Content has always been important. But for most enterprise organisations, it’s been managed as a cost centre — a necessary expense, difficult to measure, easy to cut. That era is ending. The most sophisticated enterprises are beginning to treat content the way they treat any other strategic asset: as something to be structured, measured, optimised, and compounded over time.
The Problem with the Old Model
The traditional enterprise approach to content follows a predictable pattern. A team produces content. That content gets published. Sometimes it performs well, often it doesn’t. Occasionally someone looks at the analytics. Decisions about what to create next are made based on intuition, editorial judgement, or whatever the CMO read on a plane last week.
This isn’t a people problem — it’s a systems problem. When analytics live in a separate tool from the editor, adoption is low. When data updates 48 hours after publication, it can’t inform decisions. When reporting is designed for data analysts rather than editors and writers, the insights never reach the people who can act on them.
Content as Enterprise IP
WordPress VIP CEO Nick Gernert has been making the case that content is enterprise IP — not just marketing material. Content shapes brand memory. It drives organic traffic that compounds in value over years. It generates leads that close deals. It builds the audience relationships that sustain subscription businesses.
The organisations that have internalised this view manage their content catalogues the way a private equity firm manages a portfolio. They track which content assets are appreciating in value (evergreen content driving sustained search traffic), which are depreciating (outdated content harming brand authority), and which new investments are likely to generate the best returns.
The Infrastructure for a Content Asset Strategy
Treating content as an asset class requires the right infrastructure. Three things in particular matter:
First, a CMS that enables content velocity — because the speed at which your team can publish, test, and iterate is a direct competitive advantage. Every hour a story sits in an approval queue or a template takes half a day to build is an hour your competitors are using.
Second, analytics that are embedded in the editorial workflow — not bolted on as an afterthought. When Parse.ly’s content intelligence is built into the WordPress editor, writers make smarter decisions without context-switching. Use of data increases by more than 500%. That’s not a marginal improvement — it’s a cultural transformation.
Third, a platform that scales with ambition. Enterprise content strategies don’t stay static. You launch new properties, enter new markets, adopt new formats. Your CMS needs to grow with you — not create new constraints every time your strategy evolves.
The Opportunity for Enterprise Leaders
The enterprises that will win the next decade of digital competition are the ones that start treating content as the strategic asset it already is — and building the platform, the culture, and the measurement infrastructure to manage it accordingly. The tools exist. The question is whether your organisation is ready to use them.