How to Create a Content Management Strategy

TL;DR:

• A content management strategy helps generate inbound opportunities, educates prospects, lowers customer acquisition costs, and builds brand trust.
• To set up a content management strategy, marketers should know their target audience, assess current content, choose the right CMS, establish a content workflow, and set up a content calendar.
• Centralizing content management and using automation tools can improve efficiency and productivity.

When it comes to content management, marketers are forever jumping between a million open tabs, trying to keep track of everyone's deadlines on hard-to-find spreadsheets and loose Google Docs. It's no wonder they feel overwhelmed and find it hard to stay on top of deadlines.

On average, content marketers lose around 6.8 hours a month on manual (and very disorganized) content management ops. They're wasting time on things that could instead be automated, and those deadlines pass them by.

In this guide, we'll show you how to set up a streamlined content management strategy so that you operate from one single source of truth and get all that important content out on time.

Poor content management can cost you more than just time. If you're not getting content out, you're not helping push prospects down the sales funnel. Cue a very unhappy VP of Marketing.

What is a Content Management Strategy?

A content management strategy is a structured approach for creating, organizing, and distributing content across platforms, often with the help of a Content Management System (CMS).

It involves a series of important steps, including setting clear objectives, defining roles and workflows, and tracking performance. All toward the goal of pushing out high-quality content that serves to educate potential buyers and send them along the sales funnel.

Ideally, you want to centralize your workflows to avoid running after all those loose docs (which is where that CMS comes in handy.)

Why Is a Content Management Strategy Important?

Why a content management strategy is important brings us back to why content marketing is so important, especially today.

You should be creating, managing, effectively distributing, and tracking content with a proper content management strategy for the following reasons:

1. Content Generates Inbound Opportunities. It's durable, recyclable, and sharable, attracting qualified opportunities. Companies like Metadata.io let content do a lot of the heavy lifting — between January and June of this year, they've generated 68.3K in organic search traffic, 30.4K in traffic from organic social, and 1.3K in traffic from email.
2. Content Educates Prospects, Who Become Buyers. Content guides prospects from an unaware to a product-aware state, facilitating their journey to becoming customers.
3. Content Lowers CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Compared to ads, which tend to interrupt the searcher's journey, well-crafted content answers search intent and reduces CAC.
4. Content Builds Your Brand. Demonstrating expertise through content establishes trust, making prospects more inclined to choose your services.

A poor management strategy, or going without one, causes the inverse of all these benefits. Your target audience won't engage with your content, which severely hurts conversion rates and can even negatively impact brand perception.

You also have a lot to manage when it comes to content:

• The blog
• The newsletter
• Social media pages (both company and personal accounts, if you're encouraging employee advocacy)
• Individual projects, deadlines, and approvals for freelancers and in-house writers

That's almost seven hours a week of additional work in total.

Trying to manage all of these channels and responsibilities is a huge task. You need to iron out what needs to be done and a plan of action, or you put your job at risk with all those missed deadlines.

Setting Up Your Content Management Strategy

1. Know Who You're Writing For

You're not writing content for just anyone. Your readers need to qualify as potential buyers.

Here are some ways you can learn more about who you're targeting:

• Talk to Prospects and Customers on Sales Calls. Where better to learn what prospects need from your content than from prospects and existing buyers? Sit in on sales calls when you can to understand their challenges, priorities, current tools, job dynamics, and what solutions they're looking for.

And forget doing this manually, which could take hours. Letterdrop has a feature that can do this for you, pulling content ideas, product questions, objections, themes, and more into a single dashboard.

• ‎Talk to Your Sales and Customer Support Teams. Both of these teams can give you insight into what resources customers are looking for, frequently asked questions, common problems, and more. You can leverage this insight to develop content that directly addresses these concerns.
• Analyze Demographic Data from Social Platforms and Google Analytics: With this, you can understand where your website or social media visitors are coming from, what their job titles are, and more to create a clearer picture of your ICP.
• Understand the Customer Buyer Journey: There are four stages in the buyer journey: unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware. Using the above sources, align your content strategy with the different stages to deliver relevant and effective content that resonates with each phase.

Creating a buyer persona from what you learn is a useful way to make sure your content stays relevant.

2. Assess Your Current Content

You don't always need to start from scratch when it comes to implementing a content management strategy.

You already have promising content up on your site. Reviewing it helps you:

• identify content and information gaps that you could write about
• identify opportunities to repurpose and refresh content
• understand the current workflow and what could be improved

2.1 Assessing Content Manually Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Many marketers use Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) when they're auditing their existing pages. Here's how:

1. Check Google Analytics (Reports -> Engagement -> Pages and Screens) to find pages that previously brought in traffic but have declined.

Solution: See if ranking has dropped or if general interest in the topic has declined.

2. Use Google Search Console (Search Results -> Pages) to identify pages that rank low for their target keyword but rank for unrelated keywords.

Solution: Consider splitting the page into multiple more targeted pages.

3. Use Google Analytics (Reports -> Engagement -> Pages and Screens) to find pages with high engagement rates but low views.

Solution: You need to make sure you're distributing enough to the right channels.

4. Use Google Search Console (Search Results -> Queries) to identify pages that are close to ranking in the top positions but need a final push.

5 . Perform a Google search using the syntax "site:yoursite.com (topic)" to identify any instances of keyword cannibalization where multiple pages compete for the same keyword.

Solution: Think about combining very similar pages.

2.2 Automating Content Refreshing with Content Audit Tools

Using GA4 and GSC can take hours since you have to comb through individual pages, and sometimes have to set up custom code to find them. This can take a day or two a month.

Alternatively, you could use content audit tools to take care of this for you. For example, Letterdrop has a dedicated content refresh monitoring feature and integrates directly with Google Search Console to identify pages that:

• are almost ranking
• need to be split
• are facing keyword cannibalization
• have low traffic despite high engagement
• are declining

‎
3. Choose the Right Content Management System (CMS)

When it comes to picking your CMS, there are a few things you need to consider:

• What is our content marketing budget?
• Will the CMS allow us to scale properly at our current content output levels / team size?
• Will it be easy to onboard my team, or is there a steep learning curve?
• Are the features compatible with the jobs we need to get done?

Lots of teams opt for the WordPress or Webflow CMS since it publishes directly to their site.

Alternatively, Letterdrop actually acts as a headless CMS for both Webflow and WordPress, as well as for multiple other custom sites and CMS. It publishes directly to your site, and has a marketer-friendly editor, project management board, content calendar, and more.

4. Decide on a Content Workflow and Responsibilities

At this point you need to define a content creation process, including roles and responsibilities for content creators, editors, and reviewers. It's also best to establish content guidelines so that everyone knows how exactly they should write product-led content to best position your product.

You also need to set up an approval workflow so that pieces that aren't ready don't accidentally slip through the cracks and end up on your blog.

Content workflows typically include the following stages:

1. Strategy and research. This involves deep diving into relevant topics and developing a content strategy.
2. Ideas and planning. This includes brainstorming content ideas, creating briefs, and planning your content calendar.
3. Content creation. This is when your blog posts, social media updates, videos, and podcasts are made.
4. Editorial stage. This involves removing errors, adjusting tone to stay on-brand, and making sure the content is concise and serves its desired purpose.
5. Approval and publishing. Once you get the final go-ahead from stakeholders, it's time to publish and think about distribution.
6. Distribution. This is about getting content out to the right places and getting your team to amplify posts on social media.
7. Monitoring success and optimizing results. This stage involves measuring the performance of the content, analyzing the results, and optimizing the content strategy for future campaigns.

When done manually — such as going without an automated content calendar or using a Slack channel to get approvals — teams can lose up to 60 hours a month on an inefficient workflow. Not to mention all the loose docs along the way.

Content or project management tools dramatically reduce the time lost for marketers.

For example, Letterdrop has approvals, briefs, deadlines, drafts, responsibilities, gated permissions and more tied to content cards in the project management board. Everything is accessible in one place, and there's no risk of accidental publishing.

‎
5. Set Up a Content Calendar

Without an automated content calendar or dedicated content calendar tool, you'll be left juggling an insane amount of tasks — including monitoring all the socials going out — manually.

It's simply not defensible.

Instead, lots of marketers choose to set up content calendars and project boards with Notion and Airtable. They allow you to set deadlines, see everything in one place, and leave comments for your team.

Neither of these tools is synced with your content or with publishing, though. You'll still need to use third-party tools like Google Docs to write and edit content.

That means constant cross-checking between your calendar, project board, and content. So you're back at square one.

Letterdrop's content calendar is synced to:

• your project board, which is in turn synced to artefacts like briefs, outlines, and drafts
• your socials

This means as your content and socials move, your content calendar updates.

6. Make Sure Your Content is SEO Optimized

You've spent money and time on all your content, and the best chance of getting it seen is with SEO.

Don't get us wrong — your other distribution channels, like socials and email, are very important but can be ephemeral. Search engine-optimized content, on the other hand, is evergreen and can attract visitors forever from Google and Bing.

But there are a couple of challenges marketers face when it comes to implementing an SEO strategy:

1. There's a lot of misinformation about what gets you ranking
2. It's easy to miss important practices, like tracking content refreshes, because you're checking everything manually
3. They're not sure where to even begin

We've written a guide on how to SEO optimize your blogs in 2024 from top to bottom. But the TL;DR is that you need to go through your content to make sure you follow all of these rules (and more):

1. The title shouldn't be cut off in the SERP.
2. Images need alt text.
3. Images need proper file names.
4. You shouldn't have more than one H1.
5. You need at least two or three internal links.
6. At least one high domain authority external link.
7. Is search intent answered?
8. Are there broken links?
9. Did you use H2-H6 headings appropriately?
10. Skimmable structure, such as bolding and lists.
11. Keyword use in introduction to make it clear what this article answers.
12. Keyword use in conclusion to make it clear what this article answers.
13. No keyword stuffing.

6.1 Leverage Smart SEO Tooling

Going through all those rules manually would drive anyone crazy, and there's no guarantee you'll get them all.

There are longstanding SEO tools like Surfer, but as SEO is constantly changing to put the user first, tools that recommend keyword stuffing are no longer going to help you rank. You need to optimize for search intent and cover all your technical SEO bases.

Ex-Googlers developed Letterdrop, and our tooling is built to put people first. It semantically understands and evaluates your content against search rater guidelines and EEAT. Letterdrop can:

1. Identify and auto-fix technical SEO issues — over 60 of them.
2. Identify Search Intent and let you know you whether the search is informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. It analyzes top pages and suggests the best format you should use to get ranking
3. Provide insight into what has been covered on the SERP in the so that you know what needs to be addressed. You can even auto-generate sections into your content.
4. Suggest topics and new angles that haven't been covered yet so that you optimize for Information Gain. You can also auto-generate sections into your content.
5. Analyze and compare your content to top pages, giving you comparative data on word count, keywords, headings, and media usage. You can auto-add the suggested headings and Featured Snippets to your own text.
6. It gives you an EEAT guide specific to your content to make sure all your bases are covered.

‎

7. Set Up a Content Distribution Strategy

You need to get the right content in front of the right audience at the right time.

If you don't have a solid content distribution strategy in place, you risk leaving all your best content to rot on your site — and do absolutely nothing for your business.

We have a guide on setting up a content distribution strategy, but here's the rundown:

1. Identify where your target ICP hangs out, both online and offline. To find them online, use Google Analytics, Sales Calls insights, and native social media analytics.
2. Analyze historical content performance using Google Analytics or Semrush. This way, you can see which channels drive the best results.
3. Based on your insights, choose your best-suited distribution channels. These could be paid (ads), owned (the blog), rented (LinkedIn), and earned (PR, guest articles.)
4. Determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for each channel to track progress effectively.
5. Set up your content calendar as shown in step five above.
6. Create new content or repurpose your existing content to best fit what your customers are looking for and where they like to consume content.
7. Leverage distribution automation tools like HubSpot and Letterdrop. Letterdrop can completely automate engagement from your team on socials to reach multiple networks.
8. Monitor your results using tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics so that you can iterate and improve.

Here's a helpful chart showcasing how you can leverage different distribution channels for the best reach.

8. Identify and Track Performance Metrics

In order to measure the success of all your content efforts, you need to iron out your key performance indicators (KPIs.)

You can then set up a content attribution model to trace content efforts to revenue.

While brand-awareness indicators like website traffic are important, it's becoming increasingly important that marketers are able to tie content to revenue. Tangible KPIs that feed into the top line are particularly important when you're trying to get more resources and build a business case to leadership.

Here's Adam Goyette, former VP of Marketing at HelpScout, talking to us about the importance of presenting these hard numbers to the brass.

‎

It's also important that your KPIs feed into higher-level marketing KPIs. Here are some examples:

• Increased CTR on your pages
• Increased content-influenced conversions
• Increased content-influenced pipeline
• Higher rankings on SERPs for valuable keywords

Suppose your CMO needs 100 leads next quarter. Figure out how many leads your own efforts could bring in. Do this by looking at quantifiable data from the previous quarter, such as:

• Linkedin Impressions
• Total Linkedin posts
• Total organic traffic
• Total blog posts published/refreshed
• Organic traffic to site
• Conversions/demo requests

And finally, iterate, iterate, iterate.

Centralize Your Content Management to Create Better Content, Faster

As companies like yours scale their content marketing efforts, it no longer becomes defensible (or manageable!) to operate from a million open tabs and jump between apps.

Centralizing your content operations and working from one single source of truth is the future of content management.

And with the help of AI and automation, you can reduce the amount of hours you spend on manual tracking.

Letterdrop has been proven to help users produce 32% more content, faster with its robust Content Operations Hub. If you're interested in streamlining your content ops, reach out to us.