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What Is Online Content Management And Why Do You Need It?

Creating valuable content for your customers helps increase sales and build your brand. This does not mean we all need to be content marketing machines if we want our businesses to succeed. But creating good content on a regular basis is essential to establishing your brand and building trust. Every web page, blog post, or social media post is a piece of content you can use to show value to potential customers. Yet creating content can easily become overwhelming. With a blog, web pages, social media channels, and external content, managing content can get stressful. And so enters content management. By creating an online content management strategy, you can make your content creation process valuable and efficient.

 

What Is Online Content Management?

If you have a website, you need content management. Whether you have 5 pages or 500, making sure that you are getting the most out of your content is good for business. Content management is the administration of digital content throughout its lifecycle. From creation to publication and re-editing. While every content management process is different,  the following stages are often used:

• Content Creation – The first draft of content. This includes forming the idea for the piece and creating the first draft.
• Editing – Reviewing the piece of content for grammar, style, structure and topic. Getting the piece ready for publishing. Depending on your organization, there may be several rounds of editing.
• Publishing– Putting the content out for the world to see! After everyone is happy with the edited piece, it is published on a blog, web page or other publication.
• Distributing – Spreading the content to your audience. Using email, social media channels, SEO, and anything else your team can dream up.
• Re-thinking – Re-visiting old content and deciding how it can be re-used or updated to keep the information fresh and relevant. This stage is unique to online content and is one of the reasons it makes online content marketing so effective.

 

Why Do You Need Online Content Management?

If you are a team of more than 1 person, planning, creating, and publishing content takes a good chunk of time and effort. Not only do you need to plan and process your content, you also need to manage a variety of writers and editors. A good content management strategy can help make your work easier and help you create better content. A content management strategy or system can help you find a systematic way to review content before it’s published. An online content management strategy and tool can help you:

• Adopt a review strategy that analyzes content for tone and style. This lets you make sure new content produced fits into the voice of your business.
• A solution to reduce costs. A good system can reduce the amount of time writers and editors spend working on a piece.
• Improve turnaround time for your content. Laying out an editing system in advance helps keep everyone involved in the creation process on track.

Content marketing now accounts for 20% of marketing budgets. Using online content management to help you with your content creation, helps you get the most out of your content marketing efforts.

Do you use content management for your organization? What strategies or tools have helped you the most?