Enhance your content marketing with tools and best practices

There’s a reason for the saying “content is king;” if you get it right, it translates into business success.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all process for creating content because every team is different, but there are best practices and tools that can help.

It all starts with how your team works

In a business environment, content creators get requests from nearly all departments, whether that be creating assets for sales or proofreading material for recruitment purposes. Having a process in place eliminates guesswork and leads to better results. Here are a few ways to help you enhance your content marketing efforts:

1. Workflow tools

• • Customizable requests

    This capability allows you to design custom request forms to capture all the relevant information. Having everything you need from the outset saves time by minimizing rework and delays.

  • Automation

    Another time saver; with this feature, you can automate notifications, allowing your team members to focus on their creative magic rather than administrative tasks.

• • Version control

    This helps with alignment and ensures you’re always working on the latest version. Tools like Jira allow you to track changes and revert them if necessary. This also fosters accountability as you can see who made what changes and when.

  • Campaigns

    Not all marketing teams use campaigns, but they are a common and effective strategy. Content creators play a major part in marketing campaigns, and features in tools can be used to help with planning, such as epics in Jira, which allows you to break down tasks, assign relevant team members, and progress issues through a workflow. Doing this also allows you to track the progress of your campaigns as a whole.

2. Knowledge-sharing tools

Modern knowledge management is the process of creating, organizing, and sharing information within your organization on a platform. Features of knowledge-sharing tools that can help content teams include:

• • Project planning

    Tools like Confluence help teams by keeping everything in one place. It can be used to take notes in meetings and for brainstorming and planning. This helps content teams stay organized and manage projects from conception to execution.

  • Real-time collaboration

    Using dedicated workspaces helps to foster a culture of collaboration. Here, copywriters, designers, and even stakeholders can come together in real-time. In Confluence, you can use “spaces” to collaborate and manage information. Users can create pages, organize content by importance, and customize permissions to control who has access.

  • Campaigns

    Knowledgebase tools like Confluence help with campaign planning by allowing you to create dedicated spaces to outline goals, timelines, and breakdown tasks. Confluence integrates seamlessly with Jira, meaning you can create campaign plans in Confluence, link them to Jira tickets, and track the progress. This integration helps keep campaigns organized, leading to more successful outcomes.

3. Meetings

While tools are invaluable, nothing beats a conversation. As we touched on earlier, content creators are a busy bunch, with requests coming from all directions. Meetings can prove especially helpful to content teams in prioritizing work and staying on track with goals shared by the wider marketing department. Whether in person or online, meetings help teams save time; if, for example, someone is confused by a task, it would take less time to explain it over a meeting than going back and forth in the comments section of an application. Meetings are also good for relationship building—you wouldn’t generally ask someone how they were over Jira. Connected teams produce better results.

4. Reporting

By looking at metrics, i.e., engagement rates, click-throughs, and conversions, content leads can gain insights into popular topics and how their audience prefers to consume information. Content teams can be inspired to experiment with new ideas and continuously improve as metrics reveal the effectiveness of visuals, storytelling techniques, and styles.

Remember, in content marketing, streamlining is not just about ticking boxes; it's about freeing up time for creativity. Use these tips, but also think outside the box and watch your content creation transform into a dynamic, results-driven machine for attracting and retaining audiences and driving business growth.