Whether you’re large or small, your organization needs an corporate content management strategy. You’re producing a sizeable amount of content each and every day – from emails to documents to graphics to communications – the list goes on.
All of this data needs to reside somewhere - it’s essential to make sure that you have a content management strategy in place to store and manage these massive volumes of data.
But we’ve heard from our customers that they don’t always know where to start. If this sounds familiar to you, read on – because we will give you the five key steps to getting started with your content management strategy.
In this blog, you will find:
📚 What is a Corporate Content Management Strategy
⚙️ Enhancing Efficiency by Implementing a Corporate Content Management Plan
📈 5 Steps to Implementing a Corporate Content Management Strategy
💻 What Technology Can Be Used for Your Content Management Strategy?
What Is a corporate Content Management Strategy?
A content management strategy for your company is a structured plan used when creating, publishing, and governing your organization’s content and data.
Your content management strategy is critical to your organizational survival because it’s the backbone of your effective information management. Solid information management is vital to ensuring you can thrive in today’s digital age. A content management strategy is also one of the necessary elements to support your organization’s growth.
Enhancing Efficiency by Implementing a Corporate Content Management Plan
Imagine all the time you’ll save by not having to search for a document. Imagine being able to point your new hires to one single source of truth to get all the information they could possibly need to get started. When you put a content management strategy in place, you can improve your processes and manage your resources much more efficiently, making these daydreams a reality.
However, content management isn’t something that’s done overnight – in fact, a corporate content management strategy is something that takes careful planning before implementation. Then, once you’ve implemented a content management strategy, your task isn’t quite over – the strategy evolves with your organization. It should be revisited and evaluated to ensure it achieves the goals and objectives you intended.
5 Steps to Implementing a Corporate Content Management Strategy
To help illustrate these four steps, let’s dive into the life of Dianne Reynolds, a fictitious Communications Manager that we created for this blog. In her role, Dianne is responsible for ensuring that all the company’s messaging – from C-level to Sales to Support - aligns with the key business strategies and the organization's brand as a whole.
Dianne’s organization, ABC Incorporated, had some trouble in the past – old documents were accidentally sent out, there was some disconnect between the sales and communications teams and other issues that needed to be addressed. To avoid any future mishaps (and embarrassment!), Dianne decided that something needed to be done:
Step 1: Understand THE motivations and benefits of implementing a Corporate content management strategy
Given the pain points expressed above, Dianne has decided that a corporate content management strategy may be the right step for her organization to take.
Before making a move to implement a content management strategy, Dianne first evaluates the exact reasons why she feels her company needs one. In this case, she doesn’t want the issues listed above to continue – the last time the sales team sent out an older document, it had incorrect pricing, which got them into trouble with the customer. In fact, they almost lost the sale.
Dianne puts together a business case outlining her organization’s pain points, what she hoped the content management strategy would help to solve for her organization, and what the desired outcomes would be. She also describes what success will look like if the content management strategy is implemented properly.
Step 2: Set the scope
Dianne knows from her research that a content management strategy can’t be built overnight – she needs to really dive into the time and resources it will take for the organization to implement this project.
Dianne starts by setting out the scope of the project – from the previous step, she knows what her major motivations are and the most desirable benefits that her company expects. So, she works backward from her “finished state” to map out all the steps that will be required. When possible, she lumps the steps into smaller, more “bite-sized” phases for the project.
Step 3. Involve stakeholders in developing your content management strategy
Once she’s completed Step 2, Dianne now has the full project scope in front of her. She can now go ahead and solicit the stakeholders; in her case, that means presenting this to the Director of Communications, the VP of Sales, the Marketing Manager, the Chief Financial Officer, and the IT Manager to ensure buy-in of the project and the sales team.
These stakeholders that Dianne has selected oversee different functions and departments in her organization. Dianne knows they’ll have different insights than she does, so having them weigh in on the project will help to consider issues and challenges before the project kicks off and provide valuable input once it is underway.
Dianne sets a meeting and presents her idea to the stakeholders. She receives some push-back from some of the people she’s chosen, but overall, the feedback is positive, and the team is on board to proceed with the content management strategy. The team gets to work helping Dianne to refine her scope with more realistic timelines, and they come to a consensus on which stages of the content management strategy should be implemented first.
Step 4. Build an implementation roadmap and execute
Based on the information that Dianne had gathered and the input and feedback from the key stakeholders, Dianne works with the IT department to build an implementation roadmap.
To help reduce the friction when executing their roadmap, Dianne and the team design a coordinated action plan that determines deadlines for the project, whether or not they require outside assistance in building it, possible pitfalls that they’ll want to avoid, and key milestones for the project. Dianne sets regular cadence meetings with the key implementers to check in and offer her project support and a separate set of cadence meetings with the key stakeholders to update them on how the project is going.
Step 5. Communicate the changes to the organization
The final piece of the puzzle for Dianne was to ensure that, once the content management strategy was built and implemented, people would follow it. As the Communications Manager, Dianne knew that communication with the entire organization was critical to getting company buy-in and compliance.
Dianne put together a communications calendar with key messaging that would help the entire organization understand what the new content management strategy meant to them. She highlighted the benefits of the content management strategy for the employees and included information on what would change in their day-to-day tasks. She also anticipated that there would be questions and put together an FAQ document that she posted to Workplace from Meta.
What Technology can Be Used for Your Content Management Strategy?
Now that we’ve explored Dianne’s story to understand the steps needed to implement a content management strategy, it’s time to consider the technology that is capable of organizational content management. Where does this content reside? Is it easy for employees to access, store, save, and (if needed) modify content?
This is where we think the integration between Workplace from Meta and Microsoft 365 plays a valuable role. Using both platforms together provide opportunities to ensure that content is easily accessible to everyone in the organization. Let's return to Dianne's story for a moment to show the powerful capabilities of both Workplace from Meta and Microsoft 365.
Dianne’s organization wanted to help build their corporate culture, increase communications across their organization, and ensure their employees were more connected to each other, so they implemented Workplace from Meta. As a Microsoft 365 customer, Dianne’s organization felt that the integration capabilities between Workplace and Microsoft 365 allowed for greater flexibility, greater productivity, and greater connectivity across all members of the organization.
Dianne’s organization has many of its corporate policies and procedures residing in its SharePoint intranet site. However, these documents are spread across multiple folders and are not always intuitively available.
Utilizing Workplace's Knowledge Library, Dianne’s organization set up a single source of truth for the key resources their employees required to do their jobs. Because of the integrations between Workplace and M365, Dianne’s team could easily include links that point to the exact location of the documents in the company’s SharePoint intranet site in the Knowledge Library.
Whenever an employee clicks on a link in the Knowledge Library, they’re taken directly to the SharePoint site to view the document. And, so long as the link doesn’t change (i.e., the document name isn’t changed, or the file isn’t moved), the employee will always be viewing the most up-to-date content, because SharePoint’s co-authoring capabilities mean that there is always just one real-time version of the document in question.
Kick Off Your Content Management Strategy Today!
Ready to explore Workplace from Meta and Microsoft 365’s integration capabilities? Want to see how you can use both of these powerful platforms as the centerpiece of your content management strategy? LineZero is here to help!
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