If you’re a small- to medium-sized business (SMB), considering the use of content marketing management software can present a dilemma. Of course, it seems like it would make your life easier. It could help you stay organized. It could bring visibility into your content schedule and show your teammates how much you have on your plate. And it could potentially help you automate some things. You just don’t know.
And then again, there’s the cost to consider. You think, “Is our content marketing process chaotic or painful enough to justify the cost?”
Like most SMBs, you pour all your energy into your work. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or you work alongside a small team of passionate, subject-matter experts, you all wear a lot of hats.
You might not know it yet, but those attributes (passion, subject matter expertise) makes you a perfect fit for content marketing. With a couple of caveats.
Just because you’re regularly creating and publishing content doesn’t mean you’re ready for content marketing management software. Before you invest, you should really have a few key things in place:
- An informed content strategy
- A desire to organize and streamline your content marketing processes.
With those two pillars in place, as Brad Wikstrom points out, an affordable content marketing management platform can help you simplify and automate many aspects of your content operation.
Content marketing management software allows you to pump out your content at scale and ensure it’s producing a hefty return on your investment (ROI). For an SMB, without a team of in-house content marketers or a huge marketing agency in its corner, content management software is pure marketing gold.
If you’re still on the fence, let’s take a deeper dive into why these two pillars are important, and perhaps we can help you decide on your readiness for such a platform.
Is Your Content Strategy Baked?
Before you consider buying a content marketing platform, examine your current strategy with a critical eye.
- Have you identified your target audiences—their demographics, their likes and dislikes, their behavior, and their pain points?
- Have you identified your brand messaging, personality and voice?
- Have you identified topics and themes that align with your customers’ biggest challenges?
- Have you laid out a content calendar that gets the right content into the right hands at the right time?
- Do you have production workflows and governance processes nailed down?
- Most importantly, does your company understand the importance of content marketing?
If not, you need to get your team together and hammer out a strategy that includes all of these key ingredients before you start implementing content marketing management software.
Processes and Workflow Considerations
One key difference between SMBs and large enterprise teams falls within the complexities of production workflows. SMBs definitely have an advantage in this department, simply because there tends to be fewer layers of bureaucracy in getting content assets approved and published.
Small teams or 1-person departments may be able to manage things just fine with simple task management systems or spreadsheets. But as soon as you start introducing a few other people into the review-and-approval mix, documented workflows can keep bottlenecks at bay.
For content marketing, a bare-bones workflow for a piece of long-form content might include:
- Brainstorming a topic
- Research and outline/brief creation
- Writing
- Editing/Proofreading
- Approval
- Publishing
- Promotion
Resource Constraints
Depending on your bandwidth and your team’s strengths, outsourcing some of these tasks may be your reality. Luckily, content marketing platforms typically help immensely in the collaboration department. Here are a few considerations as you think through your workflow and available resources:
- Evaluate your team’s talents: Do you have anyone on your staff who’s a dynamite writer, editor or proofreader? Do you have someone who’s never short of ideas about what can make your business produce more value for its customers? If so, delegate the topic brainstorming to your most creative thinkers and the writing, editing, and proofreading to those who excel in those tasks.
- Evaluate your team’s time utilization: What tasks would best utilize your staff members’ strengths? For example, if you’re a team of busy family physicians and nurses, your time is probably more valuable on the floor seeing patients rather than in content creation. The same rings true for other specialists, whether in engineering, real estate, or other skilled professions.
Delegate tasks according to your team’s talents and time
Let’s revisit that hypothetical physicians’ office. Since the medical field is highly technical, they would probably want to keep the topic and outline creation, as well as the approval process in-house. Their content workflow might look like this:
- Topic creation: Dr. Brown
- Research and outline/brief creation: Nurse Johnson
- Writing/Editing/Proofreading: Content marketing agency or freelancer
- Approval: Drs. Brown and Yildirim
- Publishing: Content marketing agency
- Promotion: Marketing intern
Once Your Content Ducks Are in a Row, Evaluate Software Solutions
Once you have a targeted strategy in place, resources at the ready, and a clear vision on how your content operation will flow, you’re ready for that content marketing management platform you’ve had your eye on. You’ll be properly prepared to automate the entire process—freeing you, your team, and your outsourced partners to do your work with undivided attention.
One Final Note…
When you do start evaluating content marketing management platforms, you’ll quickly notice enterprise-level price tags on most of the major players. Most platforms strictly target the large, enterprise companies that have big budgets and complex marketing organizations. You’ll likely get lost quickly in the complexities of their features and functionality.
For an SMB, the simpler the solution, the better the content marketing platform will meet their needs. That’s what DivvyHQ does—simplify and automate content marketing so you can stay on top of the thousands of things that you need to get done by yesterday… ?
If your SMB is ready to take your small-but-mighty content marketing operation to a whole new level, it’s time to put DivvyHQ to the test. Start your 14-day free trial today.