Business team discussing strategy
You might have one million tech tools at your fingertips, but all of them appear to be veering off in numerous directions. You realize you can be taking more advantage of AI and automation to hurry up your research, evaluation, workflows and content creation. But with no refined content strategy, you’re afraid you’ll just find yourself doing all of the incorrect things rather a lot faster.
Technology will be a terrific approach to get your message out, however it requires human content experts to offer the main target. Listed below are 3 ways to hurry up your content production while staying efficient and on message.
1. Hire or Partner With Top Content Talent
Any solid content strategy starts with engaging top talent. You would like writers who understand your brand and might develop the precise plan of attack. If you’ve got the budget, hiring an in-house content team has its benefits. You might have more oversight and might work directly along with your team to show deliverables around faster. Content creators can meet with departments like marketing and design to develop unified concepts or bounce around ideas.
Hiring contract employees will be cheaper, especially in case your content needs are relatively limited. But working directly with freelancers brings on additional workload your team won’t be equipped to take care of. Someone could have to source and vet talent, provide guidance and, after all, take care of invoices. For every freelancer you’re taking on, you’re adding additional relationship management tasks. You’re also giving them access to the corporate’s secret sauce—sharing data, files and messaging that may otherwise stay internal.
Many corporations discover a pleased medium by working with specialized content agencies that may screen and hire talent to create content in your behalf. They’ll also work along with your team to develop a bespoke content strategy that meets your organizational goals. It’s less hands-on than having your individual content team, but you continue to get loads of opportunities to supply feedback and request changes.
2. Audit and Optimize Your Content
When you’ve decided how your content team should operate, it’s time for a content audit. The team can evaluate all of your existing content—webpages, blog posts, social media, case studies, videos—and flag anything that needs a refresh. Once they determine what areas are lacking, they’ll find a way to define focus areas for generating latest content. Using tools like Ahrefs or BuzzSumo, the team can assess keyword usage and other metrics that will affect your search traffic.
After the audit, an excellent content team will develop a technique that works best in your brand and budget. Before jumping in to fill in any gaps, they’ll determine which changes will produce essentially the most ROI. For instance, perhaps your website is already filled with great content, but your audit data shows nobody is reading it. As a substitute of investing in freelance talent to generate more posts, you can deal with tweaking your internal linking practices. Then, when you’ve driven your web traffic up, you’ll be able to budget for brand spanking new pieces.
Effective content auditing and strategy enable your team to prioritize updates and additions so as of urgency and effectiveness. They will determine which pieces need a lightweight edit and link update, which have to be rewritten and which must be retired. Since they’ll work on essentially the most crucial projects first, it is best to begin to see results instantly.
3. Craft and Refine Your Style Guide
Whatever form your content team takes, you would like an up-to-date company style guide that documents your organization’s standards for writing and formatting documents. These standards keep your tone and elegance consistent, lending credibility to your brand. Readers can trust that they’re getting expert advice from a uniform, authoritative voice.
Initially, an excellent style guide should define which of the major style manuals writers should depend on for general reference. Then it should list any major deviations in spelling, grammar or style rules that the corporate uses. Next, it should list any commonly used words or phrases that is perhaps written in multiple ways. For instance, the guide should let content teams know whether to write down “Covid-19,” “COVID-19,” or “the coronavirus.” Finally, it should include instructions on tone, corresponding to the degree of ritual or whether or not to make use of first-person statements.
A mode guide isn’t only a stodgy grammarian’s tool. It’s a approach to give your organization a cohesive brand identity, no matter who’s writing your content. A mode guide saves time by giving content creators a document to show to with questions, thereby avoiding unnecessary feedback loops. Whether the majority of your content is written by freelancers or an internal team, a mode guide can resolve discrepancies and help them use a unified voice.
Voice, Vision and Values
So many strategies and tools exist to assist your brand establish and transmit its voice. But at the tip of the day, great content must align along with your company’s vision and values. Keep your messaging consistent with the promise your brand has all the time offered to prospects and customers. Remind your reader why they keep coming back to your brand and connect with its mission. Tech tools could make processes faster, but only human authenticity and engagement will elicit true brand loyalty.
