When you think about content management, you might picture uploading your files to a cloud storage account for easy access. That’s the basic overview, but you also need a strategy, and that’s where high-level content management comes into play.
If you plan to have a large presence online, you need a high-level content management strategy to manage the growing number of files you’ll accumulate over time. It’s not enough to store your files in an account for your marketing team. Every file needs to be created, named, stored, and organized intentionally from the start.
A strong content management strategy executed properly will make your marketing team effective, efficient, and will contribute to their job satisfaction. While hitting goals is important, employees who are happier tend to produce better work and stay at their jobs longer.
Without a specific plan, your accumulated content will become increasingly difficult for your marketing team to find. For example, unstructured content is particularly difficult to organize in a way that makes it easy to find. These are files like .pdf documents, PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Word documents, and audio/video files. You can’t add these files to a database for easy reference by running commands. The best you can do is create a good file name and try to organize them into folders. However, that doesn’t work when you have a large number of files. So, you need a better plan.
The solution is to use a cloud-based file storage system that utilizes tags to organize unstructured data. This way, any file you upload to your account can be tagged with numerous keywords that become text-searchable. For instance, when a user logs into the account and types a keyword into the search bar, all files matching that particular tag will appear in the results. This is the best way to manage unstructured data. Otherwise, your marketing team will spend hours just looking for files, which will put them behind schedule.
Organized content keeps your business running. Your marketing team can only finish their tasks on time when they have access to all the digital resources they need. If they get stuck looking for a file and can’t move forward until they find it, your projects will fall behind schedule. When project deadlines are missed, it hurts your business financially and upsets clients.
Unfortunately, disorganized digital files are the norm and many workers say they spend more time looking for files than working throughout the day. Many people also report duplicating work because they can’t find existing files. A 2018 IDC study found that data professionals waste 30% of their time each week searching for data and spend another 20% of their time duplicating work.
When this happens in your company, it means you’re unnecessarily paying for work to be created twice. However, team members don’t usually have a choice, which means neither do you.
While it doesn’t take much to create a content management plan, executing that plan can be a challenge. However, it must be done, so here are some tips that will help.
First things first – focus on security. Find a secure cloud-based file storage account that provides enough disk space and makes file organization easy. If you have more nuanced needs, you’ll have to be selective and your options will be more limited. However, there are still plenty of options. Having specific needs just means you have to evaluate each potential thoroughly.
Access management is just as critical as organization. You need to determine ahead of time what types of files will be shared with different user groups. It helps to use a file storage platform that allows you to set permissions to access files and folders based on user groups. This allows you to implement Zero Trust into your file management.
You also need a plan for how you’ll share documents and files with clients. For example, if you have Box, you can generate a link that allows your client to view, download, or edit the file. You can set these permissions in any combination you wish. For instance, you can allow the link recipient to read and sign a .pdf file, but not download that file.
Your ability to manage your digital assets will directly impact your business for better or worse. If you haven’t yet, take control of your files and organize them so your marketing team can deliver the best results within your company.
