Enterprise content management strategy explained

It’s easy to underestimate how much digital content circulates through a business at any given time — especially at the enterprise level. Here, content might be considered any digital assets — text, images, audio and video files, and so on — that the business might need to publish across any of its digital channels or customer touchpoints. 

To put a number on that, research suggests that over 64% of organizations hold at least one petabyte of data within their digital ecosystems, with over 40% managing 500 petabytes. While not all that data will necessarily be content that ends up on customer-facing digital channels, there will still be a significant volume of content that does appear on those touchpoints. 

And that’s why there's typically a huge burden placed on content operations in enterprise organizations, where large volumes of marketing content has to move through different teams, brands, and regions on the journey from inception to publication — many of which use their own tools and workflows. 

In other words, enterprises don’t just need a way to store content, but manage how they work with it, publish it, and distribute it — and do so in a way that aligns with their business goals, and customer expectations. 

That’s where an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy comes in. 

In this blog, we’re going to discuss the concept of the ECM strategy. We’ll define the concept, what it involves, and explain how businesses can leverage Contentful to implement an effective ECM strategy of their own. 

What is an enterprise content management strategy?

Before we get to strategy, let’s explore enterprise content management. Essentially, ECM refers to the technologies, people, business processes, and workflows that enterprise-level organizations use to create, store, publish, and distribute their content. 

It’s not dramatically different from non-enterprise content management — other than in terms of scale. Enterprise organizations typically serve large volumes of customers, often across multiple brands and multiple websites, which can make content operations much more complicated. In this context, brand teams may need to translate content, launch campaigns for specific regional holidays, or adjust for regulatory requirements — in addition to a range of enterprise-specific content requirements, such as document management and records management.

With that in mind, an enterprise content management strategy should serve as a means to organize and streamline content management for an enterprise-level environment — from inception through to creation, review, publication, distribution, and eventually, retirement. 

Your strategy should help you define the technologies, workflows, and governance that goes into every stage of that lifecycle. That includes steering your organization through its digital transformation and choosing your ECM software.

Technology 

Your enterprise content management strategy should include the implementation of an enterprise content management system (CMS) capable of orchestrating content operations at scale. An enterprise CMS serves the same purpose as a CMS in any business, except it needs to be capable of meeting enterprise-class needs — which (as we mentioned earlier) typically entail multiple brands, cross-functional teams, multiple regions, and so on.

That objective includes standardizing content workflows, controlling access to content, dealing with structured and unstructured content, supporting content personalization and localization, and delivering content seamlessly across every digital channel: web, mobile, wearable, in-store, and so on.

Workflows

In an enterprise environment, content production comprises multiple workflows and involves both technical and nontechnical teams. Your ECM strategy should account for the complexity of those workflows which may intersect with the front end and back end of your CMS, with different websites, different brands, and the different types of content that populate the ecosystem (text, images, videos, etc.).

The ECM strategy should also facilitate two types of workflows: technical and nontechnical. On the technical side, developers working in the back end of the CMS should be able to develop new features and functionalities, and make technical adjustments to apps and services. On the nontechnical side, creators, editors, and marketers should be able to work on content experiences simultaneously, and not be held up by a need for developer support or maintenance downtime. 

Governance 

An ECM strategy should help an organization impose proper governance over its content. At the enterprise level, that means both controlling the volume of content and executing content operations effectively, but also aligning with company policies and observing appropriate regulatory practices. 

The governance aspect of your ECM strategy should impose guardrails on content, with a system for granting access and permissions to key stakeholders as content moves through the digital ecosystem, and for defining content management processes.

How does Contentful benefit enterprise content management strategies?

Contentful is built to help organizations tackle content chaos. In other words, manage the vast amounts of content that they must create and publish so that their customers can view it on any digital channel, seamlessly.  

To that end, Contentful’s headless architecture builds flexibility and control into content management from the ground up — and is used by enterprise organizations all over the world to deliver unique, engaging digital content experiences to diverse audiences and to scale to meet the changing demands of global markets. 

Let’s examine how we do that. 

Modular content

Contentful’s content model allows you to break content into its component parts, such as headers, images, button labels, product descriptions, legal disclaimers, and so on. Those parts can then be reassembled, like modular building blocks, to create new content, in any part of the digital ecosystem. 

This modular approach to content management supports consistency across enterprise brands and channels, makes it easier to localize and update content, and enables a faster time to market because content doesn’t (always) need to be built from scratch — brand teams can create new content by reusing existing components. 

Enterprise-grade governance

Contentful offers granular control over every aspect of content lifecycle management, enabling role-based permissions for creation through to review, and publication. That means enterprise brand teams can work with large volumes of content efficiently, across different brands and websites, in alignment with centralized company policies and content goals while applying the relevant compliance standards. 

Composability and scalability

Contentful is an "application programming interface-first” (API-first) solution. In practice, that means that the platform is completely composable: You can add new applications and services to your tech stack without any risk of incompatibility — APIs handle all data transfer requirements between the different components. 

Composability translates to effortless scalability for ECM strategies. Organizations can scale up and down to meet growth goals, extending their tech stacks to reflect the needs of their markets without compromising the integrity of brand voices, and without risk of content formatting issues on the various channels to which they publish content. 

Accessibility and efficiency

Contentful promotes the technical and nontechnical objectives of enterprise content management strategies by enabling content creators and other nontechnical users to work on content workflows more efficiently — publishing, editing, and reviewing without relying on developer support. 

That approach means that brand teams can progress specific tasks, launch campaigns, respond to market challenges, and complete other critical content management tasks efficiently, without waiting for backend teams or stakeholders to get around to a support ticket. At the same time, developers can also build new features and functionalities for the enterprise tech stack, and test and iterate those additions, without disrupting the live service. 

AI content management 

Contentful's native AI capabilities also serve enterprise content management strategies — streamlining workflows, improving content quality, and automating an array of content management tasks. The AI Actions feature, for example, builds automation into the UI, putting automated content tagging, translation, and personalization at brand teams’ fingertips, reducing manual effort, and streamlining the production of content.

Contentful’s AI automation not only means that enterprise teams are able to manage large volumes of content more efficiently, but frees them up to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as planning new campaigns. AI can provide critical insights into the performance of content, helping developers analyze and experiment, and optimize their content for better engagement and conversion.

Wrapping up

An effective enterprise content management strategy requires organizations to think about the content they hold within their ecosystem, how they work with that content on a daily basis, and what they want their content to do for them. 

Deriving value from content at the enterprise level is more than just a question of managing its scope and complexity, but also considering where and how content might be needed or deployed most effectively.

And to facilitate that process, enterprise organizations need powerful, flexible, and scalable content management capabilities — the kind that Contentful is designed to provide. 

Contentful is a digital launchpad, empowering organizations to execute their content management strategies with game-changing accuracy and efficiency. From assigning CMS access, roles, and permissions to thousands of users, to scaling your content tech stack to keep pace with growth, Contentful serves as a catalyst for ECM strategies.

We’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest companies and brands, including Kraft-Heinz, Vodafone, and BMW, helping to transform their content management environments and deliver outstanding new digital experiences for their customers. To find out more about how Contentful can help your organization take control of its content and unlock new digital experience possibilities for your customers, get in touch with our sales team to discuss your next step. 

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