---
title: Introduction to content management essentials
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Content is your number one digital marketing asset. Using it effectively stands at the core of managing digital experiences.

Xperience by Kentico can serve as a repository for all your digital marketing content. Xperience applications can power different marketing activities, from sharing business information and increasing brand awareness to promoting new services on campaign pages.

The **Content management essentials** will teach you about:

- Content and content types in Xperience.
- Applications you use to manage your content.
- Different digital marketing channels in Xperience.
- Editing content in Xperience.

## Content in Xperience

Xperience by Kentico is a highly customizable solution that helps marketing teams achieve their goals. Commonly, one Xperience by Kentico implementation differs from another. Marketers have different ways of managing their content. They will use other tools to create marketing campaigns or share content on various channels. Depending on their business requirement, they will leverage integrations with different solutions.

> **Tip:** Say a company hires you to run digital marketing in their application built on Xperience by Kentico because of your previous experience with this platform.
>
> If different agencies implemented the applications, the new and the old applications might contain various features. For example, the content types might completely differ. Alternatively, similar content types will have additional properties, such as _Article_, which might have different editing fields or available properties. Each website will also contain other [widgets](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/website-content/widgets-and-page-builder.md) that dictate how to work with content in the new Xperience application.

However, no matter the implementation, several things stay the same.

### Your content is based on a content type

You can imagine a _content type_ as a cookie cutter for every _content item_. As you can create cookies of the same shape with one cookie cutter, editors use one content type and make the items with the same characteristics. The _content type_ defines what data you’ll input and how Xperience displays this data across different channels, such as websites, emails, or app screens.

![List of available content types](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/modules/content-management-essentials/cm-list-of-content-types.png "List of available content types")

For example, the _Article_ content type allows you to create any number of articles that will always have the same properties.

![Article content type](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/modules/content-management-essentials/article-content-type.png "Article content type")

Similarly, if your _Featured content_ content type contains a _Title_, _Short description_, and _Asset/Media_ fields, every individual content item created with this content type will have the same properties.

![Featured content reusable content item](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/modules/content-management-essentials/featured-content.png "Featured content reusable content item")

Content types define the content model that defines the structure and relationships between the _content types_. As an editor, you’ll work with types your developers prepare. If you realize some content types don’t suffice or identify where you can improve your editing workflow, you can ask your developers to enhance your content types.

> **Tip:** You can learn more about how you can store and present the data in Xperience applications by seeing [Content modeling](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/architecture/content-modeling/content-modeling-guide.md) guide in the documentation. (Please note that the linked guide covers the topic from a more technical perspective.)

## Types of content in Xperience

You can classify marketing content from different perspectives. Let’s simplify this topic for this tutorial and say that in Xperience, you’ll work with two types of content: **structured and unstructured**.

What's the difference?

**Structured content** (or structured data) is data without any information on what this piece of information will look like when it's displayed to consumers. Since every [digital marketing channel](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/digital-marketing/work-with-channels/digital-marketing-channels.md) has different data display requirements, storing data in structured format makes your content **reusable**.
**Unstructured content** stores the data and information about what the data will look like which ties the content to a specific marketing channel.

In this tutorial, we'll discuss these two options in Xperience. To learn more about types of content, see the [Content modeling guide](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/architecture/content-modeling/content-modeling-guide/structured-and-unstructured-content.md).

## Working with your content in channels

Xperience by Kentico is a **digital experience platform** that comes with a set a of out-of-the-box features to edit your content and display it on [websites](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/website-content.md), in [emails](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/digital-marketing/emails.md) or [headless applications](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/development/content-retrieval/retrieve-headless-content.md).

| Application \*         | Application's purpose                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| ---------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Content hub**        | Serves as the central content repository for structured content. Content in the Content hub is reusable across different marketing channels.                                                                                 |
| **(Website channel)**  | Custom website channels represent a website or a microsite within your digital marketing channels. For example, the Kbank demo website has three channels _Business Banking_, _Personal Banking_, and _Mortgages microsite_. |
| **(Email channel)**    | Custom email channels contain email newsletters, automation emails, and other types of emails. For example, the Kbank demo website has one _Marketing Emails_ channel to store all email communication.                      |
| **(Headless channel)** | Custom headless channels allow the distribution of content into headless apps. For example, the Kbank demo website has one _Mobile Banking App_.                                                                             |

\*Application name in brackets (Website channel) means the name depends on your company's naming schemes. For example, the image bellow shows website channels in Kbank

![Channels in the Kbank demo website](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/modules/content-management-essentials/kbank-example-channels.png "Channels in the Kbank demo website")

> **Tip:** You'll learn more about the **Content hub** and other applications in this tutorial.

## Multilingual content

Xperience by Kentico lets you set up [multiple languages](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/development/multilingual.md) in your projects so your _website_, _emails_, or other _channels_ can adapt to your audience’s location. A language variant is simply a version of a [page](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/digital-marketing/work-with-multilingual/multilingual-variant-of-page.md) or a [content item](https://docs.kentico.com/guides/digital-marketing/work-with-multilingual/multilingual-variant-of-content.md) in a different language than your default one.

With [AIRA translations](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/aira.md#aira-translations), editors can quickly create these language variants for pages and content items. At this moment, [AIRA](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/aira.md) is in a _preview mode_ which influences how content is translated. When you create new language variants of [pages](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/website-content/translate-pages.md) or [content items](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/business-users/content-hub/content-items.md#translate-content-items), review your content to ensure links and other content display correctly.