October 30, 2024
I’ll always believe that content gets better with transparency. Great content teams that I’ve worked with have a wide funnel at the top. There’s maximum visibility into their process – they “open the box” so everyone can look inside.
Great content doesn’t just come from a vaunted few. Lots of people inside your organization have one half off a great idea. The trick is to find the other half and put them together.
And this might sound weird coming from a guy so closely associated with CMS, but your CMS is not the place that this happens. A CMS is a publishing platform, not really a collaboration or ideation platform.
Years ago, I wrote a blog post called The First 85%, which posited that most of the “work” that goes into content happens outside your CMS. When someone actually logs into the CMS to create an artifact (the material form that the content takes), this is way, way into the process.
There are platforms designed specifically for that first 85% -- the category is called “Content Marketing Platforms.”
(Honestly, I’ve never loved that label or acronym, because I think they have value far beyond just marketing. They’re more “Content Collaboration Platforms” or “Content Creation Platforms,” but then the acronym gets problematic…)
CMPs are based around the idea that content and its artifact are two different things. We tend to look at a web page and says, “that’s content.” But it’s not. That’s actually an artifact – a web page. The content is the message, the idea, the persuasion, all the effort and input that went into it. At artifact is just the media it got wrapped in.
In perfect world, we move to “multi-artifact” or “multi-channel” content. The same content turned into multiple artifacts and pushed into multiple channels reinforces the difference.
CMPs are about content. They assist with all the things you need to come up with better ideas and work through the sometimes-messy process that results in great content that affects people.
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Intake – providing the ability for anyone in the organization to contribute ideas
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Campaign management – figuring out how to group content into thematic campaigns
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Large-scale content scheduling and editorial calendaring – coordinating all the content efforts of entire organization for maximum efficient and effectiveness
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Drafting content – actually putting fingers to keys and creating words or video or audio
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Commenting and discussion – providing feedback and editorial review
Work process management – defining and tracking the steps that move content through editorial and publication processes
The “word du jour” in Martech is “content supply chain.” The goal is for your organization to strip the “heroics” out of content creation. No content process should require champions. No one should do battle. There should be no surprises.
Content creation should be – dare I say it – boring. In a good way. You want predictability. Reliability. And this is what a CDP seeks to provide.
(I maintain it should be boring like a trip to the dentist is boring. If your trip to the dentist is anything other than “boring,” that’s never good.)
Whenever I contemplate the idea of content being boring, I think back to a documentary called Saturday Night, which chronicles the weeklong development of an episode of Saturday Night Live. Contrary to the popular image of freewheeling insanity, the process of delivering an episode of SNL is incredibly precise and predictable. After watching that, I came to understand that creativity has to exist with process. It can run wild, but within guardrails that ensures that everything gets done.
This is what CDPs provide. They give you the framework to abstract the process of developing content to an enforceable platform, and let your staff concentrate and creating the best content they can.
Too much content either never gets started because it doesn’t get captured and developed, or derails because there isn’t a framework in place to shepherd it to publication.