How to Successfully Manage Your Entire Content Process

Show:

December 30, 2021 Marketing

Content management is not an easy process. It’s one of the most underdeveloped marketing processes in large enterprises, not to mention a major cost item in their budgets. There are many different aspects to consider that involve people, processes, technology, and figuring out how to handle different types of content.

If you’re new to the world of content management, it might feel unmanageable and overwhelming. For this reason, you must first know that transformation of the way people work and interact with each other is crucial for increasing content efficiency. You’ll need to formalize and strategize the content management practices to manage the entire process more successfully.

Read below for some advice on how you can handle the content process that will ultimately help increase traffic, leads, and conversions.

Communicate Throughout the Content Process

Managing content is pretty similar to managing anything else as it requires collaboration, leadership, and proper communication skills. The first step to successfully managing the entire content process is to set clear expectations around outcomes and goals.

You should also try your best to define and assign project roles and responsibilities. Lastly, set important deadlines and schedules and always communicate regularly between those deadlines. Everyone in your team will appreciate and find defined standards helpful so make sure to share all templates, brand guidelines, and style guides with them.

To reduce any unnecessary confusion, have a main point of contact and define the framework for planning, production, and publication. This makes it much easier for every team member to plan their time and resources.

Use Content Management Software

Every company and department working on a large project requires a space where information can be communicated easily and quickly, and tasks can be organized. Luckily, there are excellent software solutions today that allow workers to sign in and sign out from their dashboards which saves them valuable time and enhances their productivity and efficiency.

For instance, any editorial content manager who’s responsible for the development, execution, and delivery of engaging, data-driven editorial content can greatly benefit from editorial content management solutions that will enable them to quickly track and assign all critical projects and tasks to the appropriate teams and departments. To ensure smooth operations, such solutions will be able to manage the entire content process from one central place, as well as automate the revenue recognition and billing processes.

Give Priority to Content Needed for Minimum Viable Product

Prioritizing content is something that many content teams struggle with on a regular basis. Remember that the best time to launch a new website is when it is vastly superior to the old one. You can begin by identifying what you have, what you want, and what you need.

Once you have completed your inventory and plan, you can begin to focus on your content creation process. When you abandon the notion that a website is a finished product, you will be able to better manage the many aspects of the entire content process.

Organizing the Content Process

Essentially, there’s no right or wrong way to organize the content process but a certain level of organization is required to ensure a smooth launch. Regardless of the system or channel you use to communicate, the process of sharing and organizing files needs to be well-defined.

For this reason, do your best to collect content elements like images, files, guidelines in one place. Identify these elements in the filename by using standard terminology and folders or a hierarchical system to organize them. Afterward, identify a standard process for sharing formats and files and continue by creating a definitive method to track version history during the content lifecycle.

Coordinate Approvals, Feedback, and Workloads

When more than one team works jointly on a project, it’s essential to coordinate the collaboration. This applies to everyone, regardless of whether the teams are all internal or if there are third parties involved.

A smart way to coordinate the work is to set aggressive timelines for feedback on project deliverables. The workload must be shared and in no way fall on one person. Always make sure to define deliverables that require approvals and establish where different teams are allowed to make decisions.

When you set clear expectations for content coordination, the team members will be able to understand how their actions or lack thereof, impact the project timeline, and they’ll be able to manage time and resources more effectively.

Final Thoughts

Your content is incredibly important and this is why you need to break it down into manageable pieces. Once you feel the burden is too heavy and the outcome unattainable, remember to take a step back and follow the abovementioned tips and use tools or software to manage the entire content process more successfully.