Your content marketing teams have an essential role to fill at your business. With new trends in digital marketing popping up all the time, it’s critical to stay up-to-date with content marketing operations and strategies so that your team can produce, pivot, and ensure you spend marketing dollars wisely in the face of continual change.
So, what can you do if the New Year has you excited to make new content? Your success ultimately relies on a solid content marketing plan, including content operations. It should be carefully structured and ready to scale. And did we mention you need access to the latest in data tools?
This may seem like a big ask.
After all, you just got done with the rush of the holiday season.
However, examining your content strategy now to ensure it’s fully funded and staffed can save you precious time in 2023. Consider these essential tips if you’re looking to hit the ground running in 2023.
1. Know what makes a good content marketing operations process
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketer confidence has been at an all-time high since the pandemic. Content professionals seem ready to tackle bold new content goals, but success depends on a solid content operations process.
But what makes a good process?
Unfortunately, there’s no one cookie-cutter process that works for every type of organization. You can rely on some universal truths, however.
First, content marketing operations isn’t a “nice to have,”, especially for companies looking to be the authority in their industry. Your process should be recently designed, not something dug up from the old marketing brochure days from a decade ago. It should include every aspect of the content production cycle, from social platforms to the flyers you hand out at conferences.
Finally, it needs to recognize the differences between content marketing and operations—namely, the approach toward creating and distributing content and the system that supports that approach.
You can’t do good work without both.
2. Get financial buy-in
People get excited about new campaigns in the New Year, but securing funds can be difficult. Work on getting executive buy-in well before Q1, so you’re ready to go right after the holiday break.
You know the importance of content, but will the decision-makers in your company see things the same way?
Remind stakeholders of the role content serves, including:
- Brand recognition
- Customer engagement
- Establishment of authority
- Education
- Onboarding
- Revenue generation
- A way to stay on top of the competition.
Pick the use cases that make the best argument for more content and investment in content marketing operations.
3. Don’t duplicate efforts
If you create a lot of content, you’re already familiar with how repetitive certain tasks can be.
This is an excellent opportunity to create playbooks of your most-used content types. Team members can jump in at any step in the process and lend a hand.
Playbooks reduce time and let you batch similar tasks. How? A day spent creating infographics for one blog post could be turned into a day creating two (or more).
4. Get everyone on the same page
As a company grows and the content marketing operations system expands, the risk of having silos of information increases.
How many content calendars does your company have? Do sales have access to them – or just marketing? If someone needed to see stats from a recent campaign, how many people would they have to contact to get that info?
Unified content calendars, tools that easily sync, and shared permission documents can save essential team members much time and effort. If you don’t have a system in place for unified tools, prioritize this now. Asking for permission to see that all-important planning doc on Google Drive should be a thing of the past.
5. Identify high-growth areas
While trial and error exist in content marketing, you should learn to recognize better opportunities over time.
Is there a blog post that consistently gets traffic during the holidays? Do you get asked the same question over and over by new clients?
By prioritizing content that fills a gap or can gain traction quickly – and doing these first – you can maximize your resources and get ROI immediately.
You won’t always know which blog posts to refresh, but time and experience can help you have some ideas. Since you likely can’t execute every great content idea you have, determine which to focus on. Start with the ones that have the most promise in helping you meet traffic, conversion, or revenue goals.
6. Separate content creation from content maintenance
With the best opportunities for content identified, you can now split tasks into creation and maintenance. Blog refreshes are maintenance, whereas new landing pages for your latest ebook would be creation.
Why is it important to split these up?
They typically use different talent teams. So, it’s easier to have your marketers chunk up similar tasks when they aren’t tasked with refreshing and writing on the same day.
For example, having one marketing team member go through 20 posts to update statistics and internal links is more efficient than having that individual do this for five posts, write two new ones, and schedule some social media posts.
7. Put the right people in the right jobs
This one may feel overwhelming, especially if creating a content process is new for you.
Your team may have obvious and hidden skills and the capacity to take on new skills with the proper training. Figuring this all out takes time, and you may overlook the best way to put the right people in the right jobs, especially at scale. Consider outsourcing the “people” part of your content strategy to freelancers and industry experts. The right partner can help elevate your content marketing operations and scale your content online.
The no-wait way to scale content for Q1
ClearVoice offers the talents of hundreds of writers, designers, and subject matter experts in your field, along with the SEO support needed to make your message go even further. We know what makes a good content operations process, and we have the systems in place to ramp up your Q1 goals very quickly!
Contact us about how we can supplement or even replace your existing content marketing systems.
