The importance of content is indisputable, however, is your business associating the same value to the data connected with your content? If the answer is no or you unclear on the meaning of this question, then you have come to the right place. Content data is any data that has meaning for your organization and can provide important intelligence to gear your marketing strategy in the right direction. 

However, making the most of content data requires forward planning and proper management. In this article, we explore the 5 best practices for ensuring you’re maximizing your content’s impact. 

1. Ensure content data is on everyone’s agenda

A company can only collect a robust content data set if all employees are investing in gathering and recording this information. This data needs to be a key part of decision-making and goal setting as an organization and for this to be the case you need to get your staff on board. 

An evidence-based strategy is essential for progression and to be able to act on what your customers are telling you through their behavior patterns. The leadership team, therefore, needs to lead by example and demonstrate the importance of effective data collection and how this can benefit the entire workings of the organization. 

2. Standardize and educate

Getting your staff on board with prioritizing data isn’t something that happens overnight. You also can’t expect employees to do this effectively without adequate processes in place. But perhaps even more important is providing comprehensive training. Fortunately, you can make things easy for your staff by standardizing the tagging system you use with data controls.

Nevertheless, you need to ensure that your tagging system works. This means providing suitable metadata tags for all the different types of content you provide. Then you need to get staff on board with your definitions and how they should be applied

The best way to do this is to involve key stakeholders in the standardization process. Then, together you can begin taxonomy creation or guide outlining exactly how your metadata tags are defined. This will help to ensure the clean enforcement of a common data language across your business.

3. Incorporate content data into production workflows

When you have educated staff and standardized your content data, it’s time to build metadata tagging into how you create all of your content. The best way to do this is by creating clear production workflows that include where your content data fits in. You can even create fields that won’t flag as complete until content data is assigned.

This will help to ensure it never drops through the net. Moreover, it will help to ensure original strategies can be continuously maintained that guarantee you get the most out of your content and data management practices.

4. Integration

When data doesn’t flow easily across systems, it is easy for the mismanagement of content data to occur. This might be through miscommunication, mangled data, incorrectly altered data, or data that is completely lost. Often, this comes from different teams falling back on bad habits and maintaining their own systems. Over time this can lead to definitions having different meanings across the business.

The key to avoiding this is ensuring proper integration integrity is always maintained. This is best achieved by establishing one, and only one, source of truth in terms of content planning and production. This means establishing an integrated system that automates updates to metadata tags across the whole system when a change is made in one part of your system.  

If you don’t have a single source of truth, then changes can fast lead to a messy and complicated system. You may not even be able to figure out where errors have slipped into the content production process.

5. Auditing is Key 

Even with the best of intentions, mistakes can happen. For that reason, an auditing system must be established from the off. This should be scheduled to happen regularly to ensure you identify any assets holding incomplete or inaccurate data as soon as possible. 

Whilst data is power, and power is money, if the data you hold is corrupted and cannot be trusted, it is going to lead to poor decisions. That’s why staying on top of your data governance practices is vital. It will make life easier for your content creators and ensure you are working with data you can trust.

Conclusion

Getting your content data set up correctly is vital to ensuring the trustworthiness of your data. With good data management practices in place that ensure confidence in your data, you can soon reap the rewards. Getting there means bringing everyone on board, unifying terminology, and creating standardized processes around agreed definitions.

Following these five best practices for content data management, you’ll soon be able to maximize your content’s impact.