The Battle of Content Strategy vs. Content Management

It is a great time to be alive. We are well into the content marketing era and as time goes on, more and more marketers are taking their website content programs seriously. Organizations are creating smarter content and tying website content to business goals and strategies.

With that being said, we are still seeing a lot of random acts of content because people are confusing content strategy and content management. Content and content strategy is not something that you address once and you are done. Content requires maintenance in order to prevent random acts of content. Part of that maintenance is continuously evaluating why you are creating content, and to do that appropriately, there are two critical steps you need to follow:

1. Document your content strategy
2. Measure performance against your strategy

So let's take a look at how these two play together and will prevent you from committing random acts of content.

Document your content strategy

According to MarketingProfs, 62% of top performing marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Having a documented content strategy is key because it helps you gain buy in for the efforts that go into content creation (i.e. time, resources, etc.). Documenting your content strategy also creates alignment on who the content is targeting and engaging and identifies what you want users to do with the content. Making sure that you have a strong content process will ensure you are consistently creating quality content (and at scale).

Measure performance against your strategy

This should sound like a no brainer, but it is worth reiterating when talking about content strategy (and this is the real difference between content strategy and content management). Measuring the performance of content is critical to ensuring that you make smart decisions for content investments and how to evolve your content in Episerver. Obviously you want to look at your content performance at a high-level to see how often it is being viewed. However, the real data you need to be looking at are your engagement metrics. How far down are people getting on certain pages? Are people clicking on links and calls-to-action associated with certain pieces of content? Are some downloads getting more love than others? Are there themes in the content that people are choosing to engage with? These are all questions that have answers in your data and will not only help you validate how your content strategy is contributing to the business, but it will help you ensure you are evolving your content strategy to deliver content your audience wants.

By adhering to these simple two steps, not only will your content game be elevated, but it will allow you to create a well-oiled content machine that then sets up your marketing team to explore additional opportunities like voice search, AI, personalization, machine learning and more.