Optimizing the content lifecycle

Ever been stuck chatting to that one person at a party for so long that you end up tuning out, or looking for an exit? If your digital content is having that same effect on audiences, it’s probably time to change things up to keep the conversation interesting. That process is easier if you’re focusing on the content lifecycle. 

The idea that content, and especially ecommerce and B2B content, has a lifecycle shouldn’t be surprising. A piece of content that makes a big splash with customers when it’s first published, will inevitably see its impact fade as it ages, to the point that it may need to be updated, repurposed, or retired. 

Maybe new information changes the relevance of a blog, maybe a product gets replaced or discontinued, maybe a page doesn’t deliver on its SEO value, maybe a brand gets bought by another company and needs to overhaul its slogans and logos — whatever the issue, it’s important to understand why, when, and how to make changes to content over the course of its life. 

So, in this post, we’re going to explore the meaning of content lifecycle, and how to use content lifecycle management to optimize digital experiences. 

What is the content lifecycle?

Content lifecycle refers to the end-to-end phases of the digital content process, from creation through to archiving. Essentially, that covers everything from content planning and production, to editing, review, publication, maintenance, and, ultimately, retirement. 

In this context, content refers to any digital asset, including text, images, video, audio files, and even fonts, that can be published or presented online. Each asset has its own lifecycle: an image used as part of a blog might become outdated, for example, while the blog itself (as a structured collection of text and image content) stays relevant. Down the line, the blog itself might become outdated, and need to be updated or retired. 

What is content lifecycle management?

Content lifecycle management refers to the way that brands work with a piece of content over those phases of its life — with the goal of getting as much value out of it over time. 

Some content has a natural lifecycle: promotions for a specific holiday, for example, or pages for a limited edition product will typically be retired when those periods end — but that doesn’t mean that you have to scrub every trace of them. You may want to reuse holiday promotion images the following year, or pull some aspects of the limited edition product description for another, similar product.

On the other hand, you’ll also produce content that you want to keep up over the long term (blogs, product pages, company stories, etc.), but will need to perform smaller updates to those pieces periodically to make sure they stay accurate, visible to search engines, aligned with business goals, and so on.

That being the case, the success of your content lifecycle management efforts rests on your approach to digital asset management, performance measurement, and the capabilities of your content management system (CMS). The more flexibility your content management system gives you as you're managing content from day to day, the easier it will be to work with it as it ages.

Think about the example blog image earlier: ideally, your CMS allows content team members to go in and simply swap out just the outdated image, rather than having to delete or republish the entire blog.

Why does content lifecycle management matter?

If content lifecycle management isn’t merely about shuffling off the old in favor of the new, why else should you be thinking about it?

Engagement

The ongoing cycle of content through a website serves to attract and engage existing and prospective audiences. That engagement isn’t just about generating one-off clicks from organic search results, or sales for the latest products: by introducing new content, and retiring old content, you’re demonstrating to customers that your brand is a living, breathing enterprise that will continue to grow and change with the world around it.

At the same time, you’re letting search engines know that you’re maintaining your digital ecosystem, and that it’s worth putting faith in your brand’s content — and using it in search results over competitor content that isn’t as fresh or well maintained.

Style and convention

Content styles and conventions become popular and then fall out of fashion, prompting marketing teams to adjust their strategies, and site aesthetics, accordingly throughout the content lifecycle. Style doesn’t necessarily refer only to longer-form content pieces like blogs or product reviews, and could include outdated fonts, images, or company slogans. 

Accuracy

The information that a company puts out to its audiences is rarely (if ever) static. If a product is discontinued or altered, for example, its corresponding page will need to be changed, and references across the wider site reviewed and adjusted.

Similarly, the factual accuracy of older blogs can slip over time as new information takes hold: if you don’t stay on top of that, audiences may get confused and frustrated as they browse. 

Efficiency

Creating content becomes a lot easier, and more efficient, when you can reuse pieces of existing content — rather than creating new content from scratch. With enough awareness and forward-planning, headers, images, product descriptions, and other component parts of larger content structures can be pulled from older content, and repurposed in new iterations. 

Business objectives

Older content may undermine or contradict current business goals and objectives. A clothing company that wants to pivot toward selling outdoor gear exclusively, for example, would need to review its current content, including blogs, imagery, headers, and so on, in order to excise confusing references to old stock, and old topics and trends, in order to optimize for the new market or target audience.  

Technological innovation

New innovations and integrations to your tech stack might affect the kind of content you’re able, or need, to present on your website. If you add a module capable of hosting or streaming video, for example, you might be able to retire existing image content. If you decide to expand to a new territory, you may add a tool that lets you translate text to a foreign language, and decide to remove translated copies of current content.

Multi-platform

Brands with a large digital footprint may see content on different platforms fall out of step: content displayed on mobile devices, for example, not matching content on the website. That disparity can end up fracturing brand voice and consistency of messaging, and confusing customers. By focusing on lifecycle, you can better ensure that all platforms remain in sync with each other, and that the customer journey is unified. 

The stages of content lifecycle management

We talked about the “end-to-end” content process, but what does that mean? The content lifecycle typically involves the following key stages:

Planning content

Before you can start producing content — writing, recording, photographing, designing, whatever — you’ll need to plan in alignment with your content strategy and your business objectives. That means thinking about what types of content you need, the target audience (or audiences) that content is being created for, the goal of the content, potential challenges to production, and how the content will fit into your wider content ecosystem. 

The details of the planning phase vary by organization but typically converge on a combination of market and SEO research, with demand for content projected out over a certain period of time. Content managers may also draw up content briefs at the end of a planning phase. 

Content creation

With content planned, content creators — writers, graphic artists, subject-matter experts — can start producing material. The edges of the content planning phase may overlap with content creation, especially when it comes to activities like brainstorming, research, and briefing creators, but this is the period in which you’ll ultimately receive the digital assets you’re going to upload to your website. 

It’s important that content creation is aligned with content strategy, which necessarily means that individual content pieces go through a suitable quality assurance process — essentially editing and review. Depending on your approach to content governance, you’ll need to think about what that process looks like, considering issues like document access, and how to facilitate collaboration between different stakeholders. 

Experimentation and personalization

As an extension of the planning phase, in order to better understand your audience and its expectations, it’s important to experiment with content to see what kind of output is going to serve your business best.

Consider A/B testing different content features (such as alternative blog formats, fonts, or CTAs) to see which performs best, and then implement the winning strategies in the content creation queue. 

It’s also a good idea to integrate personalization tools. Backed by advanced AI analytics, personalization technology can help you decide what content to create, and which members of your audience you should show it to. 

Publication

When your content is finished and reviewed, you’ll need to publish it, or distribute it via the relevant channels. The publication phase typically requires marketers to use a CMS to upload and schedule the release of individual content pieces.

Not all digital assets will be published on your website — you might need to release content across multiple digital channels, apps, emails, social media platforms, and so on, or even send it to a third party for release.

With that in mind, it’s worth thinking about syndication at this stage in the content lifecycle: which other platforms do you need to push your content out to? You may need to upload product info to an online retail store, for example, or send news articles or press releases to newswire platforms. 

Performance review  

Following publication, it’s usually a good idea to gather data on the performance of your content, not least as a way to inform future content creation efforts or future content lifecycle decisions.

This means turning to website analytics for the relevant metrics, including page views, click-through or conversion rates, bounce rates, time spent on page, and so on. Peripheral metrics, such as the content’s performance on social media may also be relevant. Depending on your tech stack, you may be able to lean on your CMS to capture this data.

Refresh

Some older content may be so profoundly out of date, or inaccurate, or so lacking in SEO value, that it needs to be removed. In other cases, it may be possible to refresh that content to bring it back in line with your current standards, or to reengage audiences with updated keywords. 

Content teams should approach refreshes carefully. The process is about efficiency — it’s obviously easier to uplift existing content than create new content from scratch. That means sorting through old content systematically to find pieces that can be feasibly uplifted or updated without too great an effort.

Develop a clear refresh strategy to focus your uplift work: the process doesn’t have to be onerous, and could involve a light intervention to update references, insert a new tag or image, or drop in a few choice keywords.

In some cases, you may be able to integrate automated tools to identify old or stale content, and even automatically refresh outdated references. Once again, it’s worth leaning into the possibilities of AI-supported content review, especially if you have vast amounts of old content to manage. 

Retirement

When content can’t be refreshed or is no longer generating any value, you’ll need to retire it. This doesn’t necessarily mean deleting the content and forgetting about it: consider whether any part of it can be reused or repurposed. Images, for example, are highly reusable. It might also be possible to archive the content, depending on storage capacity. Bear in mind that it might be necessary to retain a copy of retired content for legal reasons. 

Optimizing content lifecycle management

Effective content lifecycle management requires you to be able do what you need to do with your content, when you need to do it. That puts your CMS at the heart of your content lifecycle management process, since the flexibility and agility that it provides is going to make a huge difference over time. 

But not all CMSes give you content lifecycle flexibility. In an all-in-one, legacy CMS, the backend administration layer is tightly coupled to the frontend presentation layer, or head. That makes working with content challenging because, whenever you upload new content, or make changes to current content, you risk disrupting underlying code. You’re also locked into the functionality the CMS vendor provides, with almost no scope to add new functionalities, or make ad-hoc content updates. 

In headless content platforms (and content platforms like Contentful), there is no prepackaged frontend head — you build that part of your tech stack yourself, connecting it to the back end via an application programming interface (API). With the front end uncoupled from the back end, there’s no risk of disrupting code when you need to make changes to content, and no need to consult an engineer when you simply want to swap out an image or add a keyword at any point in the content lifecycle.

Go further with Contentful 

Contentful takes headless flexibility further, by focusing on the composability of content itself. 

In Contentful, content is broken down into its component parts — header, image, author, body text, and so on — so that you can use and reuse it across any channel whenever you need to. Even better, if you need to add new content features and functionalities, you simply connect them to your tech stack, via API, seamlessly. 

The Contentful Workflows app, for example, helps editors keep content flowing from first draft all the way through to publication, eliminating many of the tedious manual tasks that slow the production process down. Similarly, the Contentful Launch app transforms publication workflows, enabling teams to coordinate the release of new content individually or in batches, on an ad-hoc basis or at scheduled points in the future. 

What does all that mean for content lifecycle management? 

It means your content can age gracefully. It means that you retain complete control of every piece of content, over the course of its lifetime. It means anyone on the content team can upload or make changes to content quickly and simply, whenever it's necessary to do so. It means that you can grow and change your content ecosystem with your audiences and your markets — and, importantly, that the conversations you’re having with them never get boring. 

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