Content marketing involves a lot of moving pieces. To consistently publish relevant content with which your audience will engage requires lots of tasks and people. With all these requirements, the efficiency of your content team may suffer.
So, how can your team optimize productivity? Processes, content workflows, and technology can support your enterprise content team. Here’s how to put such a strategy in place.
Improving Efficiency Actually Supports Quality
Efficiency in operations isn’t always a priority for companies. They care about quality, consistency, and engagement. However, efficiency does matter. If your team can’t keep up because of roadblocks or spending too much time on manual work, it can begin to erode quality.
An efficient content team, on the other hand, feels less stress and anxiety about meeting deadlines. Quality doesn’t slip. It can even improve. When you empower teams with the proper framework, amazing things can happen.
Many are realizing this value. The State of Agile Marketing 2020 report found that 48 percent of marketing departments are prioritizing productivity. The survey also revealed that 42 percent of marketing teams are adopting practices to boost efficiency. They can realize that through effective content planning, adoption of workflows, and using a centralized content marketing platform.
Now let’s look at the tips to drive the efficiency of your content team so you can work smarter, not harder.
Tip #1: Plan Throughout the Year
Content planning is critical for any team. However, annual planning is a bit outdated. As you’re well aware, being agile is a necessity. The last year plus taught us all that this is imperative to navigating the new landscape.
So, planning throughout the year should be a regular occurrence. Your content strategy is your blueprint for the plan, but you need to be revisiting that often as well. It’s certainly good practice to have your content calendar planned 60 days out or more. That helps set expectations and offers flexibility.
Bring your core team together at least quarterly to discuss what you’ve accomplished, where the bottlenecks were, and where you’re going.
Tip #2: Define Content Workflows
A big part of your content plan is the workflows that take a product from idea to measurement. Each type of content can have many steps in between. The first step is to define these. Subsequently, in content planning meetings, you should review them and consider:
- The allotted timeframe for each task: Is it too long? Too short?
- Where are the roadblocks: Do certain reviews hold up projects? Is a lack of design or specialist resources impacting throughput?
- Are you missing any tasks that you need to incorporate?
- Are there tasks you could automate like publishing, social media posting, or things around content analytics?
Having well-defined content workflows is vital for improving efficiency. However, they aren’t set in stone. You can change and revise them as needed.
Tip #3: Stop Holding Meetings for Updates
Meetings can be such a drain on your team. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have time together to collaborate and brainstorm. What you should eliminate are status update meetings. You won’t need them with a dynamic content calendar that automatically pushes notifications.
Anyone can view it and understand where a project is and what’s left to do. Plus, as soon as one task is complete, the person responsible for the subsequent one receives a notification.
Tip #4: Streamline Onboarding and Training
When you add someone new to the team, it can take them a bit to get up to speed. To close the learning curve, you can streamline onboarding and training. With your documented processes, you can easily share how your system works and what role they play.
You’re setting up your new talent to be successful by clearly defining what to do and how to do it. This can accelerate their time to getting everything down pat.
Tip #5: Automate Tedious Tasks
Using content automation tools can boost efficiency. Automation is the friend of any busy content team. The opportunity to do this resides within your content marketing software. We’re not talking about robots writing your blogs. Rather, it’s the tedious, time-consuming tasks that can lead to greater productivity, including:
- Creating workflow templates that you can reuse
- Content calendar change notifications regarding task completions, deadlines, and other information
- Content publishing through integrations with WordPress and social media platforms, so you’re not duplicating work
- Reporting that aggregates data from multiple sources to deliver comprehensive analytics
Tip #6: Make Collaboration Easier
Content projects don’t reside with one person. Content creators need to work with designers, SEO specialists, social media managers, and analysts. That’s just within the content team. They also may need to get approvals from legal or compliance and get insights from subject matter experts (SMEs) like product managers and sales.
Collaboration can often be a thorn in efficiency’s side. The key to better collaboration is making it easy. Your content marketing solution can enable this with shared content calendars, project management features, one-click duplication, and other tools. It’s all within one platform, so collaboration is no longer fragmented.
Tip #7: Ensure Your Strategy, Processes, and Workflows Are Accessible
Your content team may spend too much time just trying to find what they need. Having a repository for your strategy, processes, workflows, templates, and more in one place stops the back-and-forth hunting. While this may seem like a no-brainer, centralization of documentation is a constant theme among many companies.
With easy access, your team will know where everything is without wasting valuable time.
The Key to Enhancing Your Content Team’s Efficiency
In looking at all these tips and how they can invigorate your team, you can make all of them a part of your operations by adopting the right technology. The platform that does all this and more is DivvyHQ. Experience how it works and why it drives productivity by trying it for free.