Plan Your Site’s Content Management Strategy

Why Is This Important?

If you create content, you need a content strategy, or a plan for the types of content that you want to create for your site. Define the business goals you want your content to achieve and identify the content that best meets these goals. Also think about how you manage your content: how you organize content assets, when and where to publish, and when to refresh or replace your content.

Being strategic about the content you create and deploy lets you extend the reach of your content, refines content workflows, and improves customer interactions and experiences.

What Should You Keep in Mind?

Let’s take a quick look at what to consider when developing a strategy, and the Salesforce tools that can help you manage your content.

Develop a Content Strategy

• Plan—Identify your audience and goals.
  • What do you want your content to do? For example, drive sales, build brand awareness, or promote engagement.
  • How does your audience engage with content? What formats do they like, for what content?
• Audit—Understand where you are today. Take note of the resources you have and what’s working (or not) right now.
  • What content do you have for different stages of the customer journey?
  • What content can you reuse?
  • Where are there gaps?
  • Is existing content easy to find?
  • What content management system (CMS) are you using? Is there just one, or do you need to coordinate multiple systems?
  

  Note As you plan and audit, you’re likely to find that your content falls into categories such as:

  • Customer-facing content: Blog posts, social media posts, and so on
  • Digital assets for branding and web design
  • Help and support documentation, knowledge articles
  • Internal documents: Sales decks, spec sheets, market research
• Map—Define customer journeys. Consider how you sequence information for maximum customer benefit.
  • How is your content linked together?
  • What is the customer experience like across various channels?
• Build—Build the right content and define your processes.
  • What types of content do you need?
  • How can you plan for content reuse?
  • How are you organizing content and managing versions?
  • How do you store resources and assets?
  • How often do you plan on updating your content?
• Activate—Distribute content to the right audiences and channels.
  • How can you put your content where your audience is?
  • Do you have an editorial calendar? A social media calendar?
  • How can you drive people to the content that you’re creating?
  • How do you manage content lifecycles?
• Measure—You know what they say: if you want to manage it, measure it.
  • What metrics can you use for different content types? For example, visitor counts, likes, search traffic, or downloads.
  • Which content is turning into leads, sales, or closed deals?
  • What reports are you running, at what cadence?
  • How can you continue to optimize over time?

Salesforce Content Management Tools

Here are some Salesforce tools that can help you with a variety of content scenarios.

• Salesforce CMS—Our hybrid CMS system lets you author and maintain all your experience-related content inside Salesforce, then serve that content anywhere, inside or outside Salesforce. Your teams can create content in a centralized location and distribute it either to a Salesforce-powered experience (built with Experience Builder or Commerce Page Designer) or to another system.
  • Create, manage, and reuse articles, news, blogs, banners, and images from a central location.
  • Use our headless APIs to deliver content to a third-party site, experience, or mobile app.
  • Organize content into workspaces and provide control over who can create and access content.
  • Create collections and use topics to organize content.
  • Support multiple languages.
• CMS Connect—Using a CMS other than Salesforce? No problem! Embed content from an external CMS into your Experience Builder site for branding consistency, reuse of material, and ease of maintenance.
• Salesforce Files and Libraries—Salesforce Files and Libraries provide a system for organizing, sharing, and controlling access to content within Salesforce. When you share Salesforce Files with related records, you can keep your documents with your CRM data and carry access control over, too.
  • Store files privately or share with records, groups, or users.
  • Set access permissions to reflect the record’s access settings and configure security settings for file upload and download.
  • Use content deliveries and public links to share documents with people outside your organization.
  • See and organize document versions.
  • Use Libraries to organize your files into folders and control access to libraries.
  • Store headers and logo images inside Salesforce as asset files, which can be used for components or Experience Cloud sites.
• Salesforce Knowledge—A knowledge base is a collection of articles with information about your products and services. This self-service model improves customer satisfaction while deflecting cases, lowering costs, and increasing support agent productivity.
  • Write, edit, publish, and archive articles from one system.
  • Provide information to internal, partner, customer, or public audiences.
  • Control access to articles based on permissions.
  • Provide support articles in multiple languages.
  • Includes version control and version comparison.
  • Set up approval processes for quality control.
  • Classify and find articles using topics and data categories.
  • Extend functionality with Apex code.

Find Out More

Developing a robust strategic content strategy can be a fairly involved process, but we have a couple of excellent guides to help you through it.

Content Strategy Development

Content Operations and Management

Salesforce CMS

CMS Developer Guide

Create, Share, and Organize Files

Salesforce Knowledge