Every serious marketer has a content strategy that details (a) how they’ll create their content, (b) who they’ll target with it, and (c) how they’ll measure its effectiveness. Web content is, of course, digital, which means two things:
- It’s easier than ever to understand how every piece of content performs in real-time (by tracking metrics like page views, bounce rate and conversion rates).
- That’s impossible to do without software that reads and interprets the data for you.
That brings us to your CMS — the backbone of all your content marketing operations.
In today’s article, we’ll run through how you can use yours to streamline content creation.
5 ways CMS streamlines your content marketing workflow
Without CMS, your content is all over the place. You can’t build a content model, track revisions or publish to multiple channels on a schedule. Not in a way that’s repeatable and scalable, at least.
CMS is the solution to pretty much all those problems. Read on to find out more.
Advanced workflow automation
Content management systems facilitate complex workflows with multiple stages of content creation, editing, approval and publishing. As an admin, you can set up role-based routing, custom statuses and automatic notifications for each stage. That way, projects move along with as little friction as possible.
And today, it’s not just inside your CMS where the collaboration occurs. Take action directly from your notifications — push content through workflows, approve it and more — straight from Slack or Teams. Stay within the flow of your task, get work done faster, and speed up content creation with more efficient publication experiences.
AI-powered content collaboration and workflow tools
Brightspot’s AI capabilities bring speed, consistency and intelligence directly into the content workflow, helping teams move from idea to publish with far less friction. Creators can generate headlines, summaries, social posts and SEO fields in-line, adapt content into specific author voices and use natural-language Q&A to pull insights from their own library without ever leaving the CMS.
Editors gain built-in translation, tagging, metadata enrichment, experimentation tools and automated workflows that keep work moving and maintain quality at scale. All of this operates within a strong governance framework that includes permissions, usage flags, guardrails for sensitive content, audit trails and centralized analytics, giving organizations confidence, control and transparency as they expand their use of AI.
Real-time collaboration and content versioning
CMS streamlines the creation process itself as well. Rather than sending documents back and forth, your team can collaborate on content as you’re creating it using the CMS’s built-in editing and commenting capabilities.
Another huge advantage is version control. All changes to a piece of content are tracked. And they’re reversible, so you can always go back to something that worked better before. You can experiment with new content ideas without fear of losing your progress.
Data-driven content optimization
SEO tools are one of the main ways you can use CMS to supercharge editorial performance. They help you analyze and optimize your content for search engines before you even hit “publish.”
But beyond that, you can also use your CMS to track things like audience engagement, conversions and even sentiment analysis depending on the type of content. You can also integrate Google Analytics and other data sources for a full picture of how well your content is performing.
New experimentation capabilities in the CMS lets teams launch A/B and A/B/n tests directly in the CMS, creating variations of published pages without relying on developers or external tools. Teams can run experiments for all visitors or targeted segments and track results with metrics like visits, clicks, page views and scroll depth. A centralized dashboard brings visibility across every site, offering runtime estimates, best-practice guidance and built-in workflows for approvals, permissions and notifications. The result is faster, data-backed decisions and higher-performing content, all without breaking editorial flow — experimentation becomes so accessible that any team can validate and optimize experiences right inside the CMS.
Scalability and customization
Trends, search engine algorithms and consumer preferences change like the seasons. Except faster. And over time, you’ll probably start publishing more content. Or, at the very least, different types of content.
You need something that can keep up.
A modern CMS offers limitless scalability and customization features. With Brightspot, automate how your work gets done by connecting to over 7,000 common business applications. Get alerts, take actions and execute workflows seamlessly across your favorite tools and applications. Get your work done faster and easier than ever before with a more open and flexible tech stack.
As a CMS platform ourselves, we have a few important tips here.
So before you start publishing in your CMS, do the following:
- Identify your content types (e.g., articles, product pages, blog posts) and their attributes (e.g., title, author, publish date). Brightspot natively provides many of the most content types, pre-built and modeled, but you can also create your own custom editorial content types to solve for any use case and specific content attributes.
- Define how they’re related for more dynamic content management. For instance, an article might be linked to an author and categorized under a specific topic.
- Develop a shared framework everyone (content creators, designers and devs) can use to maintain consistency across your digital platforms.
In simple terms, you can reuse the same content throughout different parts of your website or across multiple channels without having to recreate it every time. This is particularly handy for sites with a lot of similar content (e.g., a corporate marketing site, an e-commerce store).
Regardless of the site you’re running, it makes it easier to scale and adapt your content strategy over time.
With the editorial calendar view in Brightspot CMS, you’ll find all your scheduled publications and assignments with due dates. The widget defaults to showing changes for the upcoming week, but you can navigate through previous and future weeks and view by day, week or month. Brightspot also integrates with common calendar applications like Google Calendar or Microsoft to ensure all your teams and stakeholders are always in the loop, whether inside the CMS or out.
For product pages: the more granular, the better. You don’t want to lump everything into generic categories (e.g., ‘men’s footwear’) if you’re selling multiple types of a certain product (e.g., golf footwear, running shoes and sneakers).Thinking about a system now will help prevent confusion further down the line when the amount of content increases. Decide on a structure for tagging your content and stick to it.
For your pillar content especially, you’re going to want to schedule periodic checks and updates. Go through content in your CMS after it reaches a certain age and update it with more relevant content.
Simplify content management with Brightspot CMS
A modern CMS offers endless possibilities for managing and scaling your content. With Brightspot, you can create a custom content types, manage modular content, collaborate with team members through our conversation tool and schedule updates through an intuitive editorial calendar.
Request a demo to see how it works.
