If you're making content, you'll need to manage your content marketing workflow as your business grows. Content marketing management can help you scale content production and meet your goals, while ensuring content quality and performance.
What you will learn
- What content marketing management is and why it's crucial for your content strategy
- How content marketing management can help you organize your content for easier access and scale
- 7 Content marketing management best practices to streamline your content process and eliminate bottlenecks
What is content marketing management?
Content marketing management is the process of organizing and planning all stages of the content lifecycle from content strategy and planning, to publishing and content promotion. It involves overseeing all aspects of a content marketing strategy to ensure brand compliance and quality standards while meeting content goals.
- Content marketing management includes several key responsibilities:
- Content marketing strategy alignment with the business' goals
- Cross departmental collaboration to uphold high-quality content production
- Streamlining the scheduling and publication of content
- Maximizing reach via content distribution and promotion
- Making data driven decisions by analyzing content performance metrics
Why is content marketing management important?
Content marketing management is important because it streamlines your content workflow by coordinating all content marketing activities to reach, engage and convert your readers into consumers. Managing your content marketing process also improves efficiency by optimally allocating resources for high quality content at scale.
62 percent of B2B marketers report having an effective content marketing plan in place.
You'll also get the most out of your content marketing budget if you give the best efforts the most attention. Content management can also help content marketing managers keep your brand's voice and message consistent across different types of content and platforms. This helps potential customers recognise and trust your brand.
7 tips to simplify content marketing management
Content marketing management is vital to creating and sustaining an effective content marketing strategy that attracts your target audience and drives business growth. Here are 7 content marketing management steps to scale content.
Organize your keyword clusters
Keyword research can be an ongoing process because search trends and user intent are constantly evolving. It can be especially time consuming if you are manually looking for keywords and haven't adopted automated keyword research.
You can save hours in time and effort by using a keyword ideation tool like Surfer Keyword Research tool which took 30 seconds to generate 93 clusters with hundreds of keywords for "customer support".
It makes sense then to maintain a comprehensive keyword database that you can continuously add to as you discover new search terms and ensure your content is updated and relevant.
This will allow you to quickly access content ideas, saving time and effort by not having to restart the process from scratch every time you want to create a new piece of content.
Organizing your keywords can also help you prioritize content opportunities by identifying both successful and underutilized keywords.
You will also be able to easily share keyword data and assign content briefs based on the skills of your writers instead of relying on them to create content around topics they're not familiar with.
Our keyword bank is pretty comprehensive with 12 columns, and you may not need something as extensive but you should still include basic categories like content hubs, traffic and keyword difficulty in your database.
27 percent of marketers say that content creation is their biggest challenge. Organizing your keyword data can simplify content creation, and ultimately lead to better search visibility and website traffic.
Create a style and content guide
Creating a style and content guidelines document can ensure that all your content appears consistent and meets quality standards. This is especially crucial as your content marketing initiatives grow and involve multiple departments and writers. Or if you're outsourcing content, or even partnering with other companies.
A content guideline will tell content creators what you expect from them and make sure they know the tone, style, and quality standards for your brand.
It can help keep content consistent even when writing styles are different and staff members leave and come back. Any new team members can be onboarded quickly without affecting your content workflow.
By giving editors a place to start, a style document will speed up the editing and review process.
Your content guidelines should include:
- your brand's personality and tone for writers to adopt
- any writing styles you prefer with an emphasis on composition, sentence structure and formatting
- SEO best practices like suggested keywords and metadata
- the inclusion of images, links and examples where applicable
- things to avoid such as linking to competitors, or certain industries.
In addition, you may include your target audiences and content goals; they can help explain to your writers why you're targeting the topics you are, and who's reading them.
Create a template for content briefs
A content brief template can help you make content faster by giving you a structure and framework to use when making outlines.
Since every article is different, creating a perfect template is near impossible, but you can still include formats, headers and search engine optimization guidelines that don't have to be rewritten.
If you have more than one writer or editor on your team, a standard content brief can help them work together and make sure they create quality content.
Our content outlines are pretty exhaustive so we just include them within Content Editor to make it easier for our writers to glance at them while writing, instead of shuffling through several browser tabs.
Content brief templates can ensure that information like target audience, and formatting preferences are already present before beginning an assignment, thus reducing back-and-forth communication between the writer and editor.
Maintain a Kanban board
A Kanban board can visually communicate an overview of your content marketing workflow. Because a Kanban provides a visual representation of all tasks, making it easy to see the status of each content piece through its lifecycle, tracking your content marketing efforts becomes much more manageable even as you scale.
Your Kanban planner must list every stage that your content passes through, so you know exactly what's going on.
Using a Kanban style board can be particularly useful to monitor the progress of individual tasks and ensure that deadlines are met. You can also manage resources more effectively when you know who's doing what and by reassigning responsibilities, where necessary.
As a content marketing manager, monitoring your content with a Kanban board will help you identify bottlenecks or areas that require additional attention, and address them before they become more troublesome for your marketing team.
Using a Kanban board can also help you break down larger projects into smaller tasks, making them seem less overwhelming and easier to manage. There are several tools, like Trello or Notion that can help you set up a Kanban board in no time with their inbuilt features and templates.
Use a Content calendar
Like a Kanban board, a content calendar is critical for content marketers who need to manage content workflow and plan ahead. Using a content calendar can allow you to track your content's journey over a specific timeframe.
One of the main reasons to use a content editorial calendar is to help you stick to a regular schedule for publishing.
Content marketing managers who use a content editorial calendar are 414% more likely to report success in their content marketing efforts than those who do not.
By outlining your content schedule in advance, you will have a better idea of where to allocate resources and time, and can prioritize content ideas. You can also share your editorial calendar with your marketing team to contribute ideas and manage content-related tasks and deadlines.
Build standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Use standard operating procedures (SOPs) that explain each step of your content marketing workflow in detail. Although they're time consuming to create, SOPs can significantly improve efficiency and reduce dependencies within your content marketing management.
By giving clear instructions, they make sure that you can do tasks on your own without relying on content marketing managers or people in your company who have specialised knowledge. This ensures continuity while reducing mistakes and bottlenecks.
Instead of requiring constant supervision, SOPs can free up time for content managers who can share your content's standard procedures with new members to integrate them quickly.
By reviewing and updating your SOPs on a regular basis, you can find places to improve that will help your content marketing strategy as a whole.
Record your content workflow
It's good practice to record every step of the content lifecycle from ideation and briefs to published content and the last time they were updated—to effectively manage your content over time.
This step is important if you want to have a clear picture of your content marketing efforts and can help you find specific information if you need it in the future.
There are several good reasons to document your content marketing process:
- Keeping track of your content can help you make sure it is up-to-date, correct, and useful to your target audience, which can improve engagement and how well your site performs in search engines.
- If you're making large website changes such as switching URLs or restructuring your website, having a record of your content helps prevent broken links, aids proper redirects, and preserves search engine rankings and traffic
- Maintaining a record of your content workflow can also help you maintain version control, allowing you to track changes, and revert to previous versions if necessary
- Documenting your content can simplify content repurposing, such as turning blog posts into video or social media posts
- Maintaining a record allows you to analyze your content's performance over time, identifying patterns, trends, and areas for improvement to implement in future content marketing strategies
Track your content's performance
To manage your content marketing effectively, you should be able to tell your best performing content from the rest. Tracking, measuring and analzying your content can help you evaluate your content marketing campaign and make data backed decisions for the best possible outcome.
Monitor key KPI metrics in line with your content goals to identify which content formats and channels resonate with your audience, and which content campaigns you're better off scrapping.
Having all your data sources merge into a single dashboard like Google Data Studio can help you view a consolidated report that will be easier to interpret and communicate with others.
You can use marketing tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to help measure your content marketing results.
84% of the most successful content marketers report measuring the performance of their content regularly.
Benefits of content marketing management
You can still continue with content marketing without implementing these best practices but you won't be as productive in your reach and content goals. Content marketing management is a necessity to ensure that your business continues to attract traffic, engage readers and build brand affinity as you scale your content.
Here are several reasons why content marketing management is beneficial if you're a content marketer.
Organizes your content
Businesses often don't realise how important it is for their content strategy to have well-organized content. By taking a systematic approach to content management, you can set up a clear structure and workflow that will help you keep track of all tasks related to content and make sure they are all consistent.
Adopting effective content management practices will help you access historical data and documentation that inform your future content marketing strategy.
Streamlined Workflows
A well-organized content management system provides easy access to information, such as keyword data, performance metrics, and editorial guidelines. As a result, your tasks move quicker through the different stages of the content journey from ideation to writing and publishing.
Having an overview of your content related activities can also help you allocate resources more effectively, minimizing delays and bottlenecks.
Scale content marketing strategy
Effective content management makes sure that everyone on the team knows what their jobs are and can work together easily. This can help you make content faster because team members won't have to wait for data before they can look up information.
Best practises for content marketing management, such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), content calendars, and Kanban boards, give you the structure and organisation you need to handle a larger amount of content creation.
By having an overview of your content plan in advance, you can coordinate resources, set deadlines, and ensure a consistent publishing schedule, all of which are essential to scale your content marketing.
Key takeaways
- Content marketing management can help you scale content creation and streamline content workflows by affecting all stages of the content lifecycle, from content marketing strategy to promotion.
- Maintaining a keyword database can help ensure that you don't start keyword research from scratch every time and have options for topics based on your available writers
- Content guidelines can go a long way in ensuring consistency of brand style, tone and content, especially if your content team has several writers or is outsourcing content
- Kanban boards and content calendars make the content marketing process more efficient by giving you an overview of each step. They can also help you make the best use of your resources and get rid of any bottlenecks.
Conclusion
As you've seen, content marketing management is essential for creating and scaling a results-driven content marketing strategy that drives business growth. You may not think you need it when you get started with digital marketing, but can be the difference between producing a lot of content, and scaling effectively.
