Centralize Digital Marketing Content Management in 3 Steps

“In an internal survey of a major biotechnology company, 80% of sales representatives were satisfied with the quality of content produced by marketing, but only 20% were satisfied with the ‘findability’ of the content.” (source)

Accessible, relevant, and trackable content is a win for business and customers, so why is digital marketing content management often last on the to-do list or forgotten entirely?

Marketing content—including whitepapers, blogs, and educational guides—fuels the buyer’s journey. These content pieces are essential for turning a “maybe” into a “yes.”

If these materials are hidden or lost in digital archives, they can’t work their magic.

Think about it. When little care is taken to track and evaluate digital marketing content, “it’s like pouring money and resources into works of art, only to store them in the hallway closet” (source).

Now is the time to get content assets out of the digital weeds once and for all, and start treating digital marketing content like the most valuable artwork you own.

3 Ways to Tame the Digital Marketing “Content Monster”

It’s not a myth or tall tale: you can wrangle your digital marketing content. Not only that, but you can also create a shared central repository to provide easy employee access, organize content in a meaningful way, and get people to use it, too.

Step 1: Choose a Simple, Easy-to-Access Content Repository

To get an upper hand on the “content monster,” target its weak points. When content is disorganized, scattered, or hard to find, every point is a potential weak point.

A single, easy-to-access repository eliminates scrambling for content on various servers, desktops, or mobile devices and gives your team access to the best tools to support targeted sales efforts.

Cloud-based systems offer diverse capabilities, universally accessible log in, and can be structured according to workflow—a win all around.

However, maximizing your digital marketing content management requires one very important first step: a content audit.

Conduct a content audit to:

• Get a clear understanding of the content you currently have
• Pinpoint where key pieces are located and how they’re labeled
• Determine what content is missing
• Clarify content channels and publishing destinations, including media outlets, resources, automation tools, and shared systems

Step 2: Survey the Searchers

The people who use marketing content daily to engage long-standing and potential customers need to shape the workflow of your content repository.

Conduct a company-wide survey to gain insight on how to organize the system and identify any wish list items for inclusion in the new content management tool.

How the sales department connects with customers to deliver a cohesive narrative across the sales cycle will determine their highest-ranking search needs. Some suggestions for category search options can include persona, buying stage, and pain point.

But keep it simple: too many filters dilutes results and makes it hard to establish consistent processes for tagging content.

Step 3: Educate and Focus on the Value

Provide education and create excitement around the new digital content management system in order to get it off the ground and gain employee buy-in. Resistance to a change in workflow can be a bit of a hiccup when new systems come into play, so be clear on the value-add for your team and give them an incentive to use it.

Make and share a simple “cheat sheet” to show clear pathways to common requests. Also encourage teams to tag and use the system in the way it was intended so digital content created in the future has a clear purpose, location, and role in the marketing cycle.

When you can find a way to keep all your content in one place, you improve the efficiency of your team, reduce the stress and extra work of tracking down marketing materials, and create the best customer experience possible—all at the same time.

End content chaos and commit to using a single location where all your digital marketing content can live happily ever after.

Centralize Digital Marketing Content Management in 3 Steps