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Posted by Sanket Patel
April 25, 2016
Remember, there’s a big audience out there for almost every topic under the sun. And, there’s an equal amount of companies and brands competing for them. So, you need the right way to stand apart, on top and keep growing your base and build up an audience that’ll build up your business.
Content Marketing is a strategical approach to creating and sharing relevant and consistent content to attract and retain the pre-defined target audience to ultimately drive profitable customers. This process results in building brand awareness, set up thought leadership, elevating messaging, and engaging your audience.
There are a number of factors to play with the content that can cause big chaos before content marketers even realize it’s happening. To combat this chaos, the formation of a content marketing agency should result in individual roles that are beautifully synced.
You may need to evaluate the way you manage your team and the content they produce. So, let’s get started with these tactical ways to speed up your content editorial process by maintaining the quality of the content.
Working with whether your internal content team or external freelancers, It is sometimes critical for you to assign specific roles for each task and determine who’s doing what. If there’s only one man, producing all the content and tracking it’s effectiveness – you may fall behind and that person may also get exhausted. Like, your social media executive may have some good design skills and an analytics manager may write a good copy on marketing analytics. Depending on your company’s budget and resources, you can assign multiple roles to a specific member.
What will be your Content Strategy?
Yes, here’s the starting point! The Director or Content Strategist is someone who is at highly experienced in digital marketing strategy and they may have developed a content strategy for you.
So now, it’s up to your team members how to follow and implement those strategies.
Let’s explore the Roles of Production and Editorial management
Content Manager: Once, the company implements content marketing into its arsenal, these people are usually the first ones to hire. They are responsible to oversee the whole process. They are also referred to as ‘Content Marketing Manager’ or ‘Chief Content Officer.
Managing Editor: They often work for multiple tasks and involve in editing several contents, managing the writers, and work with the content managers to plan for the content calendar.
Social Media Executive: He’ll be able to tell you how is your content working on social media and regularly give you reports having details of their performance on various social channels.
Analytics Manager: These people should have excellent data and web analytics abilities. They play a vital role in proving ROI of your content marketing activities as they measure the effectiveness of the content once published.
Structuring Your Content Production Team
Content Writers: The number of content writers you need totally depends on the number quantity of content to be produced. Make sure, you enable your writers with all possible resources and writing guidelines to save time while editing.
Designers: Although you have good quality solid content, a good designer is worth giving a sexy look to it. If you don’t have enough budget to hire a designer, you can explore some online tools for the best designing options.
Proof Readers: Once an article is edited, it’s always good to get a fresh pair of eyes onto the piece for extra quality control. Often, content teams share the proofreading works.
It is a key element in speeding up your content editorial process. Clearly communicate the goals to the writers and they should have access to a content guidelines document. This will definitely help them write faster and the editor to breeze through the draft.
This is the checklist you should consider before sending any requirement to the content producer:
– The Goal of the content
– The themes or topics to be covered
– The audience who’ll be reading their content
– Providing some useful research links or existing assets that may help them
Provide as much information as possible to your content writers because this will save time and make everyone’s job easier.
Don’t forget, contents are the assets you produce. You should be able to leverage it to create at least 5-6 more pieces. For example, a simple ebook can be transformed into a slide share presentation, an infographic, an image for social media, using quotes you can prepare for tweets, a blog post, etc. The other important way is using Webinars to repurpose the content that can cover a wide range of topics.
So, instead of utilizing a single content for one use, repurpose the contents and save time. Just imagine, you have 4 e-books; that’s something around 20-25 pieces of content just sitting there waiting to be produced.
Fortunately, there are many tools available in the market that help you simplify and accelerate your editorial process. Exchanging emails back and forth when an asset requires multiple rewrites is highly time-consuming. But yes, it’s important that you don’t get trapped in these tools. Use them only when required. Sometimes, a simple spreadsheet may do magic for you.
Let’s have a look at the tools you can use in your editorial process that can be time-savers:
Google Docs: With this tool, your editor can directly add comments to each document. It is hosted on the cloud so they are saved on Google’s server and there’s no need to save them anywhere else, you can access them whenever you want online.
Trello: This is a revolutionary tool to manage your inboxes. It allows you to organize content and let your writers upload drafts, comment on the projects and even track the time it takes to accomplish each task.
Buzz Sumo: Are you experiencing a shortage of ideas? This is an ideal tool that allows you to search for the best pieces of content on the web. You can judge them by Linked in shares, Facebook Likes, Tweets, and so on. This will give you a clear image of what type of content is most liked by your target audience.
These calendars are big-time savers and the most effective ways to supercharge your editorial process. It is usually utilized by the content manager or content editor and should include your content goals, important links, and the things which are due and when. There are a variety of free tools available to map out your content calendar.
Google Calendar: With Google Calendar, there are many templates available, you can download any one or create your own calendar and start filling your content ideas and the marketing goals and objectives your company aims to fulfill. The best part is you get notifications on your phone or desktop when your content is due.
Excel Spreadsheet: This is the most effective way to manage your content editorial process. You can easily set up different columns for the due date, publishing date, writer’s name, keywords, notes, and any other relevant information you need. Differentiate your work with different tabs for week’s or month’s contents you’re going to produce. This will help you with easy navigation.
Besides the above-mentioned tools and tactics, you can also lookout for some content platforms for a robust content management experience. This can help you from beginning to the end – from building an editorial calendar to measuring the progress of production to publication and performance and more.
Although, these tools and calendars are effective, time-saving, and give you a complete perspective of your content development process, what you’ll really need is to be focused on each task and distribute the workload among the team wisely and allocate tasks when you’re overloaded with work. After all, management is something you’ll have to intelligently deal with to harness the persuasive power of your content – The King.
Which tools and strategies do you apply to save time in your content management process? You can share in the comments below!
