Maximizing Your Content's ROI with Effective Content Operations: 4 Main Components

Companies spend thousands of dollars to produce high-quality content that should grasp the attention of their customers. However, creating content is not enough. You have to ensure that your content is delivered efficiently and effectively to your target audience; otherwise, you'll just waste your budget. This is where content operations come in. 

What is Content operations?

Content Operations (content ops) is a holistic approach to content creation, management, and delivery. It involves technologies, processes, and people to create and distribute content that meets business goals. Content operations ensure content is created, delivered, and optimized efficiently to achieve maximum ROI.

You can also come across the term Digital Content Operations which can also refer to particular digital tools such as content management systems, marketing automation software, and analytics tools. 

What are the components of Content Operations?

There are four main components that shape content operations:

Content Strategy 

The first element is a well-defined content strategy that aligns with the overall business goals. It involves identifying the target audience, understanding their needs and preferences, and selecting the most effective content types and channels to reach them. The content strategy should outline the topics to be covered, the tone and voice of the content, and the specific goals for each piece of content.

Production

This is how you actually create content. This part includes brainstorming ideas, content creation itself, editing, refining, and optimizing it for different platforms and channels. This process can also include researching topics, conducting interviews, writing or creating content (such as images, photos, videos, infographics, landing pages, websites, etc.), proofreading and editing, and formatting the content for various channels.

Content Management 

The management component involves managing the content lifecycle, including storage, archiving, and updating. It is a process of organizing and categorizing content for easy retrieval and reuse, as well as tracking and analyzing content performance to identify opportunities for improvement. Content management can also include setting up workflows and processes for creating and publishing content while ensuring it meets quality standards and adheres to brand guidelines.

Content Delivery

This is how and where you distribute your content. The delivery process includes selecting the most effective channels for each piece of content, optimizing the content for each channel, and tracking and analyzing the performance of the content to measure its effectiveness and make data-driven decisions about future content operations.

Key benefits of Content Operations

1. Consistency

By adopting a structured approach to content creation, you can ensure that all content adheres to predetermined standards of quality, voice, and messaging. This consistency builds trust with your audience and strengthens your brand recognition.

2. Quality

By establishing clear guidelines for content creation and review, you can maintain high content quality. This not only improves your search engine rankings but also boosts audience engagement and conversions.

3. Accessibility

With established content operations, you can ensure that everyone on your team has the necessary level of access to content, and that each team member knows their responsibilities for content-related tasks.

4. Faster go-to-market 

With a content management framework in place, all the steps involved in content creation become more structured and systematic. This reduces the likelihood of mistakes or information silos, ultimately resulting in faster and more efficient content creation and delivery. 

How to leverage digital content operations with a CMS

As you decide to streamline the content ops, you should focus on choosing the tools that will cover all the practical parts of the process, and here is where a content management system (CMS) comes in handy. Headless solutions such as Storyblok are flexible, powerful, and secure, making them the best option. Here is what you can do with a headless CMS:

Create and manage content in one place

When the raw content, such as images, texts, videos, etc, is ready, sending it online shouldn't be a challenge. Storyblok offers a unique Visual Editor that empowers both developers and content teams to create, edit and publish content effortlessly and quickly. This editor functions as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool, and it offers a real-time preview, allowing you to view any changes without leaving the application.

Additionally, Visual Editor allows several users to edit the same page simultaneously, making the collaboration even more efficient. You can save the page before publishing it and share the preview through a public link to ensure all stakeholders have seen it before it goes live.

In the meantime, Storyblok acts as a central hub for all your content, so you don't need to juggle apps to create a new page or product block. Thanks to the incorporated DAM system (Digital Asset Management), all your content is stored in one place, making it accessible to all team members and reducing silos. This also makes keeping your content up-to-date and storing it safely easier. 

Publish and distribute content across many channels

Building the customer journey has changed dramatically in recent years with the boost of technology, and the number of touchpoints marketers have to predict. For example, even five years ago, digital kiosks were a rare channel. However, today, studies show that nearly 60% of young consumers choose self-service "scan-and-go" kiosks over human cashiers. It means that companies have to consider one more frontend to deliver content, and the list goes beyond that.

Hence, being able to manage omnichannel publishing from a single tool is a desired feature that saves tons of time for content teams. Due to the headless architecture, Storyblok allows you to publish content across multiple channels simultaneously, including websites, mobile apps, digital kiosks, AR, VR, IoT, and so on, through a single dashboard. This ensures that all content is consistent and up-to-date across all channels, providing a seamless customer experience.

Set up custom workflows and collaborations 

Since digital content operations involve many people, it's crucial to organize content workflows according to the needs and resources of your particular team. Storyblok allows you to create custom workflows by setting special stages such as ready to publish, editing, in review, or similar and even schedule content releases. This helps to understand the project's timeline, track it easily, and ensure that your team is on the same page and that your content is delivered on time.

You can also assign roles and permissions to ensure that only certain users can access the content and perform the required actions. Moreover, all users can communicate directly in the app by leaving comments and starting discussions. This reduces production time and keeps communication transparent and quick.

Launch content personalization and localization 

Localization has become the new norm as many companies expand into new markets. This complex process involves tailoring content to the needs and interests of different cultures and markets. However, Storyblok can cover all of the technical aspects of it. You can create content that resonates with your target audience and deliver it in their preferred language or with cultural references that make sense to them with the help of native tools, translation features, and third-party integrations.

Additionally, you can customize content based on user behavior, location, interests, and other factors to provide personalized content to your audience and create a unique customer experience, increasing engagement and conversions.

Storyblok - a marketing Content Operations solution 

Content operations play a vital role in maximizing the ROI of your content. Adopting a structured approach to content creation, management, and delivery, you can maintain consistency and high-quality standards, improve accessibility, and speed up the go-to-market process. 

Choosing Storyblok as your headless CMS can greatly streamline your content operations and enable you to create, manage, and publish content more efficiently across multiple channels. By incorporating these strategies and tools, businesses can create content that effectively reaches their target audience and achieves their desired goals.