The One Secret To Building A Content Machine (and 5 tools to help you)

Companies that succeed at content marketing have one secret.

They involve their teams in content creation.

Your team’s knowledge is your secret weapon to create unique content that engages your readers.

Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to involve their teams in content creation, which in turn affects quality, volume and increases costs.

Keep reading to learn:

How your team can help you 10x your content results
How to create a content culture
How to set up a workflow to streamline content production

[box] Freebies

Content Strategy Builder: an interactive tool to build your content strategy fast and for free.
Samir Patel’s Content Marketing Kit: templates, cheatsheets and tools to drive results with content marketing.
Idea Pipeline: a tool to centralize, organize and manage all your content ideas.
Content Library: a centralized repository to manage all your content assets and make them available to your team.
The Starter’s Guide to Process Automation: an ebook to learn how to automate your processes.
Contentools Free Trial: a free trial account of Contentools content marketing software. [/box]

HOW YOUR TEAM CAN 10X YOUR CONTENT

People outside the marketing department get rarely involved in content creation: a waste of talent and knowledge that could be used to set up an unstoppable content machine.

Why?

Content marketing is about walking your prospects through a journey.

At each step, the reader will have different questions and to close the deal, you’d better have the answers.

Just keep this in mind:

“Prospects have made about 60% of their buying decision before talking to a sales rep.” – Hubspot

And they do that reading reviews, posts, guides and case studies that that suggest solutions tailored to their realty.

Which brings us to the main point: you need to involve your team.

You can’t simply produce “good content”, you need to produce “10x content”

10X content is content tailored to your audience needs, struggles, goals that delivers your company messages without sounding salesy.

[box] To write 10X content you need someone who:

knows your market
knows your customers and how to talk to them
knows your product inside out
lives and breaths your company’s values and communication[/box]

And when it comes to knowing your market, customers, product and company, no one’s better than your own team.

Unfortunately, people outside the marketing department have their own, busy schedules and may not always be familiar with content creation.

Which in turn results in poor engagement with content creation: a waste of knowledge and resources no organization can afford.

Keep reading to learn how fix this and boost your content marketing results.

10X content: tailored to your audience struggles and goals while delivering your company messages without sounding salesy. Click To Tweet

4 WAYS TO CREATE A CONTENT CULTURE

If there’s something we learned from our 300+ customer is that you can’t force your team to create content, it’s a bottom up decision.

You can't force your team to create content: it's a bottom up decision. Create a content culture. Click To Tweet

You need to get your team mates buy in.

Below, 4 ways to make that happen.

A) Explain The Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing doesn’t bring overnight results, and chances are your teammates will give up if you don’t explain them how it works and what its benefits are.

Check out this article to learn how content marketing can save you money while generating sales.

There’s more.

[box] 4 Ways Content Can Help Your Sales Reps

Makes their outreach more effective: you sales rep can use content in emails to deliver value upfront and warm up prospects before scheduling a call.
Shorten the sales cycle: they can use content to provide your “champion” with resources to convince other key players involved in the negotiation.
Help them close better deals: educated prospects can take more informed decisions, which will lower the chances of churn.
Have fun while closing: isn’t it nice when prospects know what they are talking about?[/box]

B) Reduce Friction

The lack of a clear content creation process will discourage your team from collaborating.

To avoid it, you need to reduce friction to the minimum.

1) Design a clear process: map out your processes and share them with your team.

Highlight tasks, deadlines, tools and best practices.

In the next chapter you’ll find a simple framework to help you centralise and streamline content production.

To learn more about processes, check out The Starter’s Guide to Process Automation, an ebook to help you map and automate your processes.

GET YOUR FREE COPY OF THE STARTER’S GUIDE TO PROCESS AUTOMATION

2) Centralize your strategic documents: when creating content, your team will need guidance about tone, style, formatting and the likes.

That’s what the content strategy and other strategic documents are for, and you should make sure your team has easy access to the latest, updated version thereof.

You don’t have a documented content strategy yet? We created a free tool to help you build your strategy in no time. Click the link below to gain access.

CLICK HERE TO BUILD YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY FAST AND FOR FREE

If you are running a small team, google drive will do just fine.

[box] Centralize your strategic documents using Google Drive

Create a folder “Content Marketing”
Create a subfolder “Strategic Documents”
Give view only access to your team
Share the link with everyone*

*If you use slack, create a channel Marketing and pin the link to the top.[/box]

For bigger teams, you’ll want to go for more sophisticated solutions, such as a content marketing platform.

Check out this infographic to understand if your company needs a content marketing platform.

C) Help Them Out

Writing good content is not easy and without guidance, those who decide to write may never start.

You need to help your team out.

At Contentools, for instance, we hold monthly meetings between those who collaborate to content creation and content professionals, to ask questions and share tips and best practices.

If you are just staring off, keep it simple.

Hold the meeting yourself, and share your methods, tricks and advice with your team.

This will help them get the first articles off the ground and gain the confidence that will keep them going.

How to help your team get their first piece of content off the ground Click To Tweet

Here’s a short presentation you can share with your team:

21 Tips to Write Fast and Well from Contentools

D) Celebrate The Results

Keep your team in the loop: share content performance.

This will help them understand the value of their work and motivate them to create more content.

At Contentools, for instance, we dedicate a few minutes of our all-hands meeting to share with the team how readers are engaging with our content and what pieces are performing best.

This helps everyone gain a better understanding of how content marketing works and gives them a tangible indicator of the results of their efforts.

A quick note on content performance: social shares and visitors are not always the numbers you should be looking at.

Content Performance: social shares and visitors are not always the numbers you should be looking at. #contentmarketing Click To Tweet

Content can be used to “activate” readers and leads at different stages.

Different stages equals different goals, and different goals means different KPIs (key performance indicators).

To learn more about measuring your content performance, check out this posts where growth hacker Samir Patel’s explains how to use KPIs to track your content results.

Samir also shared with us his personal Content Marketing Kit: a bundle of the tools and templates he used to scale his companies with content marketing. Click the link below to gain access.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS SAMIR’S CONTENT MARKETING KIT

STREAMLINE CONTENT CREATION WITH THESE 5 TOOLS

To maximize collaboration you need to reduce friction, and having a clear process in place is the key.

At Contentools, we use our own content marketing platform to centralize and streamline content creation.

But in the early days, when our platform was just an MVP and our team was a fraction of today’s one, we used to orgainze content creation duck taping together a few free tools.

If you are just starting off or with a small team, you’ll find it extremely helpful.

Editorial Calendar

The editorial calendar is where you keep track of deadlines, publication dates, campaigns and events.

A must have for any organization that wants to coordinate its content marketing efforts.

Here’s a step by step process to set up an editorial calendar with google calendar.

Idea Pipeline

Original ideas are the gasoline of your content marketing machine, but without a system to store, organise and manage them, most of them will get lost and never turn into content.

In the beginning, suggestions used to come from all over the place: emails, text messages, napkins…a total mess.

So we created the Idea Pipeline, a simple tool to centralise and manage content ideas coming from the entire team.

Not only you’ll have all the ideas you need in one place, but you’ll also have plenty of context about them.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE IDEA PIPELINE

Google Docs

Use google docs to create content.

The key here is a rigorous organization

[box] How to organize your content marketing in using google drive:

Create the folder “Content Marketing” in google drive
Create a subfolder “Content” Create a subfolder with {content type} / Title
Use the folder to save everything related to that piece of content: drafts, notes, images, CTAs and so on.[/box]

Content Library

Once content is sent to production, move it into the content library.

The content library is one centralised repository where you can organize and manage all your content access and make them easily accessible to your team.

Click here to access the template.

Emails

Emails used to be the core of our content marketing communication.

The two most important emails where the “Start Production” and the “Ready to Distribute”.

1 – Start Production: this is the email the person responsible for the content manager sends to get things started.

This email contains everything the writer’s needs to get the job done:

Title
Brief
Link to strategic documents: content strategy, editorial guidelines.
Link to document where to write content
Deadline
Similar articles to use as reference

This way, both the content manager and the writer have a place where everything is centralised.

2 – Ready to Distribute: this is the email the content manager sends when content has been published, and contains a link to the content.

To increase your team’s engagement with content, send the email to the writer and cc the whole team, inviting everyone to share, like or comment.

If your blog is in WordPress and you use Slack or Chatter, you can integrate them via Zapier so that when a new post is published, zapier will notify your team on slack.

As said, today we use our own content marketing platform to simplify and automate the whole process, but the tools above can help you get things off the ground.

If you’re on the fence about using a content marketing platform, check out this infographic. It’ll help you understand how a content marketing platform can help you improve your content marking.