Time is a luxury for content marketing managers, whose day-to-day responsibilities span everything from strategy to staffing. With so much to do, plus the pressure of producing high-quality assets with quantifiable results, today’s content leaders can use all the help they can get.
In working with our customers over the years, we’ve seen firsthand how having access to the right tools and templates can quickly change the game. And while saving time in the present is wonderful, perhaps the bigger benefit is knowing that your systematic improvements will ultimately save your team from experiencing avoidable anguish well into the future.
To that end, we’ve pulled together our most helpful templates, checklists, and shortcuts for the modern content marketing manager. So ready your bookmarking tool and read on for five resources designed just for you.
5 Templates, Checklists and Shortcuts for Content Marketing Managers
What’s On the Agenda? How to Structure Your Content Planning Meetings
Need content ideas (again)? Not sure where they’ll come from? Today, more and more content marketing teams are deeming the demand for ideas to be insatiable, with general brainstorming methods becoming increasingly futile. Complicating matters further is the need for new content ideas to fit snugly into a defined strategy.
The answer? Structure your content planning meetings in a way that makes it more likely that your team will produce on-point ideas and initiatives.
This three-step guide reveals proven conversation starters to add to your agenda, along with delegation best practices, and advice on how to cement your more fruitful planning process after you’ve created it. The MS Word version can also be downloaded directly below.
Definitive Guide to Planning a New Content Initiative
What’s better than a new content idea? A new content initiative that serves as a springboard for dozens of ideas – one with a core mission, a focused target audience, and a content team that’s giddy to get started.
But where do these initiatives come from? And how can we be sure that we’re setting our initiative up for sustainable success? You’ll find these answers and so much more within our Definitive Guide to Planning a New Content Initiative, which also includes a handy one-page strategy worksheet.
The Best Blog Post Template We’ve Ever Used [Free MS Word Download]
If forced to identify the atomic particle of content marketing, most of us would point to the blog post. This is reflected in our 2018 Content Planning Survey, which showed blog posts are the most planned marketing tactic of them all.
With so much dependence on a singular tactic, and a shape-shifting one at that, it pays to have structure. By downloading our favorite blog post template, you’ll find advice for gathering and organizing your thoughts, helping you to bolster your research, better organize your posts’ structure, and produce quality in less time and with greater consistency.
The template also includes prompts to ensure key elements are included in every post that gets published. You’ll find pre-writing questions, formatting guidelines, and best practices. In addition, you’ll get a post-writing checklist that’ll help you hold everyone accountable to the standards you’ve set – from your newest copywriter to your most senior editor.
DivvyHQ’s Production Workflow Template
The production, review and approval process for content assets can take infinite forms. Not only do these processes vary from one company to the next, they also often vary within organizations based on the type of content being produced.
Scattershot, undocumented workflows are sure to leave team members feeling frustrated and helpless. What’s worse, they’re a persistent obstacle in our pursuit of quality and efficiency.
Sophisticated content marketing platforms like DivvyHQ typically provide functionality for building out individual workflows for each type of content you need to produce. Short of that, there’s still value in the exercise of bringing a team together to talk through workflow processes, documenting the individual steps, solidifying who is responsible and estimating the time allotment for each step. A simple template like the one below might be all you need to capture your process for each type of content.
Editorial Calendar Templates: Pros, Cons, and What to Look For
This isn’t a template, per se. It’s more of a guide for making sure your content calendar is as easy-to-use and productive as it should be.
Not every company is ready for a calendar-based content planning tool, but until then, this guide will help you create a content calendar that can serve as the command center for everyone involved in production.
We sincerely hope you find solace in one or more of these resources. And you can be sure that we’ll continue to use our own content planning meeting template to keep producing content that aims to make life easier for content marketing managers everywhere. Subscribe to the DivvyHQ blog below to make sure you don’t miss our next template, checklist or shortcut.