When I talk with clients about structured content, I usually get a funny look. What is structured content? And why do we need to think about that? What does that have to do with marketing?

It's common among non-marketers and marketers alike to not quite understand what structured content is and why it's so important. I'd like to take a little time to talk about what it is and why we need to be paying more attention to it—not just as tactical marketers, but at the executive level, too.

Hold Up, How Are We Defining "Content"?

Before we talk about structuring content, let's talk about what we mean when we say "content." In a business, content is anything that is communicating information. This could be marketing content (blogs, websites, marketing photos and videos, case studies, e-books, advertisements, etc.), sales content (spec sheets, proposals, contracts), HR content (applications, training manuals, employee handbooks, forms), service and loyalty content (maintenance request forms, surveys, referral cards, annual client letters)...you get the idea. Content communicates something within or outside of the business, and it can take many shapes.

In most businesses, content is all over the place. Typically, there isn't a company-wide content strategy or system for how to manage all of that content: how it's categorized, named, tagged for search, where it's stored, who has access, etc. It's honestly kind of a crap-shoot in most businesses. This is why we end up with each employee having their own folder on the X Drive, with their own versions of documents that everyone is supposed to be using consistently. This is also why it's such a hassle to update content and distribute it throughout the organization when something changes and why old, outdated versions seem to live on forever.

Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE)

Solving the issue of content strategy across the business is a topic for another day; in this article, we're just going to focus on the marketing side of things. The content strategy we're going to focus on is called COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere. This model helps to streamline marketing content production, distribution, and maintenance and its foundation is structured content.

What is Structured Content?

Structured content is essentially content that follows a specific pattern. For example, an event on your website is content. Its structure might look like this:

• Event Title

• Description

• Event Category

• Image

• Location

• Date / Time

• Registration Link

• Map

As another example, a university faculty member profile might have this structure:

• First Name

• Last Name

• Title

• Image

• Department

• Credentials

• Bio

• CV Link/Upload

• Research Interests

• Teaching Interests

These patterns can be seen in all kinds of content: products in an e-commerce store, flight listings from an airline, or help articles from your cable provider.

When you see content in this way, it's easy to understand how certain types of content have patterns. The trouble is, the way we use the content and the tools we use to manage it don't make it easy to be consistent with these patterns. Over time, the pattern is modified to fit a specific use case and it evolves into looking inconsistent and messy. Or, without the proper tools, the structure isn't even considered. If you've ever been on a website where product pages are all laid out differently, or blog posts don't follow any kind of prescribed format, this is probably why. No one took the time to understand the structure of the content and a poor user experience is the result.

The other point I'll make is that the tools aren't always going to force you to have a solid content strategy. For example, if your website CMS gives you text boxes for adding content, it's up to you to keep a consistent structure within your content. If your CMS is database-driven, that helps to keep things organized, but it's still up to you to enter the right content into the tools. 

Why Does Structured Content Matter for Marketing?

Think about the technology available to users these days:

Google Search (and therefore Google Shopping, Google Images, and all the other Google snippets). Facebook. YouTube. Amazon. Mobile apps. Alexa.

Now think of the content that marketers are producing in order to reach customers through these channels. If that content isn't consistently structured, these tools aren't going to understand what to do with that content. Unstructured content is more difficult to index in a search engine because it's more difficult for computers to understand its meaning. In some cases, the search engines will make their best guesses at meaning, which is not really what we want. Providing structure makes it easier for them, meaning it's easier for your users to find and your content will provide users with a better overall experience.

This doesn't mean that unstructured content is bad. There is always going to be content that can't be structured the way an event or a product can. But where it makes sense, structured content can add a lot of power to your marketing efforts, both in performance and operations.

Structured content, when used as part of a COPE content strategy, reduces the amount of work your marketing team needs to do and increases the likelihood that the content is actually going to be used. Your readers/viewers/customers will have a better experience engaging with your content, and you'll be better able to optimize and measure your content performance.

The last point I'll make here is that structured content is beneficial for more than just digital content. It's also useful for offline content. If you use printed product spec sheets, for example. Are you creating them from scratch each time you have a new product to sell? Creating something from scratch takes a lot more time, so why not use a pattern/template for this type of content? Then when you have a new product, just replace the sections of data with the new info, make small tweaks if needed, and then you're done. I admit this is oversimplifying the process a bit, but you get the point. Use patterns and structure where possible.

How Structured Content Increases Performance

Measuring marketing has always been difficult, and it will continue to be that way in a digital world where every click can technically be counted. But using structured content can make measuring and optimizing easier and more reliable. Structured content allows you to see trends more clearly. You can test changes to the pattern--not just to one piece of content--and optimize for better engagement/conversion/[insert your goal here].

Let's look at an example:

Let's say I have an event page that shows the details of my event. It might look something like this:

Your traffic is good, but maybe you’re not getting as many people to register as your thought you would. When your content is structured, it's easy to change how that pattern is displayed to optimize performance. A different layout could look like something below.

The content structure didn't change, but the way a user experiences that content did. Now you have something to measure and see which layout performs better. Without the content structure, this kind of testing and optimizing is very difficult, time-consuming, and difficult to repeat consistently across other events.

Let's take this event example one step further. You need to promote this event, probably on your Facebook page, and you want a short event snippet to show on other pages of your website so that your website traffic sees the new event. Because this content has structure, it's much easier and faster to publish that content in other places. You've created the content once, and now you can publish it everywhere (COPE!). Now, depending on the technology you're using, this may require developer resources or a more robust website CMS. But even if you do it manually, you're taking a lot of the guesswork out of it.

You can tell your marketing team that when promoting an event, the Facebook post should look like this:

• Post Text

• Event Image

• Event Title

• Event URL

And your content should be structured in the code as well, not just on the front-end where website visitors see it. Search engines and other websites/apps will better know what to do with your event and how to display it for a better user experience in their platforms if the data pieces are tagged appropriately. Take a look at Google Schema and Facebook Open Graph to learn more about how they use structured content.

"Without these Open Graph tags, the Facebook Crawler uses internal heuristics to make a best guess about the title, description, and preview image for your content. Designate this info explicitly with Open Graph tags to ensure the highest quality posts on Facebook."

How Structured Content Improves Marketing Efficiency

In our event example above, using structured content not only gives you opportunities to optimize your content, but it also makes it easier and faster to create, distribute, and maintain your content which can save a lot of time. The idea behind structured content is to create a content hub, a source of truth for your content, from which all other references to that content are pulled.

The content is consistent each time, and if it needs to be updated, you update it in one place instead of having to update each place to which the content is pushed.

Take the Facebook post, for example. If you use that same pattern with each event you want to promote, there's little question about what the Facebook post should be next time. If you want to promote your event on other pages of your website, your CMS may allow you to select the event and display only the details needed for that promotion, without you needing to create content all over again.

The CMO's Case for Structured Content and COPE

Greater Return on Content Investment

Creating original content is high value for your audience, but it is also a high investment. Structured content will give your team more to work with and will help you measure the return on your investment.

Easier to Scale

Patterns and templates are meant for use at scale. Implementing that idea into your content production means your content operations can more easily scale up, and your content can be widely distributed using integrations and APIs instead of manual feeds or delivery.

Training is Easier

Once your marketing team—and/or other team members across various business functions—learn and understand the structure and process for your content, training becomes much more structured, too. In fact, your training should be a form of structured content itself. Easily repeatable, easily scalable. And with everyone using the same structures and patterns, adapting and changing is easier across the whole team.

Faster Decision-Making

Ever feel like you’ve had the same conversation and made the same decision over and over again, just for different content pieces? Make a decision once about your content structure and watch it appear everywhere that content lives.

Better Reporting

Usability testing, measurement, and reporting are easier when structure is applied to content across the customer journey, meaning it will be easier to communicate trends and results to the CEO, CFO, and other stakeholders.

Tips for Getting Started

• Do a content audit so you have visibility of all of your content and can easily identify gaps or areas where adding structure would make sense

• Set up a spreadsheet to keep track of your content categories and tags so everyone is organizing content in a similar fashion

• Create templates to show how different types of content should be structured/formatted

• Include technical details about digital content, like canonical tags, meta descriptions, alt tags for images, and consistent file naming conventions.

• Set a schedule for regularly reviewing and maintaining content

• Read more about Implementing Content Marketing In Real Life which also discusses structured content and why it’s important.