What is Content Management?

Content management is the practice of assembling, organizing, delivering, retrieving, and governing website or enterprise business content. Without content management processes, the digital content lifecycle (creation, distribution, storage, retirement) would go haywire—leaving content unstructured, inaccessible, and disorganized.

Businesses generate an enormous amount of data on a daily basis. Few organizations today are prepared to handle the exponential growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of their enterprise data. Fewer still are equipped to manage and account for that data and make the resulting records accessible to the organization as a whole. While information governance is a well-established practice among government entities, private sector organizations have historically not been compelled to invest in enterprise content management (ECM) systems. With the rise of generative AI, demand for personalized user experiences, and other factors, enterprise content management is becoming a requirement rather than just a “nice to have.”

In this content management overview, you’ll learn about all the aspects of content management and its integral role in structuring web and enterprise content and business data.

The importance of Content Management

Content management enables you to control digital information creation, publication, and distribution. In other words, it helps you organize your thoughts and ideas so that others can find and consume your content.

Without content management, the internet would be one big jumble of information without rhyme or reason. In the same way, if your business is like most today, you also store data across a number of systems and information repositories—an approach that has become the norm over the past two decades with rapid advancements in information technology.

Unfortunately, as data volumes continue to increase, you face significant business risks and loss of efficiency because you simply can’t control all the information contained in siloed repositories. Time is wasted looking for a specific document that has not been managed appropriately—and you may not be fully aware of what other information you actually have. With a content management solution, you can put all that information into an orderly system that’s easy to access and navigate.

Content management usually follows an eight-step process:

1. Plan: Decide what kind of content you want to create and where to publish it.
2. Create: Develop ideas and turn those ideas into content, such as videos and blog posts.
3. Store: Once you have your content, you need to store it so others can access it. Businesses typically store content on a website, repository, or blog.
4. Establish a workflow: Create content that aligns with organizational policies and maintains quality consistency.
5. Edit: Editing is one of the most critical phases in creating ready-to-view content for both people and search engine crawlers.
6. Publish: Deliver content to users, including website visitors or employees using a business’s intranet.
7. Govern and control: Mitigate risk and protect information to maintain compliance and security throughout the content lifecycle.
8. Archive or delete: Remove or archive content when it's no longer relevant.

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What are the benefits of Content Management?

Benefits of content management for businesses include:

• Increased efficiency: Content management helps businesses automate and organize content publishing and editing processes. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity.
• Improved customer service: With content management, businesses can create self-service portals where customers can find answers to their questions without contacting customer service.
• Reduced operating costs: Automating tasks with content management strategies can help businesses save money on labor costs.
• Enhanced online visibility: Streamlining the content management process makes it easier to improve search engine rankings, making websites more likely to reach potential customers. 

Benefits of content management for individuals include:

• Convenient information: With content management, individuals can find the information they need without searching through a jumble of unorganized data.
• Greater content control: Individuals can use content management to determine who has access to their content and how it's used.
• Simple dissemination: Content management makes it easy for individuals to share their content through social media, email, and other channels.

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What are Content Management strategies?

Because managing online and enterprise business content is an in-depth process, organizations must have strategies to control their digital content. Following these strategies is vital to ensuring the success of any content management framework:

• Map your priorities: It's essential to understand what’s important to your organization and then align your content management strategy with those priorities. Do you want to educate users or point them to one of your organization's products or services?
• Define your target audience: Identifying a relevant audience for your content is critical in ensuring accurate delivery and engagement. You can define a target audience through market research, keyword research, and sentiment analysis on social media platforms.
• Determine your content channels: Determining which content channels are essential to your audience is critical. Whether via email or social media, finding relevant content channels helps create the proper content management framework.
• Establish a content creation process: This should include all phases of creating content, from ideation to publishing.
• Leverage the right technology: It takes a website development platform, analytics tools, and other asset management tools to assist with website content creation, organization, dissemination, and performance analysis.

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What are Content Management frameworks?

A content management framework is a platform that supports digital content creation, management, and delivery. It includes the processes, policies, people, and technologies needed to manage digital content throughout its lifecycle.

There are five main types of digital content management frameworks:

1. Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM): An ECM is a platform that stores, manages, and delivers enterprise-level content. This includes documents, images, videos, and other forms of content that are important to an organization. An ECM platform should seamlessly integrate with crucial enterprise applications and systems (such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human capital management, and supply chain management solutions) to accelerate business processes and leverage the data they generate. ECM includes cloud content management that can be rapidly deployed to allow organizations to store, manage, and collaborate with digital content in the cloud.
2. Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM): A DAM is a type of CMS used to store and manage digital assets, such as images, videos, and audio files. It helps organizations keep track of their digital content and ensure that it is organized and accessible.
3. Social Media Content Management: This framework involves planning and publishing content on social media platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). The goal of social media content management is to help create a robust social media marketing strategy with clear goals.
4. Mobile Content Management (MCM): An MCM platform makes information available on smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices.
5. Web Content Management Systems (CMS): A web CMS is a platform that helps you create and manage websites. It provides a way to store website files, track changes made to those files, and publish changes to a live website.

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Structured vs. unstructured content

Content can be either structured or unstructured. Structured content is heavily formatted, and computers can easily read it. It includes databases, spreadsheets, and XML files stored in a relational database. Unstructured content is not formatted in a specific, predefined way and is more difficult for computers to read. It includes text documents, images, and videos stored in data lakes.

Most content management tools work with both structured and unstructured content. However, some systems are better equipped to handle one type of content over the other. For example, a DAM system is better equipped to handle unstructured content, such as images and videos. On the other hand, a CMS is better equipped to manage structured content.

All organizations have different needs and priorities, so choosing the proper structure is about preference.

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Content Management examples

Organizations use content management strategies for a variety of purposes. For example, a company might use content management to:

• Share information internally: Businesses use content management strategies to share information internally via a company intranet, such as documents, images, and videos.
• Publish a website: You can use content management to store website files, track changes made to those files, and publish changes to a live website.
• Create an online store: A company might use content management to create an online store, where it can manage product information, such as descriptions, pricing, and availability.
• Develop a mobile app: Businesses can use content management to develop a mobile app by managing app content, such as text, images, and videos.

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What is AI content management?

AI content management uses generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to automate, optimize, and enhance the creation, organization, and distribution of digital content. It leverages machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and other techniques to streamline workflows, improve content quality, and deliver more efficient and personalized user experiences across platforms.

Here are just a few of the ways AI content management can benefit your business:

Content organization

• Automatically tags, categorizes, and indexes content
• Improves findability within content management systems (CMS)
• Identifies relationships between content pieces for better insights

Analytics and insights

• Identifies trending topics and sentiment analysis
• Provides actionable insights to support business decisions
• Summarizes or translates documents

Workflow automation

• Integrates with other tools like CRM, ERP, or HCM
• Creates a workflow or acts on behalf of a user
• Initiates a response such as a task notification as part of a business process

Security and compliance

• Identifies sensitive information in content
• Ensures compliance with regulations like GDPR
• Automatically manages access rights and version control
• Proactively flags potential risks

Content creation

• Generates content or documents based on a request
• Assists in writing content such as emails, proposals, and social media posts
• Verifies texts and proposes fixes to improve issues such as readability or plagiarism

Content curation

• Aggregates relevant content from various sources
• Filters and ranks content based on quality and relevance
• Creates personalized content feeds for users

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Learn more about OpenText Content Management solutions

Content management is crucial in delivering information to the right users at the right time. Using an enterprise content management system is ideal for fast-tracking this process.

The OpenText governance-based content management system helps organizations ensure seamless content delivery. We also offer a SaaS-based cloud content management products for excellent compatibility, flexibility, and policy automation features. Between these options, OpenText offers the perfect enterprise content management tool for your growing needs.

Submit a product inquiry to learn more about our content management tool.