You have heard it many times – blogs can become your lead generation engine; what you have to do is to publish long-form content regularly. While this simple recipe could work ten years ago, when you did not have dozens of competitors investing in content creation, these days, you need something more.
So what exactly does your blog lack to land you hundreds of organic leads overnight? In this article, we will help you make your blog a more effective lead generation channel and explain what way an effective content management workflow can help you with it. So let’s get down to this thing.
What is a content management workflow?
Unlike a process, a content workflow focuses on getting a certain work done from A to Z around your content. It starts with setting up a goal for every content piece, defining a strategy to execute, writing an article or page content, promoting it on various channels and, finally, summarizing the effectiveness by analyzing the results you content has brought.
As you see, content workflow is considerably more than just a process of coming up with a random idea for a blog post, writing it, and hitting the “Publish” button. Every article or page you create should fulfill a certain goal, boost lead generation effort, and have a measurable effect on your company’s bottom line. Let’s see what steps content management workflow involves.
1. Create a content strategy
Coming up with a content production strategy for every article you write is one of the most important steps that can help you produce a great content that converts, so make sure you dedicate enough time and focus to it.
Let’s briefly check what tasks this stage involves.
1. Set up your content goals
There are a few content marketing goals you can pursue with your content. Here are just some of them:
-generating a certain number of leads
-build an image of a thought leader
-increasing awareness about your product/company
-driving a certain number of backlinks
Before moving forward with other tasks, make sure you have assigned a measurable goal to each content piece you are planning to create.
2. Define your target audience
Get back to your persona board or document and think of how your current persona needs and pain points relate to your content ideas. Make sure you match your content with the right awareness level of your audience.
3. Check out your competitors
Skipping this point is one of SEO mistakes marketers make that can result in your content not getting sufficient reach. By doing competitor research on a selected topic, you can identify how many backlinks you need to rank higher for a your core keyword or the keywords that your competitors are not ranking for just yet.
4. Doing keyword research
You won’t be able to produce an optimized content piece without integrating the keywords that are linked to the topic. By doing keyword analysis, you can check keyword difficulty, related keywords that you can also add to your article, as well as keyword volume to help you assess if keyword popularity.
5. Prepare content brief
Preparing a brief is a final step of the content management strategy stage. By listing objectives, key points, and requirements, people involved in the process can better understand what the final piece has to look like and what is needed to achieve your content project goals.
2. Assigning key roles in your content team
When starting out, you don't have a huge team to create an engaging content that converts. In most cases, you will need a project manager who would be in charge of preparing a content strategy. You can outsource the rest to a content marketing agency or freelancers.
However, as long as content marketing tactics start bringing more leads and your company grows, you might consider internalizing the procedures and hiring more people to manage content workflow internally. So what do the content management roles look like? Let’s have a sneak peak!
Content strategists do research and brainstorm ideas before a content writer delivers an article. Doing keyword research, analyzing a similar content of competitors, and creating a content brief are a few responsibilities of a content strategist.
In some companies, it is one person who sets up a strategy and writes content. However, in some organizations that have scaled their content team and produce loads of content, it can well be two and more people involved in this process. This also applies in the situations when a company outsources content writing to a freelancer or a content marketing agency – after receiving a brief, they later send a content marketing proposal for each work.
Content writers receive a brief with an outline of key points to include in the article and proceed with writing an in-depth piece of content. The process of writing an article usually involves using content marketing software or some on-page SEO tools that help structure content, suggest relevant keywords, and help optimize content, so it ranks well on Google.
Graphic designers create graphics using relevant graphic design software after receiving a brief. They usually get the brief after the article is finished. Graphic designers create both featured images and the image creations that break down the text and contain a visualize the core points covered in the article. Often, graphics designers create the images promoting an article on social media and through paid ads. They are also in charge of choosing the right creative assets.
Content (or project) managers are senior content team members who supervise the whole process, help resolve bottlenecks, and deliver the content according to a schedule. Also, they sometimes can take the role of content strategists.
3. Distributing content
Once you have published your content piece, it’s time to move to the next stage – promoting it across social media channels, giving it a boost with paid ads or getting the right people to share it. You should define where it makes sense for you to push your content forward and add these channels to your content management workflow.
You can use various content forms for content distribution. For example, you can create a slideshow that summarizes the main points in the article or some animation that drives user attention. You can definitely come up with a lot of ideas here!
However, remember to structure them well when on this stage of content management workflow, so you keep your attention razor focussed on the goals content distribution can help you achieve.
4. Create your Standard Operating Procedure (SOPs)
It's important to create documentation about your content workflow, as it will need to be referenced in your training checklists for new employees. That’s also a step to reducing chaos in managing your content marketing activities!
You can write your standard operating procedures (SOPs) in a Google Docs, transfer it into a Powerpoint, or whatever medium that works the best for you.
The idea behind documenting your content management workflow is to align your team on every step and show them a bigger picture of what they are working on. It also helps project managers to evaluate time frames for each content project, assign tasks to the right people, and keep track of the progress.
Your SOPs normally evolve with the needs of your team and can be slightly modified over time.
5. Choose the right software to manage content workflow
It’s worth choosing the right tool stack to boost your team’s efficiency from the very beginning of managing your content workflow. You can decide to go with a few tools or look for the software that does a few jobs at once.
Some content teams would prefer to work with Hubspot as it has a lot of features going beyond email marketing. While flexible, this software can sometimes require a lot of tech skills. For example, using Hubspot landing pages usually call for the involvement of a developer who can tweak templates.
This adds more complexity to the content management and extends projects schedules. However, with some additional tools you can resolve this problem. Instead of building pages from scratch, you can consider using HubSpot CMS Hub templates to speed up the process of publishing content.
Apart from Hubspot, some teams would prefer to work with Mailchimp as it is a bit easier to get grasp of. However, there are a lot of strong Mailchimp alternatives and so are Hubspot’s.
No matter what tool you end up using, it should be the one that your team is comfortable working with.
Wrappging up
On one hand, content marketing workflow helps organize your team's work better. On the other hand, it helps you achieve much more with your content – hitting content targets and making content marketing a profitable channel of lead acquisition.
When creating your workflow, make sure you keep your team aligned on the goals and core responsibilities. Also, remind your team to do a proper research before even getting down to writing an article – both from the point of analyzing persona pain points as well as analyzing competitors.
Hopefully, by implementing the tips we have covered in this article, you will be able to achieve your next big content marketing objective.
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