Content modeling

Marketing teams today must stay ahead of the market and deliver superior content that speaks to existing customers and, at the same time, attracts new, untapped audiences.

Their marketing content needs to be better than everyone else’s. It needs to speak to the right audience. It must resurface within the proper context, place, and moment to guide customers throughout their journey.

At the same time, marketers must constantly adjust to changing trends and audience preferences. They must beat the algorithm updates to improve their content discoverability and help save marketing budgets.

In this guide, you can learn about:

1. What is content modeling
2. How to tie content modeling to your marketing goals.
3. Available options for storing content.
4. Ways to design and display content  on a website.
5. General content modeling recommendations.

What is content?

What is content modeling?

Content model determines the structure of your content. Your content model is the backbone of any content creation, promotion, and content management in your Xperience by Kentico application.

In the content modeling process, your team defines:

• what the content structure will look like,
• what content types they need to succeed in their marketing efforts
• any relationships between individual content types.

Standardized content types, relationships, and taxonomies will help your marketers keep their marketing message consistent and discoverable across all their communication channels.

What are the impacts of a well-defined content model?

We have talked to clients who, when they first heard about content modeling, wondered whether the time spent on content modeling sessions would pay off. During consulting sessions, we helped them understand that they should not consider the impact of building a good content model only from the perspective of what if you get your content model done wrong. It is important to consider the possibilities that open for your team when you get the content model done right:

• Your marketers can focus on crafting engaging and relevant content rather than worrying about technical aspects or keeping the format of their content consistent.
• Your businesses will maintain consistent branding, messaging, and information architecture throughout their digital presence.
• Your marketers can connect related pieces of content, create personalized experiences, and enable effective content discovery for your business’s target audience.

The content model is crucial in ensuring consistent, uniform, highly personalized user experience across marketing channels. From our experience, teams working with well-modeled projects are more satisfied with their platform and deliver better marketing results.

That’s why it is essential that you consider the following:

• Recognize that preparing a content model is a fundamental part of building any successful marketing project.
• Define and build your content model at the beginning of the project, and iterate over it when the need comes.
• Include every piece of content your team uses to maintain the business’s digital presence (websites, applications, video portals, and other marketing channels) into your content model.
• Identify relationships between content types, and define taxonomies that will help you create personalized content.

See how you can target a segment of your website audience with personalized content on your website.

This guide will help you understand different options for storing and displaying content within Xperience. You will also learn about the recommended approaches for modeling content in Xperience, collected internally and externally from our selected partners. You can apply these recommendations when creating the content model for your digital marketing content.

Dive in, and find out about different types of content, how and in what way you can store and display content in Xperience and what are the general recommendations for modeling your website content.