In a world where organizations face rising demand to create and publish content across several channels, relying on ad-hoc practices and conventional technologies is just not viable. 

ContentOps is ultimately an approach to creating faster, high quality content. Despite its unique benefits, however, the belief is that ContentOps can achieve higher agility, reusability, and faster publishing. In addition to these, it can be better improved through enhanced collaboration with all areas of development—including developers and operations.

With DevOps, organizations can enhance collaboration between developers and operations by automating processes, incorporating best practices, and utilizing new tools that facilitate shorter, more manageable development cycles. 

Having said that, what can ContentOps learn from DevOps? This article provides guidelines on how ContentOps can leverage the features of DevOps to improve its content delivery.

Understanding ContentOps

ContentOps - or Content Operations - is the process of creating, deleting, editing, publishing, and storing various kinds of content. ContentOps plays a crucial role in every marketing strategy. 

It combines the people, technologies, and processes necessary to create all forms of content.

• People: These are the people—technical and non-technical—responsible for managing all the different forms of content. They help to curate and publish quality content that drives business growth. These people include content writers, content operations managers, editors, legal advisors, copywriters, and subject matter experts.
• Process: This refers to the standards, workflows, organizational structure, design, and templates used to ensure a continuous stream of quality content.
• Technology: This refers to the technologies you employ in the production and management of content. To create content, you require various tools and technologies such as scheduling, collaboration, CMS, CRM, SEO, CDP, email providers, among others.

With ContentOps, organizations can achieve a better & more structured role definition, improve content strategy, save time & money, and maximize ROI.

Read more: ContentOps: What, Why, and How

The Challenges ContentOps Must Overcome

An organization faces many challenges when creating content. In the past, businesses only needed one platform— the website—to connect with their users. Nowadays, organizations need to engage with users across many digital platforms.  

There has never been a more pressing need to make the content creation process more efficient. By reusing content, content creators can create content once, organize it, and publish it to all their platforms at once. Because of this, it should be easier to approve smaller content modules quickly and make them more reusable.

Through a content creation process, you have to brainstorm ideas, research, create, edit, and publish. With the amount of time spent on creating content, it’s not surprising that content authors will have several needs for content reuse.

The content reuse practice involves incorporating the same content—or similar content—in different ways and formats. Most of the time, these are short-form contents like a phrase, sentence, buzzword, or segment that creators can repurpose on other forms rather than start from scratch.

There are several emerging technologies providing new ways of communication. ContentOps specialists must leverage these technologies, tools, and workflow to ensure faster delivery of quality content.

It’s not uncommon for several companies to set up a ContentOps team that simply copies and pastes Word documents across different databases. This inadequate Content Operations setup is one of the reasons why organizations fail to achieve their goals or deliver content late. 

The ultimate challenge for organizations is to find efficient, scalable, and agile ways to organize, produce, and deliver content. Other challenges include identifying the right audiences, automating content success metrics, and using agile practices to ensure rapid delivery

Enhance ContentOps by Leveraging DevOps

DevOps is a developmental culture that champions rapid application delivery through automation, CI/CD, and improved collaboration among devs and operations. With its unique features, ContentOps can learn a lot from DevOps.

Automation

A key goal in DevOps is to reduce the amount of manual work involved in development and operations. In general, automation speeds up processes significantly. 

With the growing demand for engaging content and the various platforms and interfaces to feed, automation offers unique advantages to content development. The truth is, it’s not always possible to meet this demand through human effort alone. By applying the automation into ContentOps, you can cut down efforts on repetitive tasks, and free up the team for more productive activities. 

Through automation, you can enable continuous publishing and delivery of content. You can create predefined workflows for conceptualizing, developing, proofing, sharing, and tracking content through the content lifecycle. For example, you can post content simultaneously on all social media channels rather than manually posting on each one. By doing this, you can set up a Facebook post to automatically share on Instagram and other social media platforms.

Centralized Repository & Versioning

Versioning is a crucial element of DevOps. It is possible through a version control software that hosts application code and allows for easy modification, integration, and deployment. Distributed version control systems such as Git host the application code and provide a collaborative and agile approach to versioning.

ContentOps can learn a lot from DevOps by taking advantage of Git to host content, enabling continuous publishing and content changes. The ContentOps team can then manage content from a single, widely distributed repository.

Additionally, content reusability becomes easier since content authors can manage and access modules and pieces of content from a single shared repository. With this in place, companies can deliver content faster without having to create short form content or reusable content modules from scratch every time. there's a need for it. 

Analytics and Productivity Metrics

How do you ensure your content is having the right impact? DevOps enables continuous monitoring of all processes from development to production. Such an approach gives you a head start in fixing any bugs or errors in your code or production environment. By measuring some specific metrics, you can better target your content to your desired audience.

According to a recent survey on Databox, 37% of respondents say they track content success weekly; another 26% track it daily. Tracking content performance and success can be challenging. It is imperative that you define your organizational goals, set KPIs against those goals, then track them. Before you proceed, you should:

• Define and outline the objectives you hope to achieve with your content, who your target audience is, and what content success means to your organization.
• Identify the key performance metrics according to your content goals.
• Establish performance standards and benchmarks for your content for easier comparison and analysis.
• Refine and improve your content based on the results of your productivity metrics.

DevContentOps: The Future of Content, Development, and Operations

As businesses look for the opportunity to improve content delivery and user experience, DevOps principles can serve as a guiding hand for improving ContentOps. Successfully integrating automation, centralized repository, and success tracking will make any ContentOps team deliver better digital experiences and enable continuous publishing. 

To enable these features, developers and content authors must collaborate. The vast majority of CMSs do not easily support DevOps, meaning there’s a divide between developers, operations, and content authors. For any CMS to successfully achieve this, it has to store code and content in a single repository. So, how can you integrate DevOps approaches successfully into ContentOps? Through DevContentOps and a DevContentOps-Friendly CMS.

If there’s no collaboration between content authors and software developers, how will you efficiently achieve increased agility, scalability, and faster application delivery? DevContentOps enables you to take advantage of headless CMS and a centralized repository to manage code and content. With it, your development and content authoring teams can collaborate without friction and maintain optimal tools and efficiency throughout their roles using modern processes and technology.