Any company that shares and distributes content online as part of their marketing strategy makes use of a content management system (CMS). For your small business or startup that’s rapidly scaling or your large media publishing agency, you’ll be familiar with your organisation’s CMS and your marketing team will use it every day.
Media publishers who regularly publish high volumes of content need to be able to rely on their CMS to make the publishing process more efficient and seamless. Authoring unique and useful content, which delights your customer base through the use of your CMS system, is essential to ensure you remain competitive in your industry. The Gutenberg text editing tool can help.
What is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is a fully integrated content editor within the WordPress CMS. Throughout this article, we will outline the number of ways in which Gutenberg can improve your brand’s authoring experience, leading to boosted web traffic, improved Google rankings and new customers.
Gutenberg is moving digital content into the modern era, by enabling your team to create rich multimedia online experiences geared towards grabbing your audience’s diminishing attention.
Gutenberg can drastically improve the authoring process for your marketing team by making content publishing a more natural experience for content creators. Learn more about how your CMS can support your editorial publishing process.
If you currently use WordPress to develop and publish your content without the Gutenberg text editor, you could be limiting the scope of your content.
Why Gutenberg can help media brand’s authoring process
When your brand is regularly seeding your website or network of sites with content, your authoring process needs to be clear, consistent and reliable.
Gutenberg can help your company get a handle on your content authoring strategy, streamlining and simplifying your delivery processes, so a steady pipeline of new and interesting web content is regularly released. With a clear delivery framework in place, you’ll have more time for creativity to develop new ideas, and you can redirect your resources in the right direction.
The team behind Gutenberg hope the editor will ‘revolutionise customisation’ and ‘site-building’. Gutenberg works on the principle of editable content blocks, which anyone can use. These blocks act as a content building tool for non-expert coders. With Gutenberg, content creators can build a piece of content from scratch using a library of preset blocks.
Each block is a different page element. Useful blocks include:
- Headings
- Videos
- Lists
- Images
- Audio: Soundcloud, Spotify
Through the use of Gutenberg, the authoring process is simplified, making the editing and uploading of content a much more intuitive and understandable task for content creators. This reduces the need for tech resources on a marketing project, eliminating roadblocks and increasing productivity. However, when using Gutenberg to build new blocks and page templates, it’s vital to involve developers at the outset to ensure correct deployment.
Campaign landing pages for lead generation activities, such as mailing list sign-ups or lead magnets, can be created using Gutenberg templates, generating growth for your business. These templates can be reused or modified for future campaigns, so your CMS can be used to grow your customer base.
Benefits of Gutenberg for marketing professionals
For marketing teams, the features of Gutenberg empower content creators to easily customise the content formats they use on a daily basis. With editable blocks, marketers don’t have to continually lean on developers for help when they’re trying to launch their next piece of earth-shattering content.
- Marketers can experiment with new layouts
- Easily incorporate multimedia elements into pages (videos interactive formats, image galleries)
- Marketers can experiment with new layouts
For flexible page builder templates and custom-built components, get in touch to discuss Powered By Coffee’s Enterprise WordPress Development service.
Your text editor mirrors your website
With Gutenberg’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality, your content creators can create pages which accurately represent the text editor. All marketers have experienced a live page which doesn’t look like the editor.
You’ve beautifully formatted your work, but when you publish it, nothing is in the right place. The links generate 404 errors, your embedded video won’t play, and your image isn’t where you want it. With Gutenberg, you can forget these publishing nightmares and trust that your text editor mirrors your website.
When structuring a new page, Gutenberg makes marketers’ lives easier. Content blocks can easily be dragged and dropped, enabling editors to move the most powerful and engaging components to where they have the most value, and any changes can be made rapidly.
All this is a far cry from how it used to be. Previously when using the former WordPress editor to create richer content posts, moderators would often need to install various widgets and plugins to ensure working functionality. More often than not, these widgets wouldn’t play nicely together. These add-ons invariably had their unique interfaces, and switching between views could make the content creators’ lives much trickier. With Gutenberg, everything is in the same place.
Better brand consistency
When looking at the most successful and well-loved brands, one thing is clear; the consistency of their content is never in question. Gutenberg’s WYSIWYG content authoring can enable this for your company, in turn strengthening your brand consistency.
As your organisation grows and scales, you’ll be creating more and rich content. With Gutenberg, your organisation will be confident that when you hit publish, your content reaches your high standards.
With the option to save and reuse customisable content blocks, content marketers are free to be more creative and plot their next big article. Useful reusable elements include image dimensions, fonts and type size as well as company logos. Using blocks, every piece of content your marketers create will display the carefully curated stamp of your brand.
Whether you are creating a new theme for your WordPress site or you would like to create custom widgets to use with Gutenberg, ask for guidance from the Powered By Coffee team.
Opportunities for creativity
It’s easy for creativity to get lost in the digital content arms race. However, creativity is central to a successful marketing strategy, and with Gutenberg, your creative team has the license they need to flex their creative muscles.
A useful analogy of how it feels using Gutenberg is the experience of using Lego blocks to create a new model. Gutenberg blocks give creators the freedom to experiment and try new ideas as soon those a-ha moments arise, without development backlogs and long lead times stifling progress.
Playing around with content formats, with appropriate Google Analytics tracking, of course, can be the difference between moving your publishing brand to the next level or languishing as the also-rans in your industry.
Gutenberg is geared towards responsive websites, so when you are building new pages, you will get oversight of how content displays on different screen sizes. Designing for different devices is so important when the majority of e-commerce purchases go through mobile devices. We live in a mobile-first world and Gutenberg ensures your content is mobile-ready.
Conclusion
Gutenberg’s founder Matt Mullenweg aims to do for online content what Johannes Gutenberg did for traditional book publishing. Now, while this is a hugely ambitious goal, a more realistic and achievable target is using Gutenberg to improve your brand’s content creation, which it is more than capable of doing.
Gutenberg does this by allowing creatives to create, streamlining the content delivery process and enhancing your brand consistency, while facilitating more straightforward content development. To learn more about how you can improve your media brand’s authoring experience, get in touch with Powered By Coffee. We can help you deliver content that stands out from the rest of your industry and engages your core customers.
