Content marketing has become the lifeblood of marketing for many businesses, with 71% of marketers indicating its importance has increased over the past year. However, despite content’s crucial role, only 29% think their company is at least somewhat effective at it.
Ouch.
I don’t know about you, but I find that statistic startling, given how hard content marketers work to produce helpful content. Unfortunately, organization and workflow challenges continue to hamper enterprise teams.
If your team struggles with effective content marketing, it’s time to have a good look at what most content managers and producers use to manage their schedules: calendar apps. Let’s dig into why these tools that should improve efficiency might hinder your team’s ability to stay on top of the chaos and produce killer content your audience loves.
Why Use Calendar Apps in the First Place?
Before we check out the issues, it’s important to note that scheduling and organizational apps are crucial to content marketing. No matter how large or small your brand is, flying by the seat of your pants isn’t an option, and most digital calendars are better than using a traditional spreadsheet.
Digital tools make navigating and managing schedules and tracking marketing efforts easier. They help ensure your team knows when things should be done and published. Often, multiple users can access the calendar without relying on constant emails every time there’s an update.
They usually provide a better overview of what’s coming down the pike, which helps your team plan and prepare. Many calendar apps also offer some automation technologies, reducing the resources needed to perform mundane and repetitive tasks.
Employing digital tools is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. However, you can improve your team’s productivity and content performance even more once you understand the main problem with the various calendar apps that most teams use and fix it.
What Is the Problem With Your Digital Scheduling Tools?
The calendar tools most content marketing teams use have several drawbacks, but they all stem from one primary problem. This problem arises from the plurality implied in the noun: “apps.”
If your team is like most, you employ multiple calendar apps to meet your content production needs. You probably use at least three to manage different aspects of the wheel that keeps your content operations rolling:
- Project management
- Content scheduling
- Editorial planning
However, you may also use more than one app for scheduling and posting content, with separate tools for socials, blog posts, emails, and other marketing activities.
In other words, you are still performing a major juggling act.
Silos Are Still a Thing
Silos are almost unavoidable for enterprise content ops. However, they don’t need to be rigid.
Unfortunately, they often are, and when each silo is using their own calendar apps, that doesn’t do anything to improve visibility and cooperation between departments, teams, and stakeholders.
Team members who serve in different roles are more likely to be cut off from one another. Your social media creators are probably unaware of what’s happening in the blogging world. The sales department has no clue about the workings over in customer service.
Source: Integration International
When rigid silos exist, aligning team efforts to your content marketing and brand goals is very challenging.
Collaboration Is Hard
Collaboration improves efficiency and effectiveness. Open communication and cooperation simplify strategy implementation.
Everyone should be working together to coordinate content production efforts across channels, with messaging from one piggybacking on another. Your teams can repurpose content and scale campaigns to reach a broader audience. They can also bounce ideas off one another to spur creativity.
However, collaboration becomes challenging if teams rely on differing calendar apps. It’s even harder when teams are dispersed.
Your Apps Don’t Talk to One Another
Depending on which tools you use and how advanced they are, your apps might have a limited ability to talk to one another, if at all. A lack of integrations between scheduling tools enhances the issues I’ve already mentioned.
Working between multiple apps will make your job harder if you are a content manager. Coordinating teams, production schedules, and goals is messy if you can’t clearly see how all components work together.
Measuring Success Isn’t Easy
If you’re one of the 81% of organizations that measure content performance, you probably struggle with measuring success when juggling multiple calendar apps. Aggregating data from various channels is frustrating enough, but generating clear and helpful reports for your teams and the C-suite can feel impossible.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
Without good analytics and reporting, you will be hard-pressed to determine what’s working and what isn’t, let alone justify your content marketing budget requirements. What about conducting a content audit? Forget about it.
How Do You Fix the Problem?
The best way to fix the problem is to use a product that streamlines content operations across teams and your organization. While you may be able to integrate some of your scheduling tools, if you can’t pull them all together in one place, you will still lack the transparency and efficiency you’d get from employing a single solution that does it all.
DivvyHQ is your one-stop shop for content operations, eliminating the problem of using multiple calendar apps. Our platform offers:
- Management tools: We fold content-marketing-specific project management tools into our content operations platform, giving managers a fluid content production and management experience.
- Editorial and scheduling tools: Divvy’s platform combines editorial and scheduling tools to streamline the content planning and production process. When you place an asset on the calendar, it triggers your content workflow, and everyone involved can track its progress.
- Collaboration and communication tools: We baked collaboration and communication into our system. It’s one of our not-so-secret ingredients for eliminating content chaos. We provide a shared idea repository, integrated commenting and messaging, a content editor, and automated notifications.
- Integration capabilities: Divvy’s platform integrates with all your current tools. With over 1,000 integrations and an open API, you won’t have to worry about whether your content apps talk to each other, your customer relationship management system, or your Google Analytics dashboard.
Our platform provides a single hub for your content operations, breaking down rigid silos and enabling easy content performance measurement and tracking.
How Do You Get Started With Divvy and Remove the Content Apps Problem?
Are you ready to eliminate the problem with your content apps? I thought so. Never fear; Divvy is here. We make it easy for you to get started with customizable solutions and a quick onboarding process. Request a demo today to see how it works!
