What is Content Lifecycle Management and Why Do You Need It?

What is content lifecycle management?

Content Lifecycle Management is a structured approach to creating, managing, publishing and retiring content in a strategic and organized way. It involves overseeing content from its creation to its eventual archival or removal, ensuring that it aligns with organizational objectives, meets the needs of your audience and maintains consistency across different platforms and channels.

Many things in life have lifecycles, for example plants, animals and so does content. Why do you need a content lifecycle? Let us look at the most common reasons.  

Why do you need content lifecycle management? 

Content Marketing involves creating many content assets for various campaigns, this can mean assets for social media posts, blogs, podcasts or newsletters. The more assets you create, the harder it becomes to keep an overview of what you already have and what you still need to create. Effective content lifecycle management helps because it involves the organization and tracking of digital assets. By implementing this process, you can reduce stress, avoid unnecessary budgetary expenses and save time that would otherwise be spent searching for important content assets.

When you have a good content lifecycle management in place, it becomes easier to publish high quality content efficiently and on a larger scale. This ultimately boosts your overall productivity. 

• Optimized Content Quality: Content lifecycle management ensures that content is always fresh, accurate, and relevant.
• Enhanced User Experience: Managing content throughout its lifecycle guarantees that users find relevant and engaging information, which can lead to improved user satisfaction.
• Compliance and Consistency: Content lifecycle management also ensures that your content complies with legal standards and maintains consistency in messaging.
• Efficient Resource Utilization: By managing content systematically, you can allocate resources effectively, save time and effort.

This makes clear why content lifecycle management is so important. Read on and find out what the 5 phases of content lifecycle management means and what they entail. 

5 Phases of Content Lifecycle Management 

Now that we know what content lifecycle management is and why we need it, let’s focus on the 5 different phases of the lifecycle process:

Content Strategy

This phase is often also called content planning and involves several steps:

• Develop a content strategy: Plan which objectives you want to achieve and what KPIs you need to measure. Think about which content roadmap you need to develop.
• Do audience and market research: Understand your audience and the market or industry you are in, create buyer personas with pain points and needs and define which content formats fit best for it.
  
  
• Do your keyword research: Research keywords because this is the foundation for every SEO strategy. Make sure these keywords will create enough traffic and also have a business value for you.
• Build a content calendar: Plan your next content publications in advance, publish on a regular basis and be consistent.

Content Creation

Now comes the part where you actually create the content. This phase also has several steps, the two most important ones are:  

• Research topics and interview experts: You need all the relevant information. What is important for your customers? How is their current feedback? Ask your customer service or sales department for their insights because those are very valuable for you.
  
  
• Get feedback and revisions: After you created the content, you need to make sure everything is accurate. Ask for feedback and make necessary revisions. It is cruel that all the created content assets are relevant. Relevance will increase the likelihood of converting visitors into customers. If a blog post or guide is irrelevant for visitors, their interest in you or your products will be close to zero.
  

Content Publication

Once you are finished with creating your content, it is time to publish it online. Go ahead and format your content for all the various platforms, including your website, newsletters and social media channels. It is best to schedule the content according to your content calendar. Make a schedule for all your blog and social media posts. Also define if you want to publish all your content on every social channel. Some content formats might only fit for selected social networks. 

Content Promotion 

To maximize the visibility of your content, it is important to take a broader approach to content promotion. Start by using social media platforms to share your content with relevant audiences and actively engage with them. Another effective method is email marketing, where you can directly reach out to subscribers and provide personalized content that matches their interests. You will want to reach more people, this is why you need to think about advertising like Facebook, Instagram or Google Ads. You need to have a clear plan to allocate the budget. Make sure your ad settings align with your objectives. Do you want more reach or more conversions? Your ads strategy should reflect this. 

Content Analysis

After publishing your content, you are not done! Now you need to measure the effect of your content. By utilizing tools for content analysis, you can acquire valuable insights into what resonates with your audience. This empowers you to make data driven decisions. Analyze how many impressions, clicks and conversions you got. If something is not very successfull, be open and try to optimize it. Use all the data you can measure in order to achieve your content objectives. 

Final thoughts

To wrap up, content lifecycle management plays a crucial role in achieving a successful content strategy. When you embrace this process, it can guarantee that your content maintains its impact, relevance and alignment with your business objectives throughout its entire journey.