Stephanie Donelson

Happy Valentine’s Day!

While many of us are focused on our personal relationships today, I wanted to take a closer look at my own professional relationship with content marketing. I love content marketing but like any relationship, it has its own set of quirks and challenges.

If you’re finding your relationship strained with content marketing it might be due to the processes is place that can, without meaning to, impede productivity.

It’s time to fall back in love with your content marketing processes to keep productivity at its peak and allowing you to put your best work forward.

10 productivity tips to improve content marketing

1. Create a marketing timeline

First up, you should have a wide-angle lens view of what your wider marketing team or sales team is doing this year. From attending industry conferences to running promotions, you should know what’s on the calendar so you can create effective content around it.

2. Create a production schedule

If you’ve got a team that’s a well-oiled machine, you can approximate how much time certain tasks take to complete so work backwards and make content production schedules for different assets. If sales wants a new one-sheeter made about a product, you can tell them how much time you’ll need to turn it around.

This can also feed into an editorial calendar where you can plan multiple pieces of content at the same time as they’ll be at different stages of their production schedule, freeing up time for different team members.

3. Build a brief

An easy way to keep everyone on the same page about a new piece of content and how it’ll flow through production is to have standardized creative briefs. We all know that teammate that urgently tells you about a piece of content they need and state how easy it’ll be and it will barely take any time at all so they shouldn’t have to waste time filling out a brief and then you find yourself stuck in revision hell for this thing that was supposed to be easy.

Make it a rule that no piece of content will be created without a creative brief.

Common things to include on your creative brief:

• Deadline
• Content format
• Why this asset is needed/what customer problem is it solving?
• Who’s it for (audience/customer segment/persona)?
• Summary of what’s needed
• Specific pieces of content or key takeaways
• Subject matter expert for assistance with piece
• Final call-to-action

4. Map content to promotion channels 

Keep a master list of all the different promotion channels and map what piece of content will be promoted where as it goes on the editorial calendar.

This is another area where you can work backwards as you’ll be looking at sponsored content or content that’s planned to be used in future advertising campaigns so you have a firm deadline in mind.

Common promotion channels for content marketing include:

• Organic social media
• Paid social media
• Organic search
• PPC
• Email newsletters
• Sponsored emails
• Website banner ads
• Print ads
• Direct mail
• In-person events

5. Repurpose plan 

With every piece of content that’s drummed up, you should think of at least one way you can repurpose it down the road. Creating a webinar? Maybe the key takeaways can be repurposed into an infographic. Keep in mind that your audience is comprised of a variety of people who like to consume content in different ways so repurposing great content can help you avoid recreating the wheel but serve quality content in the right format to the right person.

6. Plan a power hour (or two)

Creativity can be a lot like lightning, you never know when or where it’ll strike but like lightning, once it does it can easily catch fire and spread. Plan creative brainstorming sessions so teammates bounce ideas off one another and get inspired by others’ ideas – and maybe encourage people to bring notes of random ideas they’ve had for a while to get the ball rolling.

Whether you can be in person and whiteboard everything out or are remote and sharing a screen, make sure everyone sees the ideas that are on the table so they can mull them over and think of new creative directions for new pieces of content.

Maybe these sessions are a big free-for-all where you discuss all types of content or you narrow down the scope so people only brainstorm blog or webinar topics.

If you need some kick-off questions to spark some creative thinking, try these:

• If we had to make a new how-to guide for Product X, what key things would be included?
• What content does our competition have that we don’t?
• What’s the number one reason customers choose us over the competition?
• When our customers think of our brand, what do you think comes to mind?
• What questions do you have about our brand?
• When you tell people where you work, what questions do they ask?
• What do you think our customers want to know more about?
• If we were to interview the brand’s CEO, what questions would we ask?

7. Do your research

When it comes to creating content, it can be best to separate research and writing. The research phase will help you understand your topic better and then the writing phase can be where you organize everything. Breaking it up can also help you avoid burnout by thinking about the same topic for too long so that your writing voice sounds fresh and excited by the topic.

8. Add buffer time 

This is one I’ve learned over the years, even if you’re working on a big team. Add some buffer time between tasks, especially editing and layout or design. Sometimes you’ll be due to send a designer a file but it’s still in the third round of editing. Add a day or two, depending on the deadline or schedule, to give everyone some breathing room between tasks.

9. Allow guest bloggers or contributors

An easy way to improve productivity across your content marketing team is by offloading some of the work onto guest bloggers or contributors. This gives you freedom to move other projects along, and it has the added benefit of improving your website’s authority and SEO with backlinks and trusted sources.

10. Streamline approvals 

Lastly, figure out a way to streamline the approval process and kick some cooks out of the kitchen. I’ve found this is often the part of the content process that gums up the works as too many people have different opinions or one person’s edits will contradict another’s.

Have one central location or file that everyone works out of to see what changes have been made and the feedback given prior. Keep feedback and comments in that same location. It’s so easy to have offline conversations but it’s important to have a paper trail of all changes made. Also, watch for the trap of people saving multiple versions of the same thing or not having streamlined naming conventions.

Designate one or two final approvers so that everyone knows who the go-to person is to get the seal of approval. Content approvals work best when they’re an inverted pyramid. More people can contribute and review at the beginning but at the end there should be few people making changes.

What tips do you have for improving your relationship with content marketing? Sound off in the comments below!