Content management best practices for small businesses

From product reviews to HR paperwork, your company handles high volumes of content every day — and there’s a lot that goes into managing it all. What’s more, you need to go beyond just managing your data: You need to harness its value for.

According to a Salesforce report, 94% of small and medium-sized businesses consider themselves data driven to a certain degree. If you run a growing company and plan to fully leverage data, you need a structured system in place. That’s where intelligent, AI-powered solutions can help — automating workflows and collecting actionable insights from your sources of information.

We’ve put together a guide with small business content management best practices so you can implement advanced technologies like AI to scale data-driven initiatives and simplify processes.

Key highlights:

• Small business content management is the practice of organizing, storing, and sharing files and resources within your company, using tools and processes to make sure everything’s easy to find and accessible when you need it
• A content management strategy helps you set up an organized system for your files and assets, simplifying access, security, and data use for informed decisions and growth
• Using a centralized platform and adopting secure collaboration tools are examples of content management best practices for small businesses
• Box simplifies content management for small businesses with a unified platform for secure file collaboration, scalable cloud storage, and AI-powered tools

What is small business content management?

Small business content management is a strategic approach to handling documents, multimedia files, and other resources in a small business. It covers the tools you use for this purpose, like cloud storage and document management systems, and the creation of guidelines and processes to make content accessible whenever you need it.

Unlike enterprise content management, which often involves large-scale systems, content management in small companies focuses on more practical, cost-effective solutions that support growth and prioritize simplicity and ease of use.

Managing content in your small business includes different tasks. For example, you can:

• Create a system where everyone knows what content exists and where to find it
• Define who can access your business documents, customer information, and other types of content based on clear file and folder permissions
• Produce and publish content online (on blog posts, landing pages, and social media) to support your marketing team initiatives
• Maintain an internal FAQ or documentation to assist with customer inquiries
• Facilitate collaboration on project tasks, document reviews, and other content workflows

Explore our proven strategies to foster collaborative task management.

Why small businesses need a content management strategy

When you create a digital library to share files with clients, for example, you’re actively managing content. But doing so without a solid business strategy for content management means files and folders often become isolated and workflows break down. A clear plan helps you determine:

• The “what” (content assets to manage)
• The “how” (tools and processes to use)
• The “why” (purpose and goals) behind every content-related activity

Here are three reasons to build a content management strategy for your small business.

1. An organized system reduces time wasted searching for documents

Gartner reports that 47% of digital workers have difficulty accessing the data or information required for their tasks. When a team member wastes time searching for the content they need, the domino effect begins: frustration, delays in responses, and projects falling behind schedule. 

With a strategic approach to content management for small businesses, you create a centralized and organized system for all your digital assets. This framework allows everyone, from project managers to sales representatives, to access files faster rather than spend time hunting for information.

Stay organized with digital file management best practices.

2. With an Intelligent Content Management process, you realize more value from data

Congruity 360 found that 90% of an organization’s data is unstructured, which means that a vast amount of valuable insights are hidden in formats like documents and multimedia files. A small retail company, for example, might have years of sales data and customer reviews scattered across different systems. There’s a lot of valuable information within all that unstructured content, but it’s nearly impossible to find.

A structured content management process makes unstructured data easier to analyze, revealing trends that fuel their sales strategies and help answer common customer questions. Intelligent Content Management platforms support this process by extracting key data and identifying patterns that pave the way for content strategies based on reliable insights.

3. Modern content management platforms help you protect sensitive information

Information security should be an item on your content management strategy checklist — it safeguards your sensitive data from potential breaches and disasters.

An efficient small business content management system equips you with file encryption, regular backups, and other security controls to minimize these risks. Modern cloud-based platforms even extend these features to your software app integrations, reinforcing security practices while preventing threats and data privacy violations.

Understand the importance of data protection for small businesses.

Best practices for content management for small businesses

Follow these five content management best practices for small businesses to develop a strategy that grows with your company and supports long-term success.

1. Understand your content management goals

Are you building a streamlined content review process, or is your main focus on deploying collaboration tools? The first content management best practice is identifying the most critical types of files, the problems you face with your current processes, and what you want to achieve with a strategy.

These answers will guide your technology choices and workflow structures. For example, if you work in a creative agency, you might prioritize co-editing features, while a professional services firm might emphasize secure client access and searchability.

2. Use a centralized content management platform in the cloud

Zion predicts a 7.54% increase in the global content management system (CMS) market, projecting it to increase from $28.15B in 2023 to $54B by 2032. Behind this expansion is the growing importance of commercial data. But without proper management, these solutions often lead to data fragmentation, making it difficult to locate files when needed.

While finding content scattered across platforms is time-consuming (and leads to losses), adopting a unified content management system for small businesses enables you to manage digital assets in an organized and controlled way. Explore solutions you can try depending on the goals of your strategy.

Discover how content intelligence helps your business innovate and grow.

3. Prepare your content for search and retrieval

Choosing the best content management system for small businesses is only useful if you can find files and information quickly. Create consistent naming conventions for document categorization and apply metadata tags — labels that provide information about data. For example, tagging photos with event names, locations, and dates lets you instantly filter when retrieving specific images.

Explore the benefits of enterprise metadata management for content discovery.

4. Automate your content management process

As a small business owner, you likely manage your operations either solo or with a lean team. By automating tasks and workflows in your content management process, you free up time spent on activities like routing documents for review and sending updates to your partners.

You can also extend automation to your security practices — for example, using audit trails to monitor modifications within your documents and scheduling automated online backups to reinforce data loss prevention best practices.

Consider other advantages of cloud backup for small businesses.

5. Enable secure collaboration on documents and projects

A Storyblok survey reveals that 58% of organizations view collaboration tools as the most essential features of CMS platforms. When looking for the right content management software for small businesses, focus on secure collaboration tools to prevent headaches related to unauthorized changes or conflicting versions. Examples include:

• Document version control: Record file changes so you can maintain accountability during collaborative editing
• Cloud workspaces: Facilitate controlled access to sensitive information by enabling the creation of secure file portals
• Secure link sharing: Grant content access to authorized individuals who receive a link, letting you set expiration dates for temporary use
• File locking: Block other users from editing a document while another user is working on its content, avoiding overwrites and deletions by accident
  
  

Scale up with confidence with the best content management system for small businesses

To make the most of these best practices for content management, you need a solution to create, edit, and collaborate on files securely. Box, the leader in Intelligent Content Management, gives you a unified platform to leverage the power of AI and discover the hidden value of your data.

With Box for small business, you get unlimited storage, e-signatures, and AI tools that scale with your company as it grows. Plus, Box allows you to protect every piece of content with the same security and compliance trusted by global leaders — and we safeguard the flow of information across all your apps.

Contact us to discuss content management best practices and solutions for your small business.

**While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blog post is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.