Content Marketing

The six stages of content operations

Update:

Mirko Lange

The six stages of content operations

Content strategy considerations must take numerous factors into account. The success of a content strategy in your company depends, among other things, on how well you optimize internal structures for the necessary content creation processes. It is therefore important to understand the production requirements of content - only then will you be able to adapt existing company structures.

The Content Maturity Matrix with its six maturity levels provides a more precise understanding of such content production processes:

  • Driven
  • Planned
  • Targeted
  • Attributed
  • Analyzed
  • Automated

Companies go through successive stages of development in order to establish a functioning strategic content marketing strategy. The Content Maturity Matrix describes these evolutionary stages and offers an ideal target image (maturity level concept).

The Content Maturity Matrix combines the optimal corporate structure (vertical axis) with the optimal production processes (horizontal axis) in order to consistently align communication with customer needs and benefits.

The horizontal stages described below show which topics the company is currently dealing with in which stage of development and what the development steps at the transition points to the next stage look like.

Driven: Little knowledge of their own production processes 

Companies in the "driven" stage do not yet have any elaborated, defined content processing procedures and are therefore unable to operate any developed strategic content marketing. As a rule, such companies tend to react to external requirements rather than taking action themselves.

They first have to realize that they need a strategy and therefore a plan. In the transition phase to "planned", there is at most the realization that the current communication is not working well enough.

Planned: Organizing and sorting the production processes 

Strategy and planning belong together. A content strategy defines specifications for the topics, channels, associated resources and responsibilities for content creation.

Editorial plans help to define orderly processes for the production, publication and distribution of content. At this point, companies sharpen their focus on the possibilities of internal production - and the question of how well the publications reach the intended customer automatically comes to the fore.

Targeted: Aligning production processes with customer benefits 

Companies with "Targeted" status have realized that useful content is the best way to position themselves better with customers and build trust in the medium term. This requires an understanding of what "benefit" means for the customer.

This knowledge is built up using description models such as personas and customer journeys. In this way, the communication units generate content that addresses and satisfies specific customer needs.

After the design comes the question: How can the success of such measures be measured at all?

Attributed: Labeling of content to achieve an overview and measurability

It takes considerable effort to implement strategic content marketing and it takes some time for the effects to become visible. This therefore raises the question of return on investment. The more financial resources flow into the further development of content marketing/content operations, the greater the internal pressure to deliver comprehensible results.

The measurability of success is achieved through the attribution of content. The increasingly precise classification of content enables content marketers to continuously create and play out content even more precisely and to see which type of content produces which results with which target group.

The attribution phase is a prerequisite for the "Analyzed" and "Automated" stages.

Analyzed: Evaluation of the awarded content pieces to identify the content that works 

In the analysis phase, companies evaluate the distribution of content on the basis of attribution. The more precise this preliminary work has been, the more information can be filtered out of the analysis data. This finally reveals how cost-intensive the production of a piece of content is and what interaction rate or engagement can be attributed to the piece of content.

Customer interaction with content shows how relevant this content is for the target clientele. The more customers react to content, the more valuable it obviously is - for the customers. The more leads or direct sales are generated in the context of the information provided and the lower the production costs for the piece of content, the more valuable the respective piece of content is for the company.

Based on these evaluations, the final logical step is automated processes and marketing automation.

Automated: Scaled customer focus of content via marketing automation

Marketing automation makes it possible to implement customer proximity without reaching capacity limits. A high scaling of customer focus through personalized content is not feasible without marketing automation. Marketing automation therefore enables the most cost-saving customer contact with a high cost-benefit potential. Speed and efficiency in communication with the customer is the sales argument of marketing automation providers.

Setting up a functioning, largely automated content marketing machinery is an important goal of all previous measures from an efficiency perspective.

Outlook

Some elements of these illustrated stages will seem familiar to some people because the company has been using them for a long time or because it has apparently already reached a certain stage. For example, many companies have already developed personas and are familiar with the customer journey. Nor is marketing automation a new invention, but is of course used by numerous companies.

The special feature of the Content Maturity Matrix is above all that it places the function of the respective stages in a logical context and clarifies why which development step is necessary for the formation of the subsequent maturity level.

Do you know where you stand? If not, our Content Maturity Report offers you the opportunity to find out your current level of maturity. You will immediately receive a free report showing you your next steps for further development.

You can find more in-depth information on the Content Maturity Matrix in this white paper or in a recorded webinar.

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The author

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Mirko Lange

Founder Scompler

Mirko Lange has been a communications consultant for 27 years and a lecturer at several universities since 2001. In 1999, he founded one of the first consulting firms for online PR in Germany and made a name for himself as the first specialist for corporate communications on the social web in 2008. In 2010, he advised Deutsche Bahn ("Facebook Ticket") and Nestlé ("Kitkat"), among others, on crisis communications, which were hit by the first "shitstorms" in Germany. As a result, Deutsche Bahn, for example, aligned its entire communication to the social web, a process that Lange accompanied. This project resulted in the communication management software Scompler. Scompler now has more than 300 customers, including 6 DAX companies.

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