Content modeling guide

Marketers today need to deliver content that stands out, resonates with existing customers, and attracts new audiences. To succeed, your content must be easy to find, update, reuse in different channels and platforms, and remove when no longer needed. The content modeling process helps marketing teams define the structure of their content, making it adaptable and easily repurposed across different distribution channels, mediums, and outlets.

A well-defined content model improves the consistency of your content across channels, simplifies content management, and enhances content discoverability. It makes your marketing team effective as they can focus on creating superior content without being bogged down by operational challenges. They can stay agile and respond to evolving audience needs and marketing trends.

In this guide, you can learn about:

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

What is content?

Content is any digital information, blog post, quote, testimonial, case study, interview, product information, or digital asset, such as an image, video recording, or podcast. It can also include interactive elements like quizzes or tools and structured data like product descriptions or metadata. Content is the building block for websites, applications, and digital platforms.

Your marketers create content to execute their digital marketing strategy. They use content to engage their audience, communicate value, and build trust with potential and existing customers. High-quality content helps attract attention, drive conversions, and strengthen brand loyalty across various channels.

What is a content model?

Content model determines the structure of your content. Your content model is the backbone of all content creation, promotion, and management in your Xperience by Kentico application. A robust content model allows marketers to tailor their messaging, surface personalized messages in the proper context, and quickly adjust it to match changing trends and audience preferences.

Marketing teams create their content model during a content modeling process.

What is content modeling?

Content modeling is a process of organizing content, identifying content attributes, and defining relationships between different types of content the organization produces. In collaboration, stakeholders (editors, copywriters, and marketers), content strategists, business analysts, and solutions architects define the structure, relationships, and types of content that a digital system will manage.

During the content modeling process, your team defines:

• What the content structure will look like.
• What content types the team needs 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 communication channels.

We will discuss how you can approach standardizing your content types to fit Xperience by Kentico and the basics of the content modeling process later in the guide.

Before you dive into a detailed description of content modeling in Xperience, watch a short video in which Mike Wills, Kentico MVP and Technical VP at Bluemodus, explains what is content modeling and its importance.

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

A good content model:

• Helps marketers improve their efficiency and deliver consistent, uniform, highly personalized user experience across marketing channels.
• Streamlines content creation and management by providing clear templates and structures, saving time for teams and improving efficiency.
• Ensures consistent and unified content presentation across all channels, enhancing user experience and strengthening brand identity.
• Supports scalability by making it easier for marketers to add, remove, or update content without disrupting the system.
• Enables reusability, allowing content to be repurposed across multiple platforms and reduces duplication of effort.
• Powers advanced functionality, such as filtering, search optimization, or localization, through well-structured metadata and taxonomies.
• Allows developers and designers to optimize, improve, or add new capabilities while keeping the system stable and intact.
• Fosters better collaboration between different digital teams by creating a shared framework for marketers, developers, and designers to work together effectively.

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

• Recognize that preparing a content model is fundamental for building any successful marketing project.
• Define and build your content model at the beginning of the project and iterate over it as needed.
• 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.
• Define taxonomies that will help you categorize the content or create personalized variants of content. See how you can target a segment of your website audience with personalized content on your website.

Dive into the Content modeling guide

The Content modeling guide will help you understand different options for storing and displaying content within Xperience by Kentico. 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.

Find out about different types of content, the content modeling process, how and in what way you can store and display content in Xperience or what are the general recommendations for modeling your digital content using in Xperience by Kentico DXP.

What’s next

The next part discusses the essential component of the content modeling process - content types. Understanding the content types and what’s available in Xperience for defining content types will help you identify the best approach to defining (or modeling) the content types you identified for your project during the content audit and modeling sessions.