What is the Content Life Cycle?
The content life cycle simply refers to the numerous stages involved in creating content. It is basically a life cycle for content, and you must go through many steps before publishing or restoring it. Depending on the type of content, you may need to go through different stages in the content lifecycle. However, you can still structure your content by dividing it into the main categories that can be considered the basic stages of all content life cycles. The process of managing your content lifecycle is called content lifecycle management.
What is Content Lifecycle Management?
Content lifecycle management is a process where the manager plans out how the content will be created and distributed. In content lifecycle management, there is the development of the content, publishing, organizing, and repurposing of the content during its whole life cycle when it is displayed on your website. When you have a strategic content lifecycle management system, you can effectively create and share content with your users.
And when you are getting into the content lifecycle management system, there are various stages that you will have to understand.
What are the Stages of Content Lifecycle Management?
There are seven stages to proper content lifecycle management. Some organizations skip between stages or even switch their orders to meet their organizational needs. However, whatever your enterprise wants, you will still probably have to follow these basic content lifecycle management stages. Have a look at what those stages are:
1. Content Strategic Planning Based on Enterprise Needs
Strategic planning of content marketing involves creating an editorial board that will instruct content marketers on what kind of content their organization needs. It mentions the technologies and services that will help you create your content. That editorial board is full of instructions that will help the content writers develop content that will benefit the organizations and their target audience at the same time. This stage is also established to help you develop categories that you can use to tag your content.
2. Workflow Definition
The workflow definition is a shorter stage than the strategic planning stage, but you should be patient in this one. You have to be careful in the workflow stage because this is where you define your content lifecycle management workflow. At this stage, you will have to make a plan for how the content that you are creating will move through the different stages of its life cycle. You will have to make a plan for how to track the content, approve the content after receiving it from the writers, schedule the content for publishing, etc.
Your workflow can be affected when you change your team members or someone gets sick. Still, you will have to manage your content workflow so that you can publish the articles or posts at the right time as scheduled. You will have to audit your content workflow so that the content management system operates smoothly.
3. Produce the Content
The next stage of the content lifecycle management system is creating the content. You will have to ask yourself several questions at this stage. The first question is who is going to create content. How long will it take to create the content? Do you have enough resources that will support your content creation? Do you have enough instructions that define the style, practices, and tone of your content? At this stage, you will have to provide enough resources to the content developers so that they can create effective and creative content seamlessly.
4. Save the Information
The next stage is to store your content so that the developers and marketers can easily access it from the storage area. Store the content in a way that will help all of you see its status at a glance. You will also need a process that can help your team members search for the content that they need during the marketing stage.
Moreover, you will also have to keep in mind how your content will be accessible to your team members. Ask yourself who can access the content. Who can access the content from where it’s stored? What happens if the person who has access to the content is not reliable? You will have to come up with answers to each of these questions to keep your content safe.
5. Edit the Content
Developing the content is not the final stage of content creation because you will have to edit it. Editing is the best way to make sure that the content you are producing is high-quality and consistent. Go back to the content planning stage and make sure that the content that you have created meets all the requirements you have mentioned in the editorial. Make sure to check the grammar, tone, style, formatting, and other criteria to make the content reliable to the readers.
6. Publish the Content
After editing your content and making sure that it follows all your enterprise requirements, it’s time to publish it to your potential readers. Here you will have to create a publishing checklist for every type of content that you have developed. The type of content that you might have created, including blog posts, videos, infographics, etc., does not always support one platform at a time.
For example, if you are publishing content on your Facebook page, then you can share infographics or videos. Videos are also shareable on your YouTube channel and Instagram. But on your website, you can share or publish all of these types of content. Create a list of every type of content that you have created and the platforms where you want it published.
7. Update or Remove the Content
Now, publishing the content is not the final stage of your content lifecycle management. After publishing, you will have to analyze the content. You will have to track how they are performing in attracting your potential users. And if needed, you will have to update your old content with new information. But if the content is receiving too many negative reviews, you will have to remove it from the platform.
There are many factors that decide whether your content piece needs to be updated or deleted. For example, if your content needs to be updated, then it will have these factors involved:
- If your content generates genuine user engagement, then you will have to constantly update it using new information and links. If the message in your content is still valuable to your audience, then you will have to update it.
- Sometimes you will have to delete your content, no matter how strategically you have planned it. And these are those times:
- If the content does not accurately represent your brand anymore, you will have to delete it. If the content never performs well, then you will either have to rewrite it or remove it completely. If the main reason you created the content is no longer valid, For example, if it was about news coverage, then it is not valid anymore.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your business, you will have to publish regular content. It is important to have a proper content life cycle management system for a number of reasons. You will find a lot of outdated content on your website. If you don’t update your content regularly, Google will lower your ranking in their search engine. You can damage the reputation of your brand if you don’t have an established position on Google. In order to achieve content lifestyle cycle management, you should always try to establish and maintain it.
We have provided you with advice and strategies to help you develop a solid content lifestyle cycle. If you have any further questions, please use the comment box below.
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
