Producing content at the scale required for today’s digital world can be a daunting task for many teams. Whether that is a large global enterprise with a marketing team that numbers close to 50 or a smaller startup that only has 2 or 3 personnel managing everything, there is a lot that needs to be done. 

Making content work is essential for any business to compete nowadays, and to get it right, organizations need an effective content strategy. However, while careful planning, knowing the type of content you want to produce, and the kind of audience you will target is critical, organizations also need to know what happens after all of the planning. How do you execute that strategy?

That’s where content marketing and content operations (ContentOps) come into play. While content marketing is essential to attracting customers and driving traffic to your website to increase conversions, content operations are necessary if you want to properly execute your content marketing strategy. But what’s the difference between the two? 

Today, we’ll dive into those differences and explain how they manage to work together to better your digital business. 

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content to a specific audience. The goal of content marketing is to create consistent content that can attract customers and convince them to take a desired action. 

Over the last decade, companies of all sizes and across several industries have used content marketing to educate buyers and shift away from traditional forms of marketing such as cold calling, paid advertising, and others. Rather than feeling like they are being sold to, customers enjoy content marketing because it simply provides them with the answers they were looking for to the problems they were facing. 

In the early days of content marketing, simply publishing content to a blog or producing a white paper might have been sufficient to draw in customers. However, as more companies found the benefits of content marketing, it became clear that brands needed to focus their attention on personalizing content throughout the buyer’s journey. Not only providing content to attract customers at the beginning of their search but continuing to provide relevant content to them until and even after making their final purchase. 

Why Is It Important?

Content marketing helps engage customers and generate leads. But it also provides several other benefits that can help companies grow their digital presence. 

Finding New Customers 

Content marketing provides a way for you to locate customers that have never heard of you. When you publish new and relevant content, it’s easier for customers to find out more about your business and the products or services that you offer. 

Driving Traffic

Google is the most popular search engine on the internet and for that reason, driving traffic through SEO is another benefit of content marketing. Blogs, white papers, and landing pages containing your target keywords all help to drive higher search engine rankings, potentially leading to more conversions and, ultimately, revenue. 

Establishing Authority

Since content marketing isn’t new, it means that several companies have already been reaping the benefits for a while. For businesses that haven’t maximized their reach with content marketing, it can help them establish their authority as leaders in their industry. With content marketing, your team and subject matter experts can keep up to date with the newest trends and industry highlights and continue to engage your audience by providing them with the latest information. 

Community Building

Retaining customers is an integral part of any digital business. When content marketing is used to deliver personalized and relevant content to existing customers, it can keep them engaged and ensure repeat business. As more customers show their loyalty and turn to your brand for answers, they can be the beginning stages of building a community. 

What Is ContentOps?

Content operations or ContentOps refers to the people, technologies, and processes involved in the creation, management, and publishing of content. ContentOps provides the foundation for content marketing and allows internal teams to view their entire content strategy, including the assets that make up that strategy, as one message. It’s the system that allows anything content-related to function within an organization. 

While elements such as content strategy are important, content operations provide the internal workflows and quality assurances that modern businesses need to deliver content at scale. 

Why Is It Important?

Organizations often overlook content operations, but there are quite a few benefits to implementing it. 

Improved Planning and Execution

Content operations streamline internal planning and execution for content campaigns. Rather than haphazardly creating campaigns to drive engagement, clear content operations can help optimize planning and also execution. Knowing what resources you have at your disposal allows you to make more realistic goals and informed decisions for your content campaigns. 

Improved Efficiency

Content operations help optimize content production and delivery by enabling workflows that outline what happens with content from beginning to end and everything in between. With a clearer picture of who is doing what, teams can move faster and avoid creating unnecessary or duplicate content. 

Maintain Branding

Consistency is important for any content team to achieve optimal efficiency. Content operations helps organizations to maintain their branding consistency so that no matter where customers interact with them, they can expect the same personalized experiences and quality of content. 

Full Content Picture

Many content teams are unaware of how their activities contribute to the bottom line. With content operations, everyone can have a complete picture of how their work impacts final sales and be able to optimize for other campaigns. 

Read More: ContentOps: What, Why, and How

How Content Marketing and Content Ops Combine

Content marketing and operations are both important, but how important? Essentially, content marketing is the what, and content operations are the how. If we look at the definition of each, we can see why this is the case.

Content marketing is about creating and distributing content to a specific audience. In order to do that, the people, processes, and technologies within the content process need to be aligned, or rather, you need content operations. 

Individually content marketing and content operations are important, but if you don’t have both, your organization can run into trouble. Here are some of the challenges that might crop up if you don’t have both:  

Lack of Alignment

Without proper content operations in place, the chances are that your content strategy will suffer as well, and your company will be without its north star. Not everyone in a content team will have the same beliefs about which content is the best to prioritize or the channels where it should be published. Without content operations, your team will be missing this important element that helps align everyone to one common goal. 

Lack of Resources

Content teams require different types of resources to get the job done. First of all, our employees execute on various campaigns. In many organizations, there is only one content team, and they’re tasked with creating or at the very least organizing content for multiple audiences, including marketing, sales, technical, and even the C-Suite. 

Without content operations, these teams will be bombarded with requests from various departments, many times all at once. Content operations can streamline requests and make sure that they fit into the workflow to avoid overworking employees. It also ensures that content teams have sufficient designers, editors and others, so that approval processes and workflows aren’t disjointed. 

How DevContentOps Links Content Marketing and ContentOps

Modern digital experiences require several pieces working together to be effective. From people, including content teams, developers, and IT operations, to processes and technology. The most critical component of technology in facilitating digital content experiences today is the headless CMS.

ContentOps can provide a solid foundation for effective content marketing and allow organizations to create digital experiences using a CMS. However, on its own, ContentOps doesn’t include the software developers and IT operations that are also responsible for digital content experience. 

Silos and conflict typically occur between developers and content authors when producing content applications. In DevContentOps, code moves forward from development environments, and content can be moved back from production to lower development environments. This continuous flow of source code and content updates removes the conflict that typically emerges during the development, testing, and release cycles on the software side, and the editing publishing on the content side, and amplifies the benefits of ContentOps.

With DevContentOps, you can add continuous publishing to the CI/CD process, enabling you to receive the benefits of the DevOps approach that helps boost software development and apply it to content applications.