization to make more use of the content that you’ve invested time and money into.

In addition, most content management systems will allow you to manage your editorial calendar from within the platform. If your system also integrates with your marketing automation platform, this editorial calendar can provide “one view” for your publishing.

You don’t have to identify with each of these signs to find value in a content management platform. All levels of content creation can benefit from a consistent resource to help structure, perfect, distribute and analyze.

At Relationship One we stand by Oracle Content Marketing, formerly known as Compendium. With this platform, you can set up users and workflows, organize content, create new pieces with strategic guidance, and analyze which content gets you the most engagement.

If you have any questions about content creation, management or Oracle Content Management please comment below or visit us online.

Now, get to creating!