Without content, there would be no marketing – and arguably, no business at all. In an era where organizations rely on digital communication channels to reach their target audiences, it would be impossible to develop any corporate brand without words, images, and videos.
As creative professionals, we know the feeling of satisfaction that comes with generating high quality, original content. There’s nothing like putting the finishing touches on something and imagining how people will absorb and engage with it.
But… what if it isn’t being consumed properly? As the old saying goes, If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
What is the point of great content if it’s never being read, viewed, downloaded?
Why 10 new blog posts alone won’t save your company
Publishing high volumes of well-executed content will only take an organization so far. Posting 10 interesting posts to your company blog won’t generate an interest in your brand unless they are: 1) about topics that your target audience wants to read, share, and otherwise engage with, and 2) posted and promoted in ways that people can find them. After all, content is only king if it drives business goals.
Content creation is just one phase of the multi-stage web content lifecycle – a piece of content’s multifaceted journey that starts when it is created and ends when it is taken out of commission and no longer available for external consumption.
The content management process is how we as marketers control content and leverage it so that it reaches its full potential – so that every piece of material serves its purpose, whether it be for brand awareness, brand development, and/or lead generation. Officially, in the words of CMSWire, the “content management lifecycle consists of six phases: plan, develop, control, deploy, preserve and evaluate.”
Good content becomes fantastic content when it is managed effectively. Marketers have the chance to maximize content at every phase of the lifecycle. For example:
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Proper planning ensures the most relevant, attention-grabbing subject matter.
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Diligent content development leads to unique insights.
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Controlling your material ensures that messaging stays on-brand and consistent.
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Deployment involves distributing content to the channels where it will have the greatest impact.
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Preserving content protects the file integrity, while keeping it accessible internally for reuse.
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Finally, the evaluation phase is perhaps the most important because it provides a solid foundation for why to do anything.
As marketers analyze and understand how content performs on all the digital platforms where it has appeared, they can make crucial determinations regarding not only the content in question, but also for future material. In other words, the conclusions that you can draw about one form of content will be invaluable to the planning, development, and deployment of all future digital collateral.
Knowing how your audience interacts with an ebook or a video will help everyone on your marketing team produce more ebooks, videos, articles, blog posts, case studies, etc. that will leave digital audiences craving more from your company.
The numbers part of the content journey: the insights you need to optimize
The evaluation phase of the content management lifecycle involves thorough analysis of every piece of published, and measuring its performance against the metric goals you set out for it: number of downloads, number of clicks around the company website, how many shares, and overall how many conversions it has generated. And, luckily, marketers don’t have to be mathematicians – or anything close – to understand these numbers.
Of course there are many reasons why a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution should be at the foundation of every enterprise’s digital content management strategy. After all, all web marketing content is made up of digital assets – files like images, videos, documents, logos, audio files, and so on. But, the business insights and analytics components of modern DAM software are absolutely critical for content evaluation.
Digizuite’s DAM platform comes with Digizuite™ Insights, a business intelligence reporting service that provides real-time insights into what assets are being downloaded or streamed, who is downloading and streaming them, and how and where they are being consumed. And, getting the information doesn’t require marketers to make sense of confusing number-dense reports, either. With a customizable Power BI dashboard, all you see is see clear-cut data – the exact metrics you want, and displayed through graphs, charts, or another visual. Each user sets up their own dashboard exactly how they need to understand the analytics in front of them. As a result, nothing stands in the way of making the best, data-driven decisions for future content strategy and execution.
Being able to quickly identify the files that are consumed the most, or which are the hardest to find in searches will help you understand what edits or alterations are required to maximize content. These insights are also key for determining when and where there is potential for content atomization – the process of converting one large piece of content into multiple pieces, in varying forms for different digital channels.
Also with Digizuite™ Insights, you can evaluate how assets perform in certain geographic locations at the same time as comparing how content performs on one channel versus another. For example, one piece of collateral may generate significant interest when it is consumed as a post on social media, but not as much as a post on your website. Considering a variety of data sets, you can deploy your content so that it reaches people at the exact time and place that they are most likely to engage with it.
A DAM system simplifies the metrics surrounding digital marketing, making the necessary math behind marketing easy to absorb. Digizuite presents all the analytics marketers need in order to conquer the numbers game and focus on creating content that they can be confident will be not only high quality, but will also drive business goals.
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