Content lifecycle management: 3 principles to follow and 5 actions to take
Too many organisations focus on publishing increasing volumes of content instead of managing their digital estate.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He’s expert in helping organisations measure the impact of their content and manage their content across its life cycle.
Your content is a strategic asset
Your content matters to your users and customers. It is part of the service you offer them. One could go so far as to argue that, in an online-dominated world, your web content IS your organisation, because that’s the primary way your users and customers experience it.
Which is why the first principle of content lifecycle management is: realise your content is a strategic asset.
And as a strategic asset, content should be managed accordingly.
Your business evolves - so must your content
Even the most stable organisations are in a state of flux. Products and services are launched, improved and retired. Business plans evolve - or are torn up entirely - when they meet reality. What was important yesterday will be trivial tomorrow. All these things are manifested in content: product descriptions, user guidance, marketing blurb, strategy and policy statements, and so on.
Redundant, out-dated and trivial content confuses your customers. It pollutes search results. It undermines trust in your organisation and costs you money - in lost sales, compliance failures, or internal inefficiency. Only by maintaining content will it be of value.
Once you accept that content needs to reflect change, you accept that it has a lifecycle, and needs maintenance throughout. And once you accept content needs maintenance, you know, logically, it will need a maintenance budget comprising people and time.
Which brings us to the second principle of content lifecycle management: do not publish what you cannot afford to maintain.
Do not publish what you cannot afford to maintain
Many organisations hose down users and customers with words, images and videos giving little regard as to how they will be maintained.
A best-practice rule of thumb used for GOV.UK is that you need a full-time content professional for every 800 ‘pages’ of guidance content. If you can’t budget for this level of resource then you shouldn’t be publishing more content until you’ve balanced the size of the content estate with the resources to manage it. If the organisation won’t employ enough people, then the volume of content should be reduced to match.
“But, but, but…”, you may be protesting, “we neeeed all our web content.”
Really? How many pages haven’t been viewed in the last 12 months? In my experience, the websites of large organisations operate to approximately a 10:90 ratio, that is only 10 percent of the content is used 90 percent of the time - and that’s generous.
Sure, there are pages you legally have to publish which never get traffic, such as a privacy statement. But what about the description of the service you demised 5 years ago? The vanity video of the chief executive’s charity bike ride? “News” releases from 2017? Vacuous blogs written by the board? All these are barnacles on the hull of your website.
If your content operation is focussed on publishing new content, then you are doing the wrong thing (unless you run a media site). Organisations need to publish less and manage more. Simply publishing more content to fix current issues is not a viable solution because customers and users have difficulty finding the right content.
And that’s the third rule of content lifecycle management: change emphasis from publishing to managing.
Focus on managing, not publishing
In some organisations, changing emphasis is likely to go beyond resource-allocation and workflow. It will involve a change in mindset.
Managing content lifecycle means recognising that not every issue that manifests online can be fixed by publishing. Content is a window, not a patch. No amount of ‘wordsmithing’ can compensate for a poorly designed service or muddled policy. Good content will merely expose the flaws.
Five actions for content lifecycle management
To organise for successful content lifecycle management, you need to take 5 actions.
1. Set performance metrics for your content
Base metrics on what action content is intended to precipitate in your customers and users.
“Engagement” isn’t a metric. Nor is “raising awareness of my organisation’s strategy”. Users understand your strategy. So what? What do you want them to do? Buy a product? Donate to your cause? Comply with your regulation?
Couple metrics as closely to desired outcomes as possible. (See Measuring content performance blog post). Focus on user journeys (how users see your site) not pages (how the CMS organises your site).
2. Get involved earlier
Involve content professionals from the beginning of the service design process. They need to be in the room when initial requirements and strategy decisions are made, asking fundamental questions like ‘what do we want users or customers to do?’
Ensuring sound initial requirements for content needs to happen long before drafting. Drafting begets emotional attachment, which begets resistance to change. And he who rejects change is the architect of decay.
Preferably, content should be co-authored by a subject expert, who owns the facts, and a content professional who owns the way those facts are communicated to the audience.
Content people should be able to veto inappropriate publishing requests, that is, that don't have a clear purpose.
Stakeholder management skills will often result in better content outcomes than traditional writing skills.
3. Set up sustainable maintenance
Audit your site using the content metrics to decide what content you can keep as is, what needs editing and what should be deleted. Then draw up a content development plan with commensurate resources to keep monitoring against the metrics.
If you can, use a rolling audit to review 10% of the content a month, so that the entire estate is audited at least annually, allowing for 2 months when other priorities trump maintenance.
If your organisation lacks resources to monitor 10% of your content each month, give priority to monitoring and improving content that has the biggest impact on the greatest number of users.
Aim to establish a cycle of monitoring content performance and improvement (see diagram 1). Repeated iteration provides a steadily improving experience for users.
4. Establish a content governance model
Draw up a website proposition - what will and will not be published - and rules of engagement. Draw up a workflow plan that sets out the publishing process, including lifecycle maintenance.
Have these signed off at the highest possible level. Circulate them. Enforce them.
Document and track who signs off on content requirements, drafts, live content and post-publishing changes. All content should have a subject expert ‘owner’ who is responsible for factual accuracy. Content professionals should have control over the style, tone of voice, publishing platform and document format.
5. Retire content when it no longer serves a purpose
Content must have a purpose - a job to do - otherwise it doesn’t belong on your site. And when that job is no longer required, remove the content.
One of the frequent criticisms of large organisations’ websites is that no one can find what they want because of irrelevant content.