Updated March 11, 2022
Content marketing has been transforming the marketing world for years. And whether you’re a skeptic wanting more results or a devout believer overhauling your entire marketing department, many experts continue to believe it’s the way of the future.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
It boils down to the belief that if we as businesses deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.
The concept is simple enough to explain, but how can you build a process that will allow the best ideas to flow?
Here’s some great advice from enterprise-level leaders on how to build a collaborative content process:
Form and Nurture an Amazing Team
The most important step to building a collaborative content process is to create a stellar team and ensure it functions properly. In order for your process to succeed, you must have the full support of everyone in your business. This increases your collaboration potential, in addition to giving you the most diverse pool of ideas possible.
Fostering an atmosphere where ideas can be heard, supported, and tweaked is essential for successful content marketing. Brightpod encourages marketers to keep in mind: “Your content is trying to provide value to your target audience or help your existing customers use your products better. Any idea about how you can make this happen should be welcome.”
That’s why It’s important to consider the ideas of everyone in your business — not just your marketing team. The more ideas you have, the better the quality of your content will be.
Share Authorship
In order to build a collaborative process, you must give multiple team members the ability to create and edit content — preferably, the majority or all of your marketing department.
Rather than causing chaos and confusion, many people working on the same document will more naturally mimic the structure of writing and revision your team is already familiar with.
Not only that, but sharing authorship ensures that more people within your organization feel personally invested in the production of high-quality content, because they’re involved at every stage of the process, from ideation to publication. And, of course, they get to see their name on the finished product!
The key to leveraging the benefits of shared authorship is to find ways to streamline communication. Without efficient communication, all you’ll do is add a bunch of time and confusion to the content creation process.
Fortunately, you can use a multitude of tools to boost your team’s efficiency at communication, share documents, and collaborate on new ideas. This allows the best of the best ideas to rise to the top and your marketing strategy will be better for it.
Use Technology (When You Can)
As mentioned above, technology can drive your content marketing light years ahead of where you are now — as long as you use the right tools, correctly. There are several handy tech solutions out there to streamline your collaborative process:
- Acrolinx is a terminology management tool. Since your marketing revolves around telling a story (or, at least, it should), intentional words are a necessity for your team to choose together. Content Rules, Inc. CEO Val Swisher highly recommends this software, noting: “When everyone agrees on the words we are going to use, it makes the entire process of creating content more efficient. And more speed means less cost for writing, editing, and translation.”
- Evernote is an app that lets you store all kinds of information from various sources — text, images, research to look up later, etc. Content marketing requires an immense amount of organization, and Evernote can help you accomplish these multiple projects at once.
- Awesome Screenshot allows you to edit and share pictures. While initially, this may not seem to be the most useful content marketing feature, think of the app as enabling you to leave feedback the way a professor writes on your term paper. EnVeritas Chief Operations Officer Aubrae Wagner speaks highly of the tool, noting that it enables her to “take a snapshot of my screen then mark up the screen with text, arrows, circles, boxes, etc. I save the image to my desktop and send it to staff.”
- Asana is a project management tool that allows team members to track and manage tasks from a single platform, meaning there’s no need to keep flicking between email inboxes, spreadsheets, and Word documents. We’ve used it at Content Conquered to brief freelancers, manage deadlines, and provide client feedback to writers.
- StoryChief is a content marketing platform with built-in content collaboration functionality. Content teams can use it to build new collaboration workflows and feedback loops, work on editorial briefs, manage campaigns, and communicate with freelancers.
- Grammarly is a free online writing assistant that helps you create clearer, more engaging content. When it comes to collaborative content creation, it’s important to note that not everyone involved in the process will be a “natural” writer. But they might be a subject matter expert, so you still want them to contribute. A tool like Grammarly can be the perfect solution.
Balance Leadership and Personal Accountability
In an ideal setting, your content marketing team would function like a hive, with all team members contributing just the right bits to make an excellent whole. However, almost every team struggles occasionally with the direction of their content.
In some cases, this originates from a lack of structure. If all team members are editing the same document, there must be a balance found between leadership and personal accountability. If one person (even if they are the director of the project) has too heavy a voice, it can cause the rest to keep opinions to themselves or even to turn in unedited work.
On the other hand, if no one keeps the group on task, time and effort may be wasted in an unintended direction. Make sure your team has enough drive to turn in quality work, with just enough leadership and structure to keep the bar high enough to excel.
Leverage Subject Matter Experts
Chances are, the reason you’re “doing” content marketing is ultimately to generate leads and sales.
When it comes to achieving those goals, not all content is created equal. Specifically, content created by subject matter experts is far more valuable than generalist content.
According to a Hinge Marketing survey of nearly 2,000 B2B and professional services buyers, subject matter expertise is the number one means by which B2B buyers evaluate professional services firms. Not only that, but the perceived value of expertise rose by 11.6 percentage points from 2018 to 2020.
There’s a reason subject matter expertise is so highly valued:
Because it’s hard to find.
This is a pain point we hear from a lot of our clients who’ve previously worked with freelance writers.
While those freelancers might have written about a topic in the past, they often lack practical, real world experience. That’s hardly surprising — there aren’t many writers out there who were previously SaaS marketers or accountants or supply chain managers.
Unfortunately, that means the content they produce ends up being generic and bland because they can’t offer a hands-on perspective. And content like that does little to help the company’s claims of being a subject matter expert.
But it doesn’t need to be like that.
At Content Conquered, we accept that we don’t know everything about everything. So we’ve developed a series of processes that help us collaborate with our clients to produce authoritative, expert-level thought leadership content, no matter the subject. Processes like:
- Collaborating with internal subject matter experts. If the client has in-house experts, we can send them questions and get their written responses or receive access to internal documents on their specific subject matter. That way, our writers can turn their expertise into content.
- Interviewing clients directly. We might provide the client with questions ahead of time or just jump on a call and talk through the topic. The writer can then use the interview recording to structure and add expertise to their content.
- Asking clients to record their thoughts. With this process, the client doesn’t have to spend time writing up an answer — they can just talk through their thoughts in a video or audio recording and we can turn it into a blog article. That way, the client does a small amount of work to communicate their expertise without worrying about all the creative legwork.
- Reviewing outlines. Sometimes, we’ll interview a client, use their answers to produce an outline, then ask the client to supplement the outline with text or audio notes. Those notes will include specific, expert information they want to reference in specific sections of the final article.
Once we’ve gone through these steps, we then begin the process of drafting a thought leadership article. Building on the subject matter expert’s knowledge, the client’s thoughts and internal documents, and notes received in the outline review process, we’re able to put together a collaborative document that has both a high level of niche information and is well-written.
Great Information Alone Won’t Get You There
Finally, the best research in the world won’t turn into profitable sales unless your marketing team knows how to use it. Knowing what consumers want is only half the equation. The other half is plugging that knowledge into something of real value, helping you to build more meaningful, longer-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with potential customers.
According to SparkToro CEO, and previous Moz co-founder and chief executive, Rand Fishkin, providing meaningful value is all about understanding your customers’ pain points and frustrations. “If you could speak to those frustrations, especially if you can speak to them in a meaningful way, a way that resonates beyond purely tactical and technical, you can build those long-term relationships.”
The takeaway here for building a collaborative content process is this: Not only does your team need to gather the right information, but they need to turn that into meaningful content for your audience.
Don’t have the time or in-house resources to build a collaborative content process? Need to create more authoritative thought leadership content? Get in touch with Content Conquered to see how we can help!
An earlier version of this article appeared on Entrepreneur.