5 Ingredients of successful web content management

Every digital marketer knows that content plays a very important role in digital experience creation. In the post-pandemic world digital is what set business leaders apart from the laggards. But when comparing the experiences created by the leaders, it is the content that makes certain websites stand out.

According to the recent joint Sitecore Content Management and Strategy Survey, 72% content managers globally strongly or somewhat agreed their organization views content as a core business strategy, and 50% felt their ability to connect with audiences via insightful content was the top factor contributing to their success.

We have carefully reviewed the survey results, as well as talked to some of our clients, trying to outline the key ingredients of successful web content management. Here are our top 5 findings.

1. Be clear about the goals that you are trying to achieve with your content

The first question to ask yourself is – why are you creating all this content? Content can help you achieve several goals, such as:

• Brand awareness
• Brand loyalty
• Customer education
• Customer engagement
• Talent recruitment
• Lead generation
• Other

Talking to various clients we have found out that 2 main goals that they are trying to achieve with their content are: customer engagement and lead generation. Vivienne Maguire, the Head of Digital at Ibec, shared:

"Customer engagement with content is very important for us. I am really keen on developing more of the different media and content formats, but you need to find what is important, wanted and appreciated by the users before adding anything onto the site. Another key aspect of successful content management is using your content to lead the audience to the desired action and assist the lead generation."

Think about what you are trying to achieve as a business, then think, how can content help support these business objectives?

2. Take the right factors into account when planning your content strategy

Clear goals are the foundation for the future content strategy, but together with the goals there are some other factors that you should consider. These factors include:

• Brand value proposition
• Customers' values, interests and pain points
• Unique selling points, key product features
• Overall experience of your brand and customer journey
• Personalisation

Not all factors are equally important, so you might want to prioritize some of them. According to the Survey, the 2 most important factors are brand value proposition and empathizing with the customer.

3. Finding the right approach to content creation process

When you know what to do, it is time to think of how you could realistically do that. Bear in mind the size of your marketing team, structure of the company and other constrains, and select one of the approaches for the content creation. Some of the typical approaches include:

• Project: create content in response to internal requests
• Persona-focused: create content for a particular audience
• Customer journey focued: create content for a particular stage of the customer's journey
• Platform-focused: create a specific format of content, i.e. mostly blogs or mostly videos
• Other

According to the Survey, project-focused approach is preferred by 43% of the respondents, however only you can name the best approach that works for you.

4. Select the right technology to manage content across the organization

To support the selected content creation and delivery process, it is important to have the right content management technology in place. 73% of the Survey respondents admitted that one of the biggest challenges in their organizations was the lack of the right technology or them being unable to unleash the full potential of their CMS.

The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ learns and evolves with each customer interaction, empowering digital managers to deliver optimized content, campaigns, and commerce for real-time, relevant customer engagements. For the 10th year in a row, Sitecore is a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Niall Berwick, Digital Project Manager from RCSI, highlighted:

“We initially selected Sitecore as our content management solution because it provides us with a single product that: delivers a great personalized experience and enables our team to scale and manage all our web content and campaigns in one place. It is also easily integrated with the other tools we use, such as the CRM”.

5. Use every content development aid available to you

There are dozens of martech and tools available to marketers today. The graph below shows the 9 most broadly used of them:

As you see, these ingredients are modular, and may vary based on the needs of each individual organization. However, once you have identified your content goals, taken the right factors into account when planning the content strategy, streamlined your content creation process, selected the right technology and identified the content development aids available at hand – you have found your success recipe and are ready to put it into action.

If you need help reinventing your digital presence and want to get more output from your website content or if you would like to start your Sitecore digital journey, contact us today.