How to manage your content team
Every marketer knows that Content Marketing is on the rise. If you search for buzzwords or trends, you’ll see that content, engagement, content curation, etc., are at the top of the lists.
This new reality is closely linked to the fact that, according to a survey conducted by Roper, 61% of people feel more confident about a company when it provides personalized content, and are more likely to make a purchase decision.
As Content Marketing grows dramatically, marketing teams and small businesses are struggling to meet consumer demands and produce high-quality content at scale. Many companies have decided to adjust their content and create a team to produce the material, which is wonderful. However, because it is a completely new world, doubts arise and the biggest one is: how to manage this content team taking the best advantage of each member and still manage to increase productivity.
If you have this question too, don’t worry! We will clarify it throughout today’s post, showing how Workflow by GrowthHackers can help you in this challenge.
Define goals and set your strategy
With increasing demand, it is crucial that Content Marketing processes are in place to help your content team to work more assertively, but that does not mean they need to work harder. After all, overloading your team can generate burn out, mistakes, and more reviewing, instead of more productivity. The good news is that there are ways to increase productivity without straining your staff.
However, before we address the issue of management, we need to take the time to talk about processes. That’s because content creation can’t be rushed — although many brands act as if this is the right way to go. You need to think about your target audience (who they are, what they care about) and, above all, think about your goals and strategies as a company. Therefore, before creating a content team, define:
- What do you want to accomplish with your content?
- How can you achieve your goals effectively?
In short, everyone wants content to generate more customers, right? In other words, and in terms of the Inbound Marketing methodology, companies want the content to make consumers walk along the sales funnel until the conversion finally takes place. For that, obviously, it is necessary to create other specific goals for the business, such as: increasing the customer base, improving the reputation, increasing engagement, etc. The possibilities are endless, just know where you want to go. And don’t forget to work with monitoring metrics, of course.
Workflow Platform is great for content management. Before your team starts creating content, you should work on your content strategy. Workflow has a dedicated module for you to formalize your strategy, where you can define your personas and create an assertive customer journey, with relevant and quality information that will help your contributors to keep the right tone on every step of the way.
Identify your target audience
As stated earlier, at the time we think about goals and strategies, we should also be thinking about who the target audience is. So when you are defining your personas, it is important to think about what they need or want. In this sense, think about the following questions:
- What are the general demographics of your target audience?
- What influences them? Who influences them?
- What does your target audience need (detailed product information, tutorials, etc.)?
- What are the problems facing your target audience and how can you help to remedy them?
- What questions do your readers ask and what topics would they like to see addressed?
These questions will give you a good direction both for the creation of buyer personas and for the generation of guidelines for the sales funnel, which leads us to the next topic.
Describe your sales funnel
This is the step that will help your content team to create your editorial calendar — we will address this issue later on — and will allow you to reach your ideal customers at each stage of the funnel with specific content, encouraging them to convert. To create this funnel, ask yourself:
- What are the main questions and concerns that your persona faces at this stage of the funnel?
- What questions does your persona have?
- What kind of content and themes can you launch to answer these questions or answer those concerns?
- What are some examples of headlines for this type of content?
Now that you have your goals and strategies, your persona, and your sales funnel structured, you have managed to put together a structure for your content team to work and build engaging content. The next step is to build your content team!
Build your content team
A content team needs to be efficient, effective, and well organized. It is one of the most important assets of Content Marketing. This is because, once you put human resources to work with defined responsibilities, you will be able to be more productive, as all day-to-day activities will be divided in a clear way, and everyone will know what is expected and how to achieve results.
Each content team will have a different structure, depending on your type of business, how your content mix will be, and your strategy as a whole. Each member of your team will often be specialized in an area. If you don’t have team members yet or don’t know where to look for help, don’t worry! The Workflow software has several highly specialized Content Marketing professionals ready to assist you in creating, producing, and managing content.
But, before you go researching, it is important to understand that a content team needs to cover certain specialties. And you need to be aware of what each role’s responsibilities are:
- Copywriter: this is the content creator and will produce most of your demand, being able to collaborate with designers and other team members when creating content. He can be a journalist, copywriter or even an expert in his field and must have a lot of writing skills.
- Editor: this is the professional who reviews, edits, and corrects the contents. It acts as a support for the writer, providing information, references, and even assisting in structuring the text.
- Content Manager: the account manager is the one who will manage your calendar and coordinate the content team as a whole, especially when you work with freelancers — in this case, this role is even more important. Content Manager is the one that guarantees the quality of the content and the execution of the strategy as a whole, also acting as editor in several cases.
- Designer: this is the professional who gives the color and fluidity to content, working with images from original blog posts, infographics, presentations or tutorials, and e-books.
- SEO editor: this is an analytical professional, who works with Google Analytics and KPIs, in addition to optimizing content for search engines. He looks for ways to optimize his content marketing and improve the ROI of his efforts, ensuring that his content’s performance.
How to manage your content team
Once your team is structured, it’s time to manage it. For this, it is necessary to keep in mind that Content Marketing is guided by processes and that is why it is important that each team member understands where they fit in, interacting efficiently every day.
Much of this efficiency is translated into a constant production of content, which is a great challenge. Content production can be difficult when the processes and approvals are slow. Content Marketing success is linked to the ability to manage your content team and to have tools that facilitate work.
Production of quality content on a large scale depends on a well-structured and personalized workflow for your company, ensuring that deadlines are met and that each team member fulfills his part in the “agreement”. A clear and objective language is required — that is, a tool, a publication schedule (content calendar), and stipulated deadlines (the time required for each stage of the workflow).
Now let’s recap to clarify what is needed to manage your content team:
Content Calendar
This publication schedule is what keeps activities up to date and your team aligned. It tells you where each piece of content is in your pipeline. In this sense, it is essential that you map the entire publication schedule, including briefing generation, the title, the assignments of each stage, due, date, or any other pertinent information, such persona, keywords to be used, funnel stage, etc.
Workflow by GrowthHackers has a very intuitive interface with a Content Calendar that is easy to access and fully customizable to the needs of each client. You can assign the steps to each team member and the lead times for each of these steps. In addition, there is a space to add the briefing, keywords and information about the sales funnel and the buyer persona without leaving the content editor.
Workflow
Depending on your team’s structure and the format of the content itself, it is possible to create different steps for content production. However, it is important to know the daily and monthly functions of each team member, with a previously created workflow.
With Workflow, it is possible to create customized steps for each type of content. For example, if you are a marketing agency, these steps could be used as a guideline:
- Brainstorming: Content Manager, Client, Agency.
- First draft: Editor.
- Edition: Content Manager.
- Agency approval: Content Manager (if he works within the agency) or a person in charge of the agency.
- Final customer approval: Customer.
- Creation of images: Designer, Agency (at this stage it is important to define whether there will be final approval by the client or not and what will be the deadline as well).
Automation
It is possible to achieve the same or even better results with less effort from your team. This increase in productivity is achieved when the management of your content team is done with automation through a quality tool.
When this entire process is set up manually, Content Managers can be overloaded with spreadsheets and extensive email exchange. That is why using content automation for team management is so important.
Worlflow increases the productivity of content teams because in addition to personalizing the workflow, it leaves automated steps for production with automatic e-mail triggering and notifications reminding your team of deadlines. In addition, it is possible to exchange messages within the platform itself, preventing important information from being lost.
Learn how you can manage your content team more quickly and more productively, make an appointment with our experts!
Originally published at https://blog.contentools.com.br on October 10, 2019.
