DAM and Content Life Cycle

Any brand prides on how it connects with its target audiences, the points of entry being the content it proposes. The problem is, some 60 percent of such content is practically useless, according to a 2017 report by Havas, a media agency. On the one hand, brands squander time and money creating something that will not pay off; and on the other, consumers might consider overabundant content a hindrance or, worse, an annoyance.

This is when the content life cycle comes in handy. As per Robert Rose, founder of The Content Advisory, a consultancy, it is “the process that defines the series of changes in the life of any piece of content, including reproduction, from creation onward”. In the parlance, working with content is akin to growing a plant—from choosing fertilizers to regularly watering it.

It is important to note that the content life cycle is more applicable to large companies and brands that create swathes of content and target an unspecified number of people rather than small enterprises which often connect with each customer on an individual basis produce much less content.

While different authors suggest different approaches to organizing the content life cycle, one could define at least four broad stages of the process:

• planning
• creation
• distribution
• retention

Understandably, those could be expanded and divided into further sub-categories depending on the purposes of the brand/company that uses the strategy.

The noteworthy implications of the content life cycle are that, first, it streamlines content development by redistributing small tasks among those responsible rather than have one person deal with everything; second, it helps organize all the content that has ever been produced for future use; and, third, it opens up vistas for reusing the content that has already been published and/or distributed.

To that end, companies use digital asset management (DAM) software to store, categorize, and tag all the content dictated by the company’s needs and requirements. Moreover, DAM allows updating old content that could still be useful for marketing purposes—by, for instance, adding new keywords to blog posts or adding new figures to infographics to reflect the latest developments—and ridding of the content that is of no value for the company or brand.

The key idea of the content life cycle is that content management and distribution do not end when the Publish button is hit. By taking a more long-term approach to how content is created, stored, and distributed, companies can increase their marketing efforts’ effectiveness and prevent money and time from being wasted.