Why content operations is essential for your business success

Highlights

You’ll learn about why your business needs content operations:

• Efficient production: Produce quality content swiftly to meet market demands
• Resource management: Allocate resources effectively for maximum productivity
• Consistency: Maintain brand voice and quality across all platforms
• Customer engagement: Increase engagement with relevant, trustworthy content
• Save cost: Streamlines your processes to save time and money

Transform your content strategy and achieve unmatched success with content operation.

For a long, content has played an essential role in a brand’s marketing process. But with the rise of wearables, smartphones and IoT devices, you need to focus more on content strategy and delivery. It’s no longer about creating content; it’s more about streamlining the entire workflow, from ideation to distribution. 

Quality content increases your brand’s visibility and awareness, runs successful marketing campaigns and attracts leads that convert to long-term paying customers. It dictates the success of your online presence and brand’s visibility. However, creating quality content is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a list of operational tasks you need to finish before delivering consistent content across your digital channels. That’s where content operations come in. 

What exactly does it mean? What role does it play in content strategy? What are its benefits? And how does Contentstack help you with content operations?

Let’s find out.

What is content operations?

Content operations or content ops, is a principle that integrates people, processes and technology to execute a content strategy. It brings structure and order to all content activities. With content operation, your marketing team creates, publishes, promotes and measures digital content.

Content operation is the backbone of a successful marketing campaign. Like a well-oiled machine, they allow your team to create and distribute content at scale. 

Let’s understand using an example:

An IT company is preparing to launch its new product. The marketing team plans a campaign, focuses on key messages and determines who it wants to reach. Meanwhile, the design team creates visuals and content creators work on blog posts, social media updates and videos. The analytics team monitors the engagement and performance metrics, making changes as desired. By working together like this, the company pulls off a content strategy and unified launch that hits the mark and reaches the audience.

Companies that overlook content operations often fail to deliver personalized content experiences that digital customers expect. With customers likely to spend 40% more than planned on highly personalized shopping experiences, investing in content ops could be the solution your business requires.

Key components of content operations

People

In content ops, people are the foundation as these people contribute to creating and marketing content, not knowing what your team can achieve results in poor-quality content scattered across digital channels. Defining proper roles and responsibilities for your content writer, content strategist, project manager, content operations manager and marketing team keeps everyone on the same page.

While some overlap in job responsibilities might occur (writers might perform the editing task and vice-versa), as long as you define your roles and responsibilities, the team and operations should function successfully.

Process

After forming a content operations team with unique skill sets, how do you complete your projects from start to finish? Your content team needs a process or defined workflow for content creation and timely delivery. The quality or content delivery will be impacted if any of the processes fails. A defined style guideline, template and content governance model will strengthen your processes and promote accountability and consistency. But these processes cannot work in silos. You need to use them with technology to ensure smooth operations. 

Technology

Technology is the last component in content ops, which helps you accomplish each task. Because content planning is an extensive process, it takes time. So, your team requires multiple resources to be successful. The technology is as follows:

• Task management
• Project management
• Content execution
• Analytics and reports

Without these tools and technologies, it’s challenging for your team to be productive and boost its ability to function as per changing market requirements. 

Role of content operations in content strategy

The role of content operations in content strategy is as follows:

Strategy

Content operations craft and execute well-rounded content strategies. They ensure your content resonates with the target audience and aligns with your company's goals. This means understanding what your audience loves, staying on top of industry trends and changing content to meet evolving needs.

Management

Efficient content management is the backbone of successful content operations. It involves organizing content assets, managing resources and keeping the brand voice consistent across platforms. You need a system to handle various content types and formats while ensuring everything ties back to a unified brand message.

Workflow

Smooth workflows are key to effective content ops. They make collaboration among team members seamless and efficient. Setting transparent processes and responsibilities helps you produce timely content with fewer delays. This involves coordinating tasks, setting deadlines and creating open communication within the team.

Efficiency

Content operations increase efficiency by streamlining processes and using the right tools. This cuts down on time and costs for the content production process, allowing teams to focus on quality and innovation. Automation, content management systems (CMS) and collaboration tools are vital in this process.

Measurement

Regularly measuring and analyzing content performance is essential for ongoing improvement. Metrics like efficiency, quality, audience reach and engagement offer insights that refine strategies and enhance outcomes. These metrics help you make informed decisions to revamp your content operations and achieve better results.

Content operation vs content strategy

Benefits of content operations

Produces content faster

While quality of content matters the most, you need to produce it fast to keep up with the changing demands of the market and customers. Companies adopting content operations are more likely to produce quality content faster. How? When you use the right processes and tools, you can work together and avoid delays, consistently delivering quality content on time. Plus, regular check-ins and feedback fine-tune your content operations strategy, boost productivity and keep the work to a high standard.

Better resource management

By defining clear goals and objectives, you properly allocate resources and ensure all resources are used to their full potential. A structured approach improves productivity, allowing your teams to deliver high-quality content.

Improves content consistency and quality

Content operations provide consistent and quality content during every stage of your customer’s journey. A well-organized content operation ensures your content stays true to brand guidelines, maintains high quality and keeps your brand's message consistent and trustworthy on various platforms.

Increases customers engagement

Great content vibes with your crowd and levels up your experience. Sharing relevant and spot-on information grabs attention and builds long-term relationships. This increases engagement while building trust and loyalty as customers feel understood and valued by the brand. 

Saves time and money

Content operations build a cycle between people, processes and technology, increasing your business efficiency. Such efficient teams save time and money. They drastically cut down the time needed to create, update, approve and publish content. Apart from monetary savings, content operations free up valuable resources, allowing your team to focus on areas of growth and innovation. 

Why use Contentstack for content operations?

Contentstack’s headless CMS creates, manages and delivers content across various channels. Its user-friendly interface promotes teamwork by breaking down silos and increasing productivity. Plus, its API-driven structure integrates with your existing tools, making the most of your current setup.

Contentstack also offers customizable workflows that fit your unique content processes, ensuring each piece meets your quality and consistency standards. With features like version control and content scheduling, you closely monitor your content strategies.

How did Contentstack help Reckitt with its content operations?

Reckitt, a global player in consumer goods, set out to streamline content across 700 websites for its 84 brands in the health, nutrition and hygiene sectors. They used Contentstack’s headless technology to improve internal processes and digital experiences, leading to a 40% increase in website performance. As a result, the company witnessed reduced migration and maintenance costs while speeding up the launch of websites and new brand identities. By switching from a homegrown CMS to Contentstack, Reckitt gained more flexibility, scalability and better content management. 

After using Contenstack, Paweł Płoneczka, IT&D Senior Manager Websites at Reckitt, said:

“With Contentstack’s global governance and control over the content model, we can make sure that all sites are compliant, have full accessibility and work as they should, out-of-the-box.”

Read the complete case study here.

How to make your content operations more effective

Use a single and reliable information source

Organize and store all your content and information in a central system. This will help you stay consistent and accurate and ensure your team has the most current information. 

Know where your customers are spending time.

Using advanced analysis, you can understand your customer trends and behaviors. Once you understand these areas, you can map content strategies for increasing user engagement and conversions.

Simplify your workflows

Analyze your existing processes to identify potential bottlenecks. Simplifying workflows increases productivity, reduces stress and enhances team efficiency, allowing faster project completion.

Focus on automation

Choose the right automation software to minimize your or your staff's work, such as data input, email responses or social media updates. Your team will have more time to dedicate to creative work and planning strategies.

Ensures your content serves a goal

Ensure the content you share has a clear purpose. Your purpose can be to educate, inform or entertain. So, ensure your content archives the specific business goals.

Key metrics for evaluating your content operations

Content efficiency

Pay close attention to the time and resources you're investing in content production. Tracking content efficiency helps you spot areas where you can streamline processes or better allocate resources, increasing productivity and reducing unnecessary costs.

Content quality

Check the quality of the content to ensure it aligns with your brand and resonates with your audience. Ensure consistency in your messaging, tone and style.

Customer experiences

Monitor how your customers interact with your content. Metrics like click-through rates, time spent on pages and feedback provide an overview of how your content resonates with your audience.

Content approval time

Watch out for how long your content approval takes to find any bottlenecks. Speeding up this process reduces delays, ensuring your content reaches your audience on time.

Collaboration efficiency

Strong collaboration tools and communication channels enhance teamwork, creating more cohesive and creative content.

Performance analytics

The next metric is performance analytics, which measures content success across different platforms. These insights reveal what’s working and what’s not, helping you make data-driven decisions.

FAQs

What is the meaning of content operations?

Content operations manage the processes, tools and teams that create, distribute and maintain content.

What does a content operations specialist do?

A content operations specialist oversees the content lifecycle, ensuring efficient workflows, quality control and alignment with strategic goals.

Why are content operations important?

Effective content operations enhance productivity, consistency and quality, leading to better customer engagement and reduced costs.

What is the content of operations management?

Content operations management oversees the people, processes and technology required to produce and manage your content.

Learn more

Implementing content operations is smart and essential for companies that create content. They’re essential for bringing your content strategies to life and increasing overall business efficiency. As companies evolve, your content operations strategy will become even more crucial.

To streamline your content operations and increase business productivity, talk to us today.