Definition: Centralized content marketing
What is centralized content marketing?
Centralized content marketing refers to a strategic approach where content marketing activities and decisions are managed from a central authority or location within an organization.
Under this model, a central marketing department or team oversees and directs the content marketing efforts across various regions, branches, or divisions of the company. It involves consolidating the planning, execution, and management of strategies, content creation, campaigns, branding, and messaging to ensure consistency and coherence in the market approach across all areas of the business.
The benefits of a centralized content marketing strategy
Content centralization can unlock many rewards. For example, it can:
- Ensure that your entire organization is on the same page as far as content priorities.
- Simplify workflows for creating consistent content — and maintaining it.
- Allow for content repurposing; resulting in potentially more consistent messaging as well as a broader reach.
- Reduce any conflict related to the marketing technologies used to create content.
How to manage a centralized content marketing strategy
Identify the decision-makers: Establish who can approve a centralized approach to content strategy and communication and ask that person to be the executive sponsor for your work. Then, find leaders across your organization who can help you set and enforce guidelines.
Bring everyone together: It’s important to 'cast a very wide net' from the start; use all your the channels to communicate how you’ll approach marketing activities going forward.
Define how stakeholders can contribute: Survey your stakeholders and ask them what marketing activities they’d like to get involved in. For example, they may wish to share content ideas with you, help review and approve content, or help support the general marketing effort in some other way.
Put an organizational structure in place: It starts with documenting who you’re working with and what roles they’ll assume (sometimes a RACI chart is used for this very purpose).
Ideally, you'll be using a content hub or repository to store any content ideas, tasks, production and marketing calendars, and any completed work.
Create content themes: It’s important to showcase the breadth of what your organization can offer, but strive for 'variety' and 'balance' with your chosen topics. Tagging content will ultimately help you prioritize what gets featured and reveal any gaps — so that you know what content to develop next.
Create an effective content production process: There are lots of ways to produce content, and many factors depend on your organization, its employees, and other resources. The key is to know what the content creation path should look like so that you can put the right workflows in place and identify any roadblocks you're likely to encounter.
