Content marketing, over the years, has become a growing industry and its success lies in producing consistent and great content. SEO content writing services and businesses are now on the hunt for more than one writer in order to fill their content and marketing needs.
In order to do this, there is a massive need for content writing services, graphic artists, website content writers, and, nowadays, videographers and video editors. These should be people who can create actual copy that is creative and worthy of being shared again and again.
According to a report released by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs in 2020, as many as 86% of businesses say that content marketing creates brand awareness, 75% uses it to build trust and credibility, and 79% says that it helps educate their audiences. In order to reap these kinds of benefits, there is a need for quality in your marketing team's writing to be optimized.
Not having a structured and definable content delegation can quickly put the team at risk and make the whole operation an impossibility. Without proper plans for content, the team can easily get distracted on small tasks instead of going for the big picture, which can make the whole operation disorganized. With the pandemic that resulted in sudden shifts in work dynamics, it’s even more crucial to provide support. Learning how to keep a content team managed and productive is a skill in itself.
1. Develop a shared understanding of content creation
Have conversations with your team members where you can brainstorm on what kind of content you want and need to create. What we want to achieve here is to have common grounds on what all of you are really thinking or are there differences that need to smooth out and understand a bit more so you can get to a place where everyone is on the same page to be the best content writing service.
Document everyone's content ideas and get them closer to a shared understanding, and even better, this way the team can prioritize which stories and knock them out one at a time.
2. Identify technical skills within the team
Not every content is a simple blog post. With the marketing world becoming a multimedia faceted space, there is a need to expand to more than just words. Videos, podcasts, social media posts are just some of the new tools in which marketing has expanded to. And some content is more involved than writing and entails some production as well.
Survey your team and find out who has experience and can commit to working and creating this kind of content. Just like pairing a complex article to an inexperienced writer, requiring members to learn technical skills on the spot will result in impeded and sub-par work.
3. Make collaboration easy
Strength in numbers come to play in different ways to ensure that team productivity is nice and high. This encourages qualified team members to work together and achieve a goal.
Having one team member to edit or add details, citations, or links to the article, and having another member take care of the graphics and images that should be incorporated is a great way of having members collaborate and help each other out. You could also make teams of two in creating extensive projects to get it done more quickly and produce high-quality content.
Delegating routine tasks to team members and dividing large tasks can help in completing the work. Doing this can help team members focus on the work at hand in contrast to just saddling all the work to one member and just wading through a big list of to-dos.
4. Establish boundaries
We have just iterated that collaboration helps team morale and productivity; however, all good things have downsides. Just because one team member can be available does not mean that they always have to. Content creators are very much artists in their own rights. Their work is the product of creativity and imagination, and sometimes all they need is much deserved and needed quiet in order to function. Therefore, boundaries are also important.
This approach is not just beneficial for one individual but also for the whole team. It is a great way to turn off distractions and establish priorities to focus on what the team agreed is important. Set up rules so the team is not overwhelmed and so everyone knows what each other's limits are.
The idea is to prioritize so all of the members can spend as much time as possible on important tasks without getting bogged down in urgent and unimportant tasks.
5. Offer a helping Hand
If you want to get more out of your content creation team, the most important thing is to lend them a helping hand. This does not necessarily mean that you need to be there every step of the way in order to form the articles or videos or series. This means providing them with the necessary tools that will help them know what the product should look like.
Provide your team with examples of article assignments relevant to their topic which shows the voice and tone you are looking for, word count, client specifications and concerns, keywords, and SEO tools.
More importantly, always be available to them for questions, concerns and just for communication to make sure they have everything they need and that they fully understand the assignment.
You could also provide your writers with citations, additional information, sources, and details that will narrow down their research. This ensures that writers are not wasting time to ascertain what kind of article they should be doing and can simply begin with the project immediately.
6. Outsource services
The main reason there is a team is so that not just one member has to do all the work. This way every team member can focus on things like overall growth of the company, revenue strategy and down to making sure that every piece of content made is nothing less than perfect.
There is strength in numbers, and a great content creation team can get more done and produce more and better content. All team members can bring opinions and suggestions to the table, diversifying the agency's voice in a way that a single marketer or creator never could. Use your team effectively and focus on delegating.
Ideally you need to match each task with the best person who has the best skills to handle it. Matching needed content with team members who are competent in those areas streamlines the content creation process and makes great material. For example blog and article writing services can be given to new team members while professional writing services need to be given to team members with more experience.
It can't be helped when the company is up to too many tasks. T, that is the reality of what it takes to compete with big companies, and this is where you need a strategy to continually produce a supply of high-quality, error-free, and SEO relevant content. This is where outsourcing comes to play. It is a strategy that can free up critical time that can be spent on more important tasks for the business. Outsourced content writers are less expensive than in-house writers and you can hire more writers depending on your content needs. With different outsourced writers you can experiment on various tones and voices that can be compatible with different kinds of projects.
However, bear in mind that outsourcing is not always the way to go especially when it comes to the risk of confidentiality. You also lose the ability of creating a long-term homegrown writer that would otherwise be a great addition to your team and eventually save you resources and onboarding cost. It is also worth noting that some contractors charge higher by the hour, and they do not know much about your business or brand which can come off in the articles they produce as amateurish or unhelpful.
The trick is to ensure that you can provide them with a comprehensive style guide and information to keep them up to speed.
The foundation of productivity is good management. This includes time management, organization, collaboration, and understanding the vision of the team or the organization/ When employees know exactly when they are supposed to do, the requirements and restrictions, and are capable and knowledgeable, skilled, and motivated, great work will ensue.
As managers, delegating tasks, providing strict deadlines and help are all organizational tasks that should be done every time a new work comes up to help the team be more productive. Set goals and time limits for the work to be completed and ensure that the team is well-supported, that every member is cohesive and collaborative.
Being more present in the creation cycle will help the writers do their best work possible. Nobody gets left behind, nobody is trying to figure out the ropes, but doing exactly what they are supposed to do...creating content.