You know you need consistent, high-quality content to stand out from the crowd in this increasingly busy, fragmented world. But managing large content projects is complex.
You need to work with multiple stakeholders, goals, channels, budgets… and the list goes on. As ‘Brand Guardian’, it’s your job to whip the beast of competing priorities into shape. Do the job right, and you’ll turn that beast into regular, engaging, well-crafted content that delivers against everyone’s goals. Do it wrong, and you can end up with:
- content that gets planned, but never actually written… because nobody takes responsibility for making it happen and everyone’s ‘a little too busy right now’
- content that gets written, but never actually published… because so many different stakeholders want to ‘just check it first’ that it ends up buried in someone’s inbox
- content that gets published, but nobody actually reads it… because your content strategy doesn’t consider your audience’s needs and drivers
- content that gets read, but doesn’t deliver any kind of ROI… because the success metrics for it aren’t rooted in your business goals
Keeping a large content project on track is a tough job! But someone’s got to do it – and apparently, that someone is you. So how do you keep YOUR content project from running rampant in any (or all) of the ways above? Here are three ‘must-do’s to tame your large content project beast…
Of all the content projects I’ve seen in my time running an SEO Content Creation Agency, not one has been successful without a solid content strategy behind it. ‘Solid’, in this case, means the strategy needs to incorporate:
- who you’re creating the content for
- what your business wants to achieve by creating it
- what you’re already doing now that’s working
- how you’ll measure the content’s success
And without fail, that strategy needs to come before your organisation begins to even think about planning your content, let alone actually writing it.
You might have heard that everyone who’s anyone has left Facebook for Instagram these days. Or that the true gold for any business is only ever in their email list. Or that white papers are the best way to go when it comes to showing serious thought leadership.
The truth is that there’s one place and one place only to publish your content to – and that’s ‘wherever your ideal readers hang out’. So when you’re planning your content, always focus on the channels where you know your readers are. Publishing anywhere else will just create content for content’s sake.
It’s possible (albeit often hard) for organisations to run successful large content projects completely internally… IF they can bring the right team members on board. For every major content project, you’re going to need:
- A Senior Content Lead to plan and manage the project, then regularly review it to keep it on track
- Several Copywriters to research and actually write the content
- At least one Copy Editor to keep everything consistent and on-brand
- A Digital Assistant to publish the content to the appropriate channel/s and run reports on success metrics
If you have employees with the right skills (and workload capacity), there’s a reasonable chance that you can run your project successfully with them. However, many smart organisations decide to outsource some – or ALL – of these roles to a specialised SEO Content Creation Agency.
The good news is that if the idea of running a large content project is intimidating, you don’t have to do it alone. My strategic SEO Content Agency, Content Copywriting, specialises in taming large content project beasts.
To help senior marketers like you, we offer a range of content marketing services and packages for every budget.
