Content marketing has become a critical component for brands in every industry, with 71% of marketers indicating that it is more critical in 2023 than in 2022. To compete, you need to produce more and better content.
When your team devotes significant time and energy to generating new ideas, you want to ensure that every idea gets published. How do you keep your team from spinning its wheels?
Staying in the content game isn’t easy, but it can be done. Let’s look at how you can start on the right foot and end up ahead of the competition, publishing every content idea while keeping them relevant.
Know Your Audience
The first step in ensuring every idea gets published is to make sure they are all good ideas. That takes more than just coming up with a cool new topic.
You can develop unique topics, but if your audience isn’t interested, it’s better to shelve the ideas than publish them.
The first rule of Content Marketing Club isn’t to not talk about content marketing; it’s “know your audience.”
Segmenting Your Audience
Your target audience isn’t likely one homogeneous group, all with the same interests and pain points and moving along the buyer’s journey in the same way. We recommend investing time in developing buyer personas and a customer journey map for each target customer group.
Segmenting your audience into various buyer personas allows you to target consumers according to:
- Demographic features
- Psychographic characteristics
- Technographic preferences
- Firmographics
- Behavioral tendencies
When you know who you’re talking to, generating relevant content ideas is easier.
Implement a Content Strategy
If you haven’t yet formalized a content strategy, do so as soon as possible. With buyer personas and customer journey maps in hand, you should be able to develop a solid strategy.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
A content strategy drives your marketing efforts, outlining personas, goals, and channels. It also establishes your parameters for publishing frequency, content types, and content structure guidelines.
A formalized content strategy provides your team with an operational framework and a focus for developing content ideas. With DivvyHQ as your content operations partner, you can ensure your team has the tools to generate ideas that meet your audience’s needs and fulfill strategy goals.
Do Your Research
To ensure your team develops ideas worth publishing, they need to know what topics resonate and what content works. Your team will need to roll up their sleeves and dig into:
- Trending keywords: Trending customer interests can change faster than the weather in New England. Keyword research is an ongoing but necessary process to ensure you stay on top of the topics that matter most to your audience. Be sure to pay attention to search intent.
- Your competitors: Your top-ranking competitors can give you an idea of what matters most to your target audience. We also recommend scrolling past page one in the search results to mine idea nuggets worth exploring and see what content isn’t a hit with consumers.
- Existing content: Conduct a content audit to see how existing content performs. An audit will also help you identify whether you’ve reached saturation on some topics while other highly relevant ones are sparse.
If you want to ensure every content idea is published, you should know what ideas will land with your audience.
Source: Netline
Maintain an Idea Repository
When your creatives understand what works, they can hammer out concepts that fit with your audience and content strategy. Whether these ideas are generated through brainstorming sessions or come as random inspiration, you don’t want your team to write them down on a napkin or device note that is all too likely to be tossed or buried.
Divvy’s idea repository provides a safe spot to park your team’s genius content ideas. This Parking Lot (that’s what it’s called) isn’t located at the bottom of anyone’s drawer.
Instead, it’s right on users’ dashboards, always visible and accessible. Instead of idea black holes, your team will know exactly where to go to look for a new topic to cover.
Use a Dynamic Content Calendar
Once you set your team up for successful content ideation, you need a structure and process that efficiently moves an idea through the content production process.
The first step is to ensure you schedule ideas. You won’t publish content that isn’t on your calendar.
A dynamic content calendar makes it easy to plan when to publish those great ideas your team develops. Our filtering capabilities allow you to determine how a new idea fits within the greater production schedule or zero in on a particular audience or campaign to ensure you publish it to the right audience at the right time in the right place.
Divvy’s calendar doesn’t just show you scheduled content. You can also view the due dates for each stage of the production process and tasks for each team member.
Create Custom Workflows
It’s too easy to schedule a topic and then forget about it until the deadline is upon you. A production workflow ensures that scheduled content makes it through each stage of the process rather than falling off everyone’s radar.
Creating a workflow lets you establish the project’s parameters, team member roles and responsibilities, and deadlines for each task. Divvy’s platform allows you to generate custom workflows for different campaigns or content types and use them as templates.
You can also automate your workflows, letting the system automatically generate and assign tasks and determine deadlines.
Our system includes automatic notifications to let team members know when tasks are completed or deadlines are approaching. We also incorporate project management capabilities so you can stay on top of the entire production process to ensure every idea ends up published.
Sign Up for DivvyHQ
To create an effective and efficient content production process, you need to incorporate the tools and structure your team needs to generate ideas that resonate and move assets from ideation to publication.
Divvy is the answer.
Our platform puts all your content creation tools in one place, allowing your team to access what they need when they need it without bouncing around from app to app or platform to platform. We make it easy for your team to ideate, collaborate, communicate, create, and publish. Request a demo today to set your team up for success and ensure every content idea ends up published.
