Wednesday, 11 October 2017

The Benefits of Centralized Content Management

You work with a lot of content in today's business world. Everyone from the marketing team to customer support relies on this material, but keeping everything organized is challenging. You end up with content locked away in email inboxes, hidden in workstation folders, saved on personal cloud storage accounts and strewn around on thumb drives. A centralized content management platform is a must if you want to improve productivity and efficiency in your organization.
Improve Content Accessibility and Visibility
Your staff won't spend countless hours or days hunting down the content they need for their projects. They can quickly find the most relevant pieces for their needs and put them to use. Search and taxonomy functionality complements the well-organized structure offered by a centralized contentmanagement platform.

The overall visibility of your company's content assets also improves. You can see what everyone has available, identify gaps and find opportunities to expand with a top-down view.
Encourage Cross-Department Collaboration
Once the content is brought together in a centralized platform, collaboration between teams and departments is much easier. You eliminate the endless back-and-forth emails and messages from people trying to get their hands on digital assets. The entire process gets streamlined so team members can focus on the work they're trying to do, rather than a wild goose chase.

Work From a Single Version of the Truth
When your content is spread between many people, you have no idea which version they're working on. Redundant work, incorrect brand terminology and other inconsistencies make it difficult to move forward with your projects. Centralized content means that everyone pulls from the same files. Updates happen universally for all users in the system, so you won't run into situations where someone is working from a months-old document.
If you work with external partners, such as an agency, a centralized platform is even more essential. You can end up with an external team using the wrong brand colors, style guide and other assets if they're referencing out-of-date materials.
Eliminate Lost Data
A single point of failure can easily take out your most important content when an employee leaves your company or a hard drive breaks. You dedicate a lot of resources to your content production workflow, so losing the result of all that hard work is frustrating and expensive.

A centralized content management platform removes the potential for data loss in these situations. You have redundancies and backups in place to manage this risk, and you don't have to worry about any digital assets hiding out in out-of-the-way network locations.
Track Content Usage
How much of your content actually gets used? A centralized platform gives you the opportunity to track the formats your staff prefers, the channels they use it on, what files external partners access and other data points.

You can optimize everything from your content production workflow to your content marketing strategy by looking at this information and measuring whether you're getting an excellent ROI from your efforts.

A centralized content management platform provides your business with the foundation it needs to succeed in today's content-heavy business world. Whether you need a way to discover the content you need more of, or you want to make it easy for team members to get the assets for their projects, this solution can make a world of difference.