It can happen anywhere – but it’s especially rampant among content teams in larger companies. It’s content chaos. But there’s good news. An efficient content operations platform can clear out the chaos and organize your teams’ production.
When the demand for content comes from all over your company, as StoryChief’s Dayana Mayfield points out, keeping everything going smoothly becomes a massive challenge.
For instance, your writing team might be working on content for an account-based marketing campaign for one of your company’s biggest prospects. And then the sales team comes in. They need a new one-sheeter yesterday. Your go-to freelancers are off on vacation. FUDGE. And the cherry on top, you have a slew of blog posts due tomorrow.
You’d like to pull your hair out, but you can’t spare a single one.
What you need is a better way to organize your content operations – all the teams, processes, tools, and methods that go into content production. You need a content marketing platform that can bring subject matter experts, outside teams, and others into the process, but in an orderly way, one in which everyone is on the same page.
With such a content operations platform, you can coordinate every aspect of your teams’ operations, beginning with the bedrock of content marketing – content strategy.
It All Starts with Strategy
Think about the Budweiser Clydesdale teams that perform in parades, commercials, and live appearances during major sporting events. Even though each horse has a unique personality, temperament, and motivation, they work together as one.
Your content team can work together, too, provided they share a single vision. And they can do that a lot easier when you have a single place where you can plan, document, and implement a single strategy that all of them can follow. That one move alone can turn your content chaos into a smoothly running operation, making every piece of content you produce align with your brand voice and your company’s mission.
Provide a Single Hub for Planning, Scheduling, Collaboration, and Creation
Planning
Once you have a strategy, you can organize your teams around planning content that adheres to your goals, guidelines, topic cluster and brand voice. During the content planning process, look closely at your SEO keyword data and content analytics to identify what resonates with your target audiences and plan topics that appeal to them.
Scheduling
Your analytics data can also indicate the best times to schedule publication for each target customer segment, especially if your company has a global – or even interstate presence. For example, if you published content at the same time for your London prospects as you did your West Coast customers, you run the risk of one group not seeing your social posts.
Social media feeds are time-sensitive. Ill-timed posts will likely disappear into your followers’ lengthy notifications lists. Not many people these days have time to go through an entire list of the day’s notifications, even at the end of their day.
Email, too, produces better results if you tailor your send times to your recipients’ schedules. A central hub on which you can move seamlessly from planning to scheduling and on to collaboration and creation, will streamline the process, allowing your teams to spend more time on their specific tasks.
Once you set your schedule, make sure that all participants have access to your content calendar. If you plan to include design teams, subject matter experts, or participants from other departments, be sure to give them the proper credentials to log in.
The beauty of having a single platform to handle all content tasks is that every participant can see where the project is in the planning, creation, and distribution process. Not only does this motivate your teams to stay on track, but it allows others to see where they might pitch in to offer help if someone hits a creative wall.
Collaboration
Once you have chosen your general topics and set your publication dates, you need to put your teams’ collective heads together to flesh out each piece of content. Brainstorming sessions that help you figure out what angle you want each topic to take can help writers and video producers have a better idea about what direction to head in when creating.
Usually, it pays to also bring in teams that lie outside your marketing silo for content collaboration. People who can add needed perspective, such as subject matter experts, sales personnel, and customer support employees, can help you plan content that is both technically correct and meets the needs of your prospects and customers.
The goal of these collaboration sessions? To come up with a detailed, actionable brief that provides a concrete roadmap to help your creative teams produce content that aligns with your overall strategy and your specific goals for each piece. When you have a comprehensive operations platform in your content toolbox, you can streamline every step of the process.
Creation
The ideal content operations platform should provide a space for collaboration during the creation and editing processes. A smooth back-and-forth between your creative teams and editors is essential to producing top-quality content. Instead of emailing back and forth, they can receive real-time updates right on the platform, allowing content creators and editors to complete tasks more quickly and get the content into the right hands.
Publication and Amplification
Once the final edits happen, it’s time to put the magic of content automation to work. Since you need to publish content to each segment at varied times, an automation feature is a necessity for any enterprise-grade content operations platform.
Similarly, when you want to amplify specific pieces of content on social media, email, or paid promotions, you need to time their release to reach each target audience segment. When your content platform has this capability, you free your teams’ hands to create more industry-leading content.
Analytics
Now that the content is out, it’s time to measure its effectiveness. A content operations platform that includes a content measurement feature can simplify the process, allowing you to measure your critical KPIs and tweak each piece of content to perform better, all in one place.
Is There an Affordable All-Inclusive Content Operations Solution?
There are two ways to go to give your company a comprehensive way to manage your content operations. Companies who have tried the DIY approach, cobbling together various components from different providers, often find that doing so is awkward at best, and inadequate for all the tasks they need to manage.
For instance, one company that tried to MacGyver a solution discovered that they – not the service providers – were responsible for service and support. Its user experience was “basic,” which could prove time-consuming for a busy enterprise content team, as could the lack of support.
Why go through all that hassle when you can get an affordable solution that provides all the support you need and scales as you grow? And, with DivvyHQ, there’s no need to experiment with one tool for one task and another tool for another task.
You need a no-hassle solution that coordinates everything your teams need from strategy, to publication, to analytics. That’s DivvyHQ – and you can try it for free for 14 days. Start your no-obligation trial today.