When is a Team Ready for a Content Marketing Platform?
Content marketing platforms can address a multitude of challenges for companies on the rise. They’re not, however, a cure-all. If your team isn’t ready for a content marketing platform, or more importantly, ready for change, then buying one can be the wrong decision.
Instead of hopping on the content marketing platform bandwagon because everyone else is, evaluate your team’s readiness for such a move. Here are some things that you should consider that not only gauge readiness, but also may help you uncover issues that need to be resolved before buying.
Tell Us Where it Hurts
Process pain is common among content teams, but it isn’t always a sign of buying a content marketing platform. In most cases, people and organizational silos introduce the most friction into a complicated process. In other cases, teams simply haven’t developed a thorough content strategy or production workflows, all of which are vital components that a new platform isn’t going to magically flush out for you.
You need to devise a content marketing strategy and a content plan (which are two different things, BTW) with production workflows that your team can get behind before trying to automate these key elements with a platform.
A lack of definition in the content creation process, too, can cause discomfort. With more structure, that uneasiness can subside, freeing producers to create better, more targeted content, platform or not.
Lastly, if members of your team aren’t willing to collaborate, you have an uphill battle on your hands. Even the best content marketing platforms only work as well as the people using them. Cultivating an environment that encourages collaboration is probably one of the most important aspects of readiness. Relying on a platform to try and change a toxic culture is an unreasonable idea.
Are Convoluted Processes Hampering Your Team’s Best Efforts?
If your company is in insurance, health care, or another strictly regulated industry, there’s likely a convoluted process that content creators must go through to get approval from the compliance bigwigs for every piece of content they create.
Or perhaps your company is a global player with teams in multiple time zones, cultural differences, and language translations, all of which complicates content creation. But hey…process #FAILS on a global scale can get your brand on YouTube!
If these situations slow down your team, then a content marketing platform may very well be a godsend. With such a platform, you’ll have all the tools in one place to ensure that you synchronize your content calendar with your overseas partners, your workflows maintain an efficient flow for compliance reviews and approvals, your language adheres to industry compliance requirements and style guidelines, and that you communicate clearly in a way that speaks with one voice, that of your brand.
Are Your Conversion Rates in the Doldrums?
As you grow your content marketing operation, there comes a point when you need a quick, accurate way to measure the return on your investment. If you’re not seeing as many conversions as you did when you had fewer pieces of content to manage – or if your conversion rate isn’t improving – you might be ready for a content marketing platform.
Top-quality content marketing platforms provide you with extensive content analytics to make sure you’re reaching the right people at the right time with the right content. You can even test variations in your content to see which form drives more conversions, tweaking your content more with each campaign to send your conversion rate soaring.
A content marketing platform allows you to segment your content’s audience by demographics and behavior, providing each customer segment with the content they need to solve their specific challenges, and not turning them off with irrelevant content.
With the increased demand for personalization and relevance, you need a system that makes content collaboration easy. When your content creation team can collaborate easily with your sales team – who are on the front line and know their customers’ pain points – you can achieve more conversions with content tailored to each customer’s exact needs.
Do You Go Outside the Marketing Department for Content?
That very collaboration with people outside the marketing department, while it provides a greater depth of perspective in your content, can open up other challenges. Specifically, these other content creators might not be familiar with your brand voice, your compliance requirements, or your style guidelines.
A content marketing platform provides these other voices with access to regular content creators who are more familiar with the company’s content standards.
Having a platform in place allows, for example, engineers to contribute their extensive knowledge about how and why your company’s new gadget works without worry about them straying from compliance or legal guidelines. It allows your company to showcase the expertise and insights of all your subject matter experts while still having a process in place to draft, review, approve and distribute their content to the right audience.
Are You Ready to Scale?
Many companies around the globe understand the vital role that content plays in reaching customers and have seen success in their own endeavors. Naturally, if something is working in marketing, companies are going to want to scale up those initiatives. New content channels arise providing companies with new avenues. Existing channels show positive gains. Pumping up the content volume in all of these channels is a natural evolution.
But more volume requires more people and resources. More people outputting a higher volume can naturally lead to more disorganization and chaos without the right processes and tools in place.
To scale up a content marketing operation, you need a system that can:
- House your strategic guidelines
- Organize your content execution plans across multiple channels and teams
- Automate your planning, production and distribution processes
- Analyze the results
When you’re ready to grow your content marketing (and your business), it’s time to step up to a content marketing platform that can do just that. To manage and grow your company’s presence among its target customers both online and off, you need a content solution that can help your team efficiently package and deliver great ideas to those who need to read, watch, hear, or see it.
Bottom line, if you think your team is ready to take your content marketing to the next level, why not take DivvyHQ for a test drive, free for 14 days.
