Content creation for digital marketing campaigns is complex. A single concept can turn into months of drafting and reworking before the final deliverables ever reach an audience. So it’s no surprise that a study revealed that two-thirds of decision-makers said their company’s proficiency with content will be vital to its success in the next 5 to 10 years.
Budget spend and your team’s time and resources can quickly become obstacles if your organization does not have the right tools in place to optimize collaboration among your marketing and experience masterminds. And with the recent global state of content marketing report revealing 97% of respondents saying that content marketing is definitely part of their overall brand marketing strategy this year, making efforts to ensure your creative team can perform at their peak while also speeding time to delivery will put you at a competitive advantage.
How do you get started closing the content creation gaps in your organization? Here are four steps to help your team work better, together.
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1. Centralize your content creation space
From project ideation to digital distribution — where does your team plan, create, and execute on your brand’s top priority marketing strategies? If multiple platforms and creative spaces come to mind, centralizing your content marketing lifecycle under one roof can be a key step to providing your team with a hub-style collaborative environment. It can serve as a homebase for your workstreams, providing a uniform operating structure across the organization with shared tools.
The top benefits to adapting this model include reducing the redundant tasks your team is required to do to keep workflows organized and up-to-date across multiple collaborative spaces, which has been reported to slow down productivity by 30%.
2. Make your completed assets easily accessible
After your team has successfully launched a new marketing campaign, what happens to the assets? Can your team or others outside of marketing get extra value from your content pieces by versioning for languages, industries, search optimizations, or web and account personalization?
It can be a missed opportunity if your creative teams across the organization don’t have access to internal resources that enable them build on your brand’s work from the past. Storing your content in a single digital asset management (DAM) solution is a key step to helping bridge that gap among teams responsible for content.
A DAM can help you increase the speed to new content assets by 47% by reducing the lag time from inception to delivery. One example of what success has looked like within Sitecore using our own DAM, we’ve established a taxonomy that enables people across the business to easily find existing content that can then be modified to get a variation of that asset to market quickly. The system also captures asset details to help connect users with content owners, files, and landing page URLs where an asset appears on our website.
3. Lift barriers to organizational transparency
Every marketing team has its blind spots and bottlenecks. Common areas where marketers experience slow down happens during approval requests, sharing, versioning, and locating documents. Barriers in your organization’s content creation workflow, such as silos, disconnect between your teams, or limited access control, impacts everything from scalability to employee churn – especially as output demands increase. Eliminating barriers to transparency removes the guesswork and the challenges that arise with roadblocks.
Whether your team is small or enterprise-sized, key instruments for empowering them to collaborate effectively within a centralized content management space is using workflow optimization tools. They work as shared content planning, production, and governance resources, so your team will have the ability to see each aspect of a campaign, who needs to do what, and when it will be completed. The visibility will keep everyone on the same page without the extra back-and-forth and accelerate your production schedule.
4. Delete the distance between content contributors
Remote teams, global time differences, flexible office hours — the way we ‘work’ is evolving with changing global and technology dynamics. But does your brand succeed at fostering marketing creativity no matter where your contributors are in the world? A content management system (CMS) run on cloud can turn your traditional content output into a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) system, expanding better collaboration across marketing and content creators, IT, and developers.
Simply put, CaaS is a specific version of Software as a Service (SaaS) technology and is characterized as a headless CMS, giving organizations the freedom to deliver content on the backend without having to create content specifically for each device that will access the content from the user’s end. The flexibility of cloud enables smart cross-organizational collaboration that can help you power scalability on a global scale.
Continue learning more about how to overcome content execution hurdles.
Monica Lara is Senior Content Marketing Manager at Sitecore. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.