4 Innovative Approaches to Collaborative Content Creation and Distribution

Creating and distributing new (and valuable) content isn’t easy… This is one of the many reasons why collaboration is so important.

If you can build a meaningful network of contributors and partners within and outside your organization, you can create great content at scale.

If you run a business, telling your brand story has never been more important. Creating a robust online presence is key to generating demand, staying relevant, and converting leads.

If you run a content agency, streamlining your team’s content processes is crucial to meeting deadlines and producing quality work every time.

Whichever bucket you fall into, this article is for you.

Keep reading to learn a few innovative approaches you can use to collaborate on content creation and distribution. These strategies focus on partnerships and team collaboration technologies to help you create a well-oiled content production machine (and reduce how much you spend on content marketing activities).

Curious to learn more?

1. Partner With Relevant Influencers and Guest Authors to Scale Your Content Marketing

Join forces with influencers and guest authors who are relevant to your industry and brand (or the clients you produce content for) to expand content production and publication.

If you run a big-time brand or cater to clients with large budgets, working with mega-influencers, such as public figures or celebrities, can pay big dividends with content distribution and reach.

For instance, the telehealth brand, Hers, partnered with actor Kristen Bell as an ambassador for mental health meds:

Source: BusinessWire

Co-Founder and SVP of Brand and Innovation, Hilary Coles noted the following about the partnership’s impact:

“In her role as Mental Health Ambassador, Bell will share about her personal mental health journey to drive meaningful conversations on the topic. She will also call attention the individualized care Hers provides access to for anxiety and depression.”

The telehealth brand also partnered with Miley Cyrus for its prescription skincare line.

Source: BeautyPackaging.com

The actor and singer noted:

“In this new advisory role, I hope to work closely with the company and introduce my fans to an easier, more personalized skincare journey.”
– Miley Cyrus

Hers’ CEO and co-founder Andrew Dudum mentioned:

“We’re thrilled to have Miley, who is an incredibly outspoken and passionate businesswoman in her own right, supporting our efforts to bring personalized skincare to a larger audience.”

With access to large influencer audiences, there’s no limit to how far out your content distribution can go.

If you run or represent a small to mid-size company, work with micro or nano influencers with audiences that align with yours. These brand advocates accommodate a range of budgets and have curated highly niche audiences that are ready to buy.

If you’re in the B2B industry, lock arms with trusted guest authors or B2B affiliate marketers.

Invite your brand partners to create authoritative content, such as guest posts, product reviews, comparison guides, demos, thought leadership pieces, and tutorials. These highly searchable content types can help you scale your content marketing goals.

You can take this tip up a notch by asking partners to create gated assets, such as webinar content, mini-courses, or ebooks and guides. This can help your organization collect quality opt-ins for lead nurturing campaigns.

For instance, the social media scheduling platform Later partnered with Instagram Strategist Elise Darma to create a gated workshop on how to generate real and free followers on Instagram:

Source: Later.com

But Elise isn’t the only one.

Later has also established multiple partnerships with aligned creators, subject-matter experts, and industry professionals to create other gated assets, such as:

• Videos
• Webinars
• Product videos
• Tutorials
• Guides
• Digital events

And speaking of subject-matter experts…

2. Outsource to Subject-matter Experts (SMEs) With Small Content Production Teams

Outsourcing content to subject-matter experts with teams can help you accelerate and scale your content output. These are essentially “mini-agencies” where a contractor works with subcontractors to produce content for a book of clients within a specific industry or domain.

By working with these specialists, you can create multiple content teams, each focused on specific topics, content orders, and project deadlines.

For agencies, this means having more hand-off-ready content to deliver to clients without going through the usual production process. This allows for faster and more efficient content delivery.

As a brand, outsourcing content production can lighten the load on your in-house team. With the help of outsourced content producers, you can scale content production without burning out employees.

A perfect example of this type of outsourced team is Aha Media Group, a niche agency that specializes in developing content marketing programs only for healthcare industry clients.

Source: Aha Media Group

*Pro-Tip: Send your small subject-matter expert teams weekly, monthly, or quarterly content orders — and ask them to submit the final pieces to you in batches. This helps you stay ahead of deadlines, produce more quality work, and scale content.

3. Give In-house and Outsourced Team Members Access to AI-based Content Production Tools

With multiple contributors comes the potential for grammatical errors, spelling mishaps, and style variations.

To make sure the final output always remains consistent with brand guidelines and is distribution-ready, equip your creators with any relevant content formatting templates and a suite of AI content production tools.

Some great tools to give access to include:

AI SEO Tools

These tools leverage artificial intelligence to help teams optimize content for search engines.

Consider supplying credentials to an SEO platform, such as MarketMuse, Frase, or Clearscope. These options help writers identify relevant keywords and competitor scores so they can produce valuable content that ranks.

They’re also effective at helping creators produce content that aligns with every milestone in the Digital Customer Journey. For instance, the right SEO tool can help content writers identify keywords for top-, middle-, and bottom-of-the-funnel content.

AI Writing Assistants

Help your team beat writer’s block in its tracks, plan outlines, or receive writing suggestions with tools like Writer, Jasper, Simplified AI, ChatGPT, or Google’s Bard.

AI Proofreading Tools

Let’s face it. Reading every piece of content out loud before publishing is time-consuming.

An AI proofreading tool helps combat this issue by allowing teams to edit content without manually combing through each asset. The AI tool auto-generates recommendations, which writers can accept in one quick click.

Source: Wordvice AI

Check out options such as Wordvice AI, Grammarly, and Writer.

AI Readability Tools

Help your team write content that’s suitable for the web and the target audience’s average reading level.

With a tool like Writer or the Hemingway app, writers can see the reading level for their pieces and adjust the text to decrease or raise the final score.

AI Voice Generators

Give your content team access to AI voice generators to help them create high-quality audio content faster and easier. They can use them to generate realistic and diverse voices that can narrate content, such as podcasts, videos, or even audiobooks.

Source: Lovo.ai

Choose from a wide range of voices to find one that fits the brand’s style and tone. Check out tools such as LOVO AI, Murf.ai, and HeyGen.

By integrating the above tools into their daily workflows, you can support content creators to deliver their best work.

4. Use a Content Collaboration Platform to Centralize Your Content Operation

When you’re managing a robust content operation that includes a variety of internal and external resources, you can’t afford to let anything slip through the cracks. You have a publication and distribution schedule to adhere to and people to collaborate with.

As you may’ve learned by now, one information silo or kink in the machine can set an entire project off-track. That’s why organizing your processes with a content collaboration tool and operations platform is pivotal.

We may be biased… but we recommend DivvyHQ.

With Divvy, you’ll truly have a one-stop shop for your content planning, collaboration, and production work. It’s specifically designed to help content teams simplify and optimize the content development process from start to finish.

With Divvy, you’ll have a range of features at your fingertips to enhance your content management experience.

You’ll be able to:

• Easily define your content strategy
• Efficiently manage your team, projects, and assets
• Create and customize your content calendars
• Streamline and automate your content workflows
• Enhance visibility, communication, and project tracking
• Have access to real-time tracking
• Measure content performance
• Have access to seamless integrations with over 1,000 apps

On top of these amazing features, all Divvy plans come with:

• Idea storage in the DivvyHQ “Parking Lot” — a central hub for storing content ideas, briefs, and templates
• Robust content calendars for an organized overview
• Unlimited content repository with no data limitations
• Cloud file storage integrations with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, making collaboration and production efficiency easier than ever

Wrapping Up

If scaling content is on your to-do list, you need people and software to help you achieve your goals. By collaborating with experienced content marketers, influencers, and SMEs, and using the right tools, you can create a content marketing production line that runs strategically.

You’ll know what’s due when and how, who’s in charge, and how to fulfill each project. You’ll also have everything you’ll need to measure what’s working and what needs refining.

If you’ve been meaning to streamline your content operations and collaboration, let this guide be the final push you’ve been looking for.

Here’s to your success! And remember, never underestimate the benefits of content collaboration.

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