Structured content essentials for marketing success

Highlights

You’ll learn about why structured content is important in modern marketing:

• Enhances efficiency: Save time and resources by reusing content components
• Improves user experience: Ensure consistency and engaging interactions
• Optimizes for SEO: A structured approach enhances search engine visibility and online ranking
• Ensures sustainability: When you treat your content as data, you promote content reusability and easy maintenance

Embrace structured content to improve your brand's impact and reach. Start implementing structured content strategies today.

Keep reading to learn more!

Your business creates content to build trust, educate customers, improve SEO, create leads, convey a message and answer a customer’s questions. You want people to discover your product through your content. But is it that simple to reach your audience with your content? With customers expecting dynamic content and personalization on every digital platform, creating such experiences can be overwhelming for small and large businesses.

Enter structured content.

Structured content streamlines your content development process and ensures consistency across various platforms. In short, it helps you do more with less and reach customers who matter to your business. Rather than creating heaps of content, focus on structured content. 

But what is structured content, and why is it important? Read on to explore!

What is structured content?

Structured content is organized to be reused and repurposed easily across various channels. You break structured content into smaller, modular pieces, which you can easily organize and classify. In structured content, you treat your content like data, helping you shape information into many expressions. You can assemble and reassemble content pieces in different ways. 

Ultimately, structured content helps you create cleaner content from an external and internal perspective. As structured content is bite-sized and modular, your content is searchable and reusable, saving your developer and content editors time and money. Also, you no longer need to develop fresh material from scratch because you reuse the content created any number of times. 

Like LEGO blocks, each piece of structured content is labeled, helping you search for relevant content and reuse it for different campaigns.

Structured content vs unstructured content

Unstructured content is a single text block with limited formatting and metadata, such as an article in a word processor. But structured content breaks down text into smaller, discrete elements—like headings, paragraphs, images and metadata—each stored separately and tagged. Here are some more differences between the two:

Benefits of structured content

Better time efficiency

Structured content increases the speed with which you create and update content. Reusing pre-made components like text blocks, media elements and templates saves time and resources. With structured content, you create smoother workflows and reduce redundancy, creating an organized content strategy. Structuring content keeps your information consistent across different platforms, maintaining your brand identity. 

Increases user experience

Publishing content across multiple channels, such as apps, email campaigns, social media and websites, can be challenging. Structured content maintains consistency while establishing your brand’s voice. Your customers receive the same information no matter how and where they interact. It enhances the overall experience and builds trust, leading to smoother and more cohesive interactions.

Promotes reusability and sustainability

The primary purpose of creating content is to ensure uniqueness, but not all content should be unique. You can reuse and repurpose customer assets like case studies, customer ratings, or product descriptions. Storing your content asset in a relational database makes it reusable, as it's easily accessible. 

Additionally, structured content makes you sustainable. When your information is accessible, it’s easier to maintain your content—you create once and publish everywhere (COPE), removing duplicate efforts. Sharing the most up-to-date information builds trust. 

Improves SEO

Search engines use structured content to deliver meaningful descriptions in the search results. The more context you provide about your content, the better it will rank on the search engine result pages. Providing more context makes your content more machine-readable, allowing search engines to display content to your target audience. 

Let’s say someone searches for “Headless CMS” on Google. Google bots look at your data and content to understand whether your content caters to the user's search intent. As a result, your customers directly visit your website, where they receive important information about headless CMS. 

Enhances content modeling

Structured content makes content modeling easy. By defining different content types and how they relate to each other, structured content simplifies your content management processes. It delivers information across various platforms, ensuring the right details reach the right people at the right time.

Innovates faster without risk

Structured content creates an environment for innovation by separating content from its presentation. A structured approach uses different formats and distribution channels without losing the quality of the content. As a result, your companies adapt to changing market demands.

Steps to implement structured content in your business

1. Define your goals

Before creating structured content, pinpoint your goals of moving from unstructured content to structured. Your goal can be to improve efficiency, simplify content updates and enhance SEO. When you have a clear strategy, make it easier to execute it. 

2. Conduct a content audit

Go through your existing content to identify content gaps, content redundancies and areas for improvement. Conducting a thorough review shows you what information is missing or repetitive, helping you organize your content. Performing a content audit improves your material's clarity and relevance, ensuring it meets your audience's needs and hits your communication goals.

3. Develop a content model

Outline your company's content, such as a blog post, product description, social media update and newsletter. For each type, it’s helpful to define key content elements, such as the title, author, date, keywords and the main body of the text. To increase engagement, remember to add fields for images or videos, tags and call-to-action elements.

4. Choose the right content management system (CMS)

The next step is to choose the right CMS that genuinely supports your structured content. One great option is Contentstack, which is a headless CMS platform. The right platform differentiates between success and failure because it provides flexibility and powerful features for managing structured content.

5. Create a taxonomy and metadata strategy

Create a taxonomy to help your customers find your content. Many companies use metadata standards like title tags and schema markup to improve their SEO, which makes it easier for customers to find your content.

6. Migrate existing content

Plan how you will move your existing content into the new structured format. Start migrating the most important content and use automated tools to make the content migration easier. This will save you time while migrating your content. 

7. Monitor and optimize

Use different analytics tools to observe how your structured content performs. Based on data and feedback, you can change your content models, taxonomy and workflows, which can help you improve your content strategy.

How do you structure content in a headless CMS?

A headless content management system (CMS) is the best option for your structured content because it offers all the required features. Here’s how you structure your content in a headless CMS like Contentstack:

Decouple the content delivery from the content creation layer

The headless CMS decouples the content creation process from the delivery process, so it’s not tied to the backend. When these two layers are separate, you create modular and reusable content. That way, you use dynamic content across multiple platforms and channels. It allows for a more agile way to deliver content, helping your team use the latest tech and create engaging messages without the usual limitations of a traditional CMS.

Integrate third-party solutions into your headless CMS

The API-first approach of headless CMS as Contentstack includes adding best-of-breed integrations like digital asset management (DAM) systems and content delivery networks (CDNs). This integration manages rich media and ensures your content reaches your customers.

Case study: How did Contenstack help Akind scale content across multiple brands?

Akind selected Contentstack’s headless CMS to enhance content production for its various recruitment brands across multiple websites. The headless CMS centralized content management, improved localization and streamlined user experience for clients and job seekers. With Contentstack, Akind simplified content operations, allowing for quicker website relaunches and efficient translation of materials. The headless platform enhanced collaboration between marketing and development teams, increasing flexibility and resilience.

After using Contentstack, Leo Hård af Segerstad, Digital Marketing Strategist at Akind, said:

“We have had other CMS solutions, but none have the reliability that comes with Contentstack. We have one system to work in, where we know we can adjust content easily and still keep the level of quality and functionality that we need. A web editor who knows nothing about web development or coding can go into the CMS, update what they need, create new pages and launch it and we have no worries that anything will break. We feel completely safe. This allows everyone to work so much more efficiently and is our main reason for using Contentstack over other solutions.”

Read the full case study here.

Create rich metadata

Rich metadata makes your content more discoverable and improves user experience. When you tag your content with detailed information, your customers can find what they need, ensuring better engagement and a more satisfying experience. With custom metadata, you define specific attributes and properties that align with your content requirements.

Manage your content with DAM

Integrate DAM systems with your CMS to simplify the handling of multimedia content. Your digital assets remain organized, easy to find and ready for reuse.

Use Contentstack's AI platform

Contentstack's AI platform enhances your structured content capabilities. Contentstack automates metadata generation and content categorization, tagging and organizing your content consistently. Tagging your content ensures faster discovery while improving the efficiency of your content management workflow.

FAQs

What is an example of structured content?

A great example of structured content is a product description page, which features separate sections for the product name, description, specifications, customer reviews, and related products.

What is structured content management?

Structured content management is about organizing and storing content so it’s easy to find and use later. By breaking content into predefined, reusable pieces, you increase efficiency, maintain consistency and scale your content efforts.

What is structured content translation?

Structured content translation translates your pieces of content instead of entire documents. Using a structured approach, your digital content remains consistent, allowing you to reuse the same content across different languages.

How to write structured content?

Writing structured content means breaking your information into smaller, reusable chunks, each having metadata. A structured approach defines your content type, creating modular components and tagging to keep your content organized and accessible.

Learn more

When you create structured content, your team and company and—more importantly, your customers benefit from it—creating a win-win situation. Structured content helps your customers find your content more easily while enjoying a personalized experience. 

Adopting structured content is a strategic move that enhances your content management processes and overall business efficiency. To know how structuring your content benefits your business and how Contentstack can help, talk to us.