How to Organize Your Company’s Content Once and For All
As your business grows, so does your content, and managing this digital abundance can feel overwhelming. But, with a clear-cut strategy and the right tools, you can bring order to the chaos and make your content work for you.
The Danger of Content Sprawl
Creating content is a necessary and important component of successful growth in today’s digital marketplace. However, with lots of content creation comes an increasing level of responsibility toward maintenance and organization. Over time, many businesses find themselves in a compromising situation where content sprawl negatively impacts their productivity and security.
“In many ways, sprawl is a natural byproduct of collaboration,” content marketer Christian Buckley explains. “People generate sites and lists and documents as part of the collaborative creative process. Some of these may expand and iterate, and ultimately remain within your system of record (requirements documents, research data, project plans, meeting notes, etc.), while other artifacts may have a short lifespan. Logically, the more we collaborate, the more sprawl we create.”
Over time, ignoring content sprawl creates a negative cascading effect. You can think of it like ignoring your lawn for months or years at a time. If you don’t mow your grass, weed flower beds, and trim hedges, it gets worse over time. Eventually, it gets so bad that you can’t even do anything without giving up and starting over. You don’t want to get to that point with your content. That’s why it’s important to address content sprawl as soon as possible.
How to Better Organize Your Content
As you explore ways to address content sprawl and get more organized, you may find the following tips helpful.
1. Classify Your Content
Content classification involves systematically arranging your content into distinct groups based on certain criteria. This is a critical step in content organization because it makes it easier to locate and retrieve content when needed and helps maintain consistency across all the content produced by your company.
A good classification system can improve productivity, streamline workflows, and enhance communication within your team. But it takes some work to get things properly classified and organized.
When classifying your content, consider factors such as the type of content – such as blog posts, product descriptions, and press releases) – as well as the topic or subject matter, the department responsible, and the date of creation or publication.
2. Utilize a Content Management System
Classifying your content and staying organized is much easier when you have a content management system (CMS) on your side. More specifically, we recommend going with a headless CMS.
“A headless CMS is a content management system that separates content creation and storage from content presentation and delivery,” Marcel Digital explains. “Unlike traditional CMS, which control the presentation layer of a website, a headless CMS only manages content and makes it available through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to be consumed by various devices, such as websites, mobile apps, digital kiosks, and smart devices.”
Regardless of the exact type of CMS you go with, it’s important that you take the time to research different options and go with a platform that aligns well with your content goals and overall vision for growth.
3. Embrace Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a significant role in content organization. By adopting SEO practices, you not only improve the visibility of your content in search engine results, but also create a more organized, easily navigable, and user-friendly website. SEO practices such as proper use of keywords, metadata, and alt tags can help categorize your content in a way that’s understandable to both your audience and search engine algorithms.
To fully understand the entirety of how SEO fits into your content strategy, you’ll need to either take some time to personally study this field of marketing or partner with a specialist who can execute these techniques on your behalf. But don’t let the complexity of SEO scare you. It’s a necessary investment in the pursuit of getting organized.
Let’s Get Organized
There’s no substitute for organization. In fact, being organized can be one of the things that sets you apart from your competitors and gives you an advantage. The more organized you are, the faster you can move on trends and take advantage of opportunities.
And when you do find a content marketing technique that works, you can invest in a cost-efficient manner that delivers the highest ROI possible.
