Best Practices: E-Business and Online Marketing

When Content Management Tools Can Help

As more aspects of your operations move online, manually managing the various kinds of digital content on which your business depends -- whether it's website content, documents, spreadsheets, images, or data from your database -- gets increasingly complicated and expensive.

Chances are many hours of your employees' time is wasted looking for content and then re-creating it when it can't be found or is too difficult to transfer from one environment to another. At some point, the wasted time becomes significant enough that its worth considering the use of content management tools that enable your employees to efficiently use the content created in one part of your company for one particular function in other areas of your operations.

At the heart of content management is the separation of creating content and managing content, which is usually accomplished with web-based solutions. Thus the content, for example, of a Word file can be converted to website content rather than recreated from scratch.

Content management solutions offer more than just a platform for generating and publishing information. They also can help end-users, rather than your appointed gatekeepers (webmasters, managers, editors), organize and more easily extract value from the information residing in documents, email, web content, images, multimedia, e-records, computer report output, and other key documents and data.

In addition, content management solutions can automate key business processes using workflow automation, reduce information management costs, and help your business meet compliance requirements.

Content management tools can deliver:

• Simplified access to, and, reuse of content, reducing time needed to find content, lessening duplicative work, and encouraging sharing of knowledge.
• Content security.
• Lower auditing costs, since information is easier to find
• Minimized loss of documents and records, thus lowering financial and legal risks.
• Less time required to create content.
• Boosting of accountability and quality, thanks to workflowbased review cycles.
• Improved productivity of webmasters and IT staff by enabling end-users to manage their own content.
• Enhanced marketing efforts because your business brand can be consistently updated.
• The most current collateral and tools for salespeople.
• Heightened customer satisfaction by delivering key information on demand.