Making Content Happen on Time

Developing a content marketing strategy, or even knowing that you need one, is the first step to a campaign’s successful, impactful delivery. But once you develop your strategy, you can’t just email it out and call it a day. A strategy in and of itself isn’t going to increase your conversion rates or get your message out. You have to have consistent, continuous content delivery – the right pieces in the right places at the right times.

So, where to start?

Get your team on board.

You wrote a strategy and it got approved. Who are you going to need in order to make that strategy come alive? Often a marketing campaign will be developed in one department, but the people who will actually carry out the campaign are scattered around in other departments. Ensure that the key players are part of the conversation from the beginning and that they understand the big picture of what you’re trying to accomplish as a team. Most likely you’ll need support from writers, editors, reviewers, but are you also going to need support from technical experts across the organization? Are you going to need support from graphic designers to create amazing images to pair with your written content? Consider your immediate team and your extended team and reach out to them early. When the deadline train approaches, you’ll get what you need faster if you don’t have to explain what the project is in that eleventh hour.

Socialize the content approach.

All members of your organization producing content for the public should be following brand guidelines to ensure your organization’s voice remains consistent. Within that voice, each campaign is going to take its own tone depending on who you are writing to, what you are writing about, in what vehicles your content will travel, and what your point of view will be. Set these guidelines in advance and socialize them to the team to achieve cohesion and consistency across writers.

Create your content calendar.

Develop an editorial calendar for the team to follow so that content creation requests don’t come as a surprise to your writers. From your strategy, use the goals you need to reach or the milestones you need to hit as a starting point for outlining what content needs to be created, and when. At that time, indicate who will be creating the content and what the expectations are for the final product.

Other considerations:

• Content Review & Approval. It is crucial to establish whose opinion matters. Everyone has opinions, but at the end of the day, whose job is it going to be to give the up or down vote? Is it more than one person? If so, who reviews first? How many rounds of review is too many? LOTS of content gets delayed, or even stuck, in review.
• Content Distribution. It sounds obvious, but did you plan out where content will be published and who will push the “go live” button when the time comes? You will want your content to hit quickly once it’s written so be sure you don’t get stuck in a holding pattern while figuring out where your content should go and who knows how to operate the system to make it happen.

Give your content strategy the legs it needs to succeed by developing a fool-proof plan for you and your team to follow.