Every serious marketer has a content strategy that details (a) how they'll create their content, (b) who they'll target with it, and (c) how they'll measure its effectiveness. Web content is, of course, digital, which means two things:
- It's easier than ever to understand how every piece of content performs in real-time (by tracking metrics like page views, bounce rate and conversion rates).
- That's impossible to do without software that reads and interprets the data for you.
That brings us to your CMS 鈥� the backbone of all your content marketing operations.
In today's article, we'll run through how you can use yours to streamline content creation.
5 ways CMS streamlines your content marketing workflow
Without CMS, your content is all over the place. You can't build a content model, track revisions or publish to multiple channels on a schedule. Not in a way that's repeatable and scalable, at least.
CMS is the solution to pretty much all those problems:
1. Advanced workflow automation
Content management systems facilitate complex workflows with multiple stages of content creation, editing, approval and publishing. As an admin, you can set up role-based routing, custom statuses and automatic notifications for each stage. That way, projects move along with as little friction as possible.
And today, it's not just inside your CMS where the collaboration occurs. Take action directly from your notifications 鈥� push content through workflows, approve it and more 鈥� straight from Slack or Teams. Stay within the flow of your task, get work done faster, and speed up content creation with more efficient publication experiences.
2. Integrated multichannel distribution
More than half of today's companies use . But even if you use two, managing them through separate systems is a total headache.
A modern CMS (like Brightspot) integrates with all your digital channels, allowing you to publish and manage content across websites, mobile apps, social media and even IoT devices and PoS systems. For more intricate digital customer journeys, you can even build your CMS as part of composable DXP tech stack with the ability to add 鈥� and subtract 鈥� components and services as needed.
This guarantees consistent messaging and branding. And that's precisely what you need to maximize the reach of your omnichannel content strategy.
3. Real-time collaboration and content versioning
CMS streamlines the creation process itself as well. Rather than sending documents back and forth, your team can collaborate on content as you're creating it using the CMS's built-in editing and commenting capabilities.
Another huge advantage is version control. All changes to a piece of content are tracked. And they're reversible, so you can always go back to something that worked better before. You can experiment with new content ideas without fear of losing your progress.
4. Data-driven content optimization
SEO tools are one of the main ways you can use CMS to supercharge editorial performance. They help you analyze and optimize your content for search engines before you even hit "publish."
But beyond that, you can also use your CMS to track things like audience engagement, conversions and even sentiment analysis depending on the type of content. You can also integrate Google Analytics and other data sources for a full picture of how well your content is performing.
5. Scalability and customization
Trends, search engine algorithms and consumer preferences change like the seasons. Except faster. And over time, you'll probably start publishing more content. Or, at the very least, different types of content.
You need something that can keep up.
A modern CMS offers limitless scalability and customization features. With Brightspot, automate how your work gets done by connecting to over 7,000 common business applications. Get alerts, take actions and execute workflows seamlessly across your favorite tools and applications. Get your work done faster and easier than ever before with a more open and flexible tech stack.
CMS best practices to get the most out of your system
To organize content creation with CMS and really get an efficiency boost out of it, you have to do more than just use it. It's all about how you use it.
As a CMS platform ourselves, we have a few important tips here.
Understand and create the content model for your business needs
Content modeling is the process of organizing content into structured elements that ensure consistency in how the system stores, displays and delivers your content. You can't have a scalable CMS without one.
So before you start publishing in your CMS, do the following:
- Identify your content types (e.g., articles, product pages, blog posts) and their attributes (e.g., title, author, publish date). Brightspot natively provides many of the most content types, pre-built and modeled, but you can also create your own custom editorial content types to solve for any use case and specific content attributes.
- Define how they're related for more dynamic content management. For instance, an article might be linked to an author and categorized under a specific topic.
- Develop a shared framework everyone (content creators, designers and devs) can use to maintain consistency across your digital platforms.
What is a CMS?
In today's world, there are essentialy three types of CMS:
- Traditional CMS (also called "coupled" CMS) is a platform that manages both frontend and backend operations. It stores your web content, templates and designs in a database and delivers them as HTML pages to the user's browser.
- Headless CMS (technically a subset of "decoupled" CMS) separates the back-end and front-end operations. It stores your content in a database and delivers it to any frontend of your choice through an API.
- Hybrid CMS combines traditional and headless CMS approaches. It has a backend coupled with frontend flexibility, so you can push content to multiple channels from one centralized location.
Explore our CMS architecture guide here
"Create once, publish everywhere"
By using different attributes, you can create modular content. Modular content is an approach to content management that involves breaking down content into smaller, reusable modules or building blocks. It enables content creators to efficiently deliver content across multiple channels, platforms and devices while maintaining consistency and flexibility.
In simple terms, you can reuse the same content throughout different parts of your website or across multiple channels without having to recreate it every time. This is particularly handy for sites with a lot of similar content (e.g., a corporate marketing site, an e-commerce store).
Regardless of the site you're running, it makes it easier to scale and adapt your content strategy over time.
Establish a content calendar
This is how you stay on track with your content strategy. A successful content calendar helps you see the big picture of what's coming up, and it makes it easier to allocate resources.
With the editorial calendar view in Brightspot CMS, you'll find all your scheduled publications and assignments with due dates. The widget defaults to showing changes for the upcoming week, but you can navigate through previous and future weeks and view by day, week or month. Brightspot also integrates with common calendar applications like Google Calendar or Microsoft to ensure all your teams and stakeholders are always in the loop, whether inside the CMS or out.
Create uniform content tagging and naming conventions
Tagging content is essential for SEO. It's also crucial for keeping your content organized and searchable, especially when you're working on a larger scale.
Within your CMS, you create tags to classify content and make it easier to find 鈥� for example, articles tagged as 'marketing' or 'product updates.' This lets users (and your content team) filter for specific content types based on what they're looking for. It also helps search engine crawlers read your site.
For product pages: the more granular, the better
You don't want to lump everything into generic categories (e.g., 'men's footwear') if you're selling multiple types of a certain product (e.g., golf footwear, running shoes and sneakers).
Thinking about a system now will help prevent confusion further down the line when the amount of content increases. Decide on a structure for tagging your content and stick to it.
Distribute tasks
Collaboration is one of the biggest benefits of using a CMS. And it's also one of the most crucial aspects for keeping your content strategy on track. You can use permission settings to make sure only the right people have access to the areas of your CMS that are relevant to the task at hand.
Establish a system for maintaining your content
Monitoring your content and updating it periodically will help you (a) rank higher on search engines and (b) stay relevant to your audience.
For your pillar content especially, you're going to want to schedule periodic checks and updates. Go through content in your CMS after it reaches a certain age and update it with more relevant content.
Simplify content management with Brightspot CMS
A modern CMS offers endless possibilities for managing and scaling your content. With Brightspot, you can create a custom content types, manage modular content, collaborate with team members through our conversation tool and schedule updates through an intuitive editorial calendar.
Request a demo to see how it works.