How Does ContentOps Differ from Traditional Content Marketing?
Discover the difference between content operations and business as usual when it comes to marketing and content editing.
Written by Vegard Ottervig on
Content operations (ContentOps) is a marketing principle integrating people, processes, and technology in content production.
Why? Because the latter is increasingly torn between ambitious content strategies and fragmentary multi channel delivery.
But involving writers, editors, and stakeholders in an editorial process with technological tools is hardly new.
What really sets ContentOps apart from its more traditional content marketing relatives?
What Is Traditional Content Marketing?
Content marketing is described as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.” Content marketing is thus any conscious effort of making content an integral part of your marketing strategy.
A defining characteristic of traditional content marketing is its ad hoc nature. A business decides it “needs content” to help attracting customers. An in-house marketer or an external agency is then tasked with creating content.
See also: How Enonic Uses ContentOps »
Another characteristic of content marketing is the silo aspect. There tends to be one writer, one content editor, one legal expert, etc. working in their own silos and with little or no overlapping and flexibility of roles.
Finally, traditional content marketing often relies on older tools and workflows. For instance, using a CMS designed mainly for publishing rather than a modern digital platform built for integrated, omnichannel experiences.
What Is ContentOps?
While content marketing can be structured, structure is on the other hand at the very core of ContentOps. The goal of ContentOps is to make the creation of quality content consistent, repeatable, and scalable.
Part of keeping a process structured is to define and plan every stage. The flexible, but well-defined roles of people is yet another key ingredient, and gives people more ownership to the entire process.
See also: Rocketpower Your Content Operations with Enonic »
Both people and processes are supported by modern technology, often augmented with AI and cloud services. Such modern storage, sharing, and communications tools are lightweight, user-friendly, and works instantly.
Content Marketing vs. ContentOps
Content marketing | ContentOps |
|---|---|
Ad hoc | Structured |
Silos | Defined, but flexible roles |
Often outdated tech | Modern, cloud-based AI-enchanced tech |
Content marketing focuses on creating and publishing content to attract audiences, while ContentOps focuses on building the structured processes, roles, and technology that make content creation consistent, scalable, and efficient.
Deriving from DevOps
To really understand what sets ContentOps apart, we should also look at the etymology. ContentOps clearly derives from the more familiar term “DevOps”, which stands for “developer operations.”
DevOps combines software development and IT operations. Developers are not only coding and programming solutions, but are also involved in deploying, testing, and production.
With ContentOps there is a clear parallel to content. It means to treat content with the same degree of seriousness and respect as development. Here multiple people are involved through several stages of the process, ensuring continuity and efficiency.
First published 4 November 2020, updated 26 November 2025.
