How Better Content Management Can Help Your Business Become More Efficient

We all strive for efficiency in business. Efficiency means doing more with fewer resources and/or less friction, ultimately resulting in higher productivity, higher profitability and — for those of us who love working unabated — higher morale.

But when it comes to organizational efficiency, many businesses overlook the high-level systems, structures and workflows that could make them operate more efficiently, instead scrutinizing low-level details. Proverbially, they miss the forest for the trees.

Take, for example, the area of content management. Better content management could make your entire business work more efficiently, but most business owners neglect this important element.

Content Management and Organizational Efficiency

How, exactly, is better content management going to make your organization more efficient overall?

For starters, content often exists at the core of your business operations. Before a salesperson can finalize a sale, they need to get the right contact. Before HR can onboard a new recruit, they have to put their hands on the employee handbook. Before a customer service rep can fully help a customer in need, they need to research the problem. Everyone, at every level of the company, relies on content in some way to do their job effectively.

That’s why better content management can help them in a multitude of ways, including:

Finding what they need faster

With an efficiently organized content management system, an employee can find what they need very easily. Files are clearly labeled and properly organized within a hierarchy; they can also be found in a number of ways, including an intuitive search feature. Within seconds, an employee should be able to access the piece of content they need for a specific task. Depending on the complexity of your organization, this can save hours of time for each employee over the course of a year.

Easily creating, editing, sharing and collaborating on content

Content management is also about the ongoing development of new and existing content. With the right system in place, employees can create and edit new content easily. They can share it with others without experiencing friction and collaborate with their peers to make the content even better. You’ll end up with much better completed pieces, and you’ll probably save time in the process of creating them.

Relying on a single source of truth

Antiquated CMSs often suffer from redundancies and ambiguities. There may be a dozen versions of a given file, with no clear indication of which is the latest version. With an effective CMS in place, though, there’s a single source of truth. This means you’ll greatly reduce the chance for errors to occur—and therefore reduce the number of hours spent scrambling to correct them.

Of course, all these benefits are made still more significant by the fact that content is becoming ever more important to an organization’s overall success. Content is being created in higher volumes by more people in more roles. At a certain point, a more efficient management system becomes a practical necessity to avoid chaos.

How to Improve Content Management

We’ve established that better content management can make your whole organization operate more efficiently. But how can you make your content management strategy more efficient?

Use the right platform

Your first job is to invest in the right content management platform. The appropriate software can make it ridiculously easy for employees to upload files, collaborate on content, share content and find what they’re looking for. If it’s intuitive, secure, easy and reliable, it’s worth investing in.

Establish clear hierarchies and conventions

Make sure you formalize your expectations when it comes to organizing content. Are there specific storage levels and hierarchies your employees are supposed to follow? Are there particular naming conventions to include?

Appoint a leader

Content management is something every employee will execute, at least to some degree. Nevertheless, you’ll benefit from having a designated leader in place to oversee these operations. Put this individual in charge of setting the rules, monitoring the system and training and educating employees. Speaking of which …

Train and educate employees

Better employee training can improve almost any aspect of your business, and content management is no exception. Spend some time making sure all your employees are familiar with your new CMS and educate them on best practices for content creation and management.

Gather feedback and improve

Finally, collect feedback from your employees. Are there aspects of your content management strategy that can be improved? Collect this feedback anonymously, seriously consider it and act on it if it seems like it could improve your efficiency further.

With a better content management system in place, you’ll have a much better chance of increasing your organizational efficiency. After some initial friction when establishing and reinforcing your new parameters, you’ll be free to capitalize on the benefits of higher productivity.