If you’ve been practicing any form of content marketing or strategy for long, then you’ve created countless forms of content and distributed them across platforms you saw fit. That’s how content works; conceptualise, strategise, develop, distribute and manage.

Most of us have mastered the art of conceptualising and strategizing, as well as development and distribution.

We’ve got it all down to a T, but we all struggle with the last bit – management.

Content is great, and even better when you use a blend of strategy and creative flair. It can arouse a sensation of desire, where your audience engages with the content and feels an urgent need to take out a specific action that is desirable for your campaign. However, it all means nothing if that content is not being managed.

Do you have an inventory?

With all content management systems, there needs to be an inventory where you take stock.

How much content have you generated?

Where is it?

How is it performing?

This helps you understand the ecosystem you’ve built through content, which can help you refine your objectives or the content in order for it to provide a seamless experience for the audience. Therefore, you need to keep a documented record of all the content you have published.

Are you checking up on performance?

Some content is hard to measure, while the rest is. Whatever the case is, most of your content needs to be measurable. Remember that all this content is being developed for an objective. You need to measure whether that objective is being met with your existing content. If not, you might want to go back and refine it, or cut it out of your ecosystem completely.

Is your audience talking to you?

If your content is being generated to create engagement, then one of the indicators is audience responses. If you’re managing your content, you need to keep a track of what people are saying about it.

This means you need to always check on your comments sections, as well as social networks to see if there is any conversation being generated by your content. If so, then you need to jump on the opportunity and enter the discussion. No one else can provide as much clarity as the author of the content, and that clarity is more than likely more welcome and leads to more trust.

Are you rejuvenating old content?

It may be old, but some content is still evergreen. A tweak here and adjustment there and it’s as good as new. This is especially so when your content is a how-to guide. These seldom change, but if your product has been improved on, or your service has been updated slightly, then your how-to guide needs to follow suit. If it’s a how-to on a phased out product, you may want to update it with useful information that existing users might find relevant, as they still use the product, and need support.

What’s more, always remember that content can be repurposed. This means you can recycle old content into new content that takes on different approaches, including turning an infographic into a video, or article into a series of Instagram posts.

Learn from it

The most important part of the management process is the insights you get. These should help you gauge how good the strategy is. It also allows you to pave way for new, more relevant content. This is why you need to constantly measure all the activities you do around it, whether that’s during the conceptual stages, or years after you’ve distributed it.