Building high-quality, personalized and relevant content at a high pace is one of the main concerns for businesses today. According to HubSpot, roughly 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
We all know that increasing the output of quality content has a tremendous impact on marketing efforts.
We have all got a lot of content to produce. For the majority of us, there is more to do every year.
It’s always great when that extra content generates more results. But if more content just means more stress it’s not so good.
If your content marketing program is bringing with it too much stress recently, or if it’s had a flurry of avoidable mistakes, you might be seeing the symptoms of a friction point in your content marketing system (CMS). As most marketers call it, ‘a bottleneck’.
What is a content bottleneck?
A content bottleneck happens where demand for content exceeds the capability of an organization to deliver and meet that demand in a timely manner. While that’s simply stated, the factors and circumstances making bottlenecks are many and sometimes might not even be obvious:
- Requests exceed available resources.
- Content strategy isn’t used (or isn’t sufficiently detailed).
- Content silos make collaboration difficult if not impossible.
- Multiple tools are used to manage the process.
- Content assets are not easy to find.
- Stakeholders only know their part of the process.
Solving the bottleneck of Content Marketing
Approval Bottlenecks
This is the classic bottleneck. It is particularly hard on creative teams.
Here is how it usually works: The creative teams put in overtime to make a deadline and get a finished piece to the executive’s desk. where it sits for at least a week.
After spending days under intensive pressure they send the creatives to the executive for their approval, the team gets the changes from the executive. They have to work overtime again to fix them and get the changes done and they often miss their final deadline.
None of this is good for the team as well as the business. It is terrible for the morale of the creative and design team, for starters. And the long working hours and stress of the missed deadlines make for burnout, kills creativity, and can often result in mistakes, sometimes expensive mistakes.
So what’s the solution? Typically, a company will first have a collegial talk with all parties involved in building content, including the executive. The executive will promise to do a better job at getting the approval turned around, and undoubtedly this approach might even work, for the first few weeks. But typically, you will go right back to where you were before.
A genuine solution is usually four-fold.
- You create and use a company style guide and content specifications.
- You always work from a detailed creative brief.
- You find someone the executive trusts to review the work for them.
- Make your approval and feedback system is as efficient as possible.
Build better levels of collaboration
Content development involves more than one individual in an organization. Each individual should fulfill their role in the content development and marketing project so it stays on track.
Often, though, the parties don’t necessarily understand their role or how their role affects the roles and responsibilities of others. That’s the reason why it is important to define who will be doing what, when, and plot this throughout all the stages, from the first draft to editing, approvals, and publishing.
Take the help of technology
Using one effective tool can also provide better alignment across teams and departments because everybody works on the same system. Content management platforms like Percolate empowers marketers to gain visibility into the marketing process. It also helps in improving coordination of work, and effectively build marketing campaigns and content with analytics to measure impact. Percolate also builds a coordinated buyer experience/user experience, decreases production costs, and improves marketing impact.
Percolate by Seismic is popular for its various platforms such as content management, brand and channel management, and social media management. It enables users to manage brand and channel management activities from a central location. It offers end-to-end content creation and a brand publishing platform to help users in distributing content to organic and paid social media channels. Such crucial features allow Percolate to solve the biggest bottleneck in content marketing, that is content Management.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aashish Yadav
Content Writer, Martech Cube
Aashish is currently a Content writer at Martech Cube. He is an enthusiastic and avid writer. His key region of interests include covering different aspects of technology and mixing them up with layman ideologies to pan out an interesting take. His main area of interests range from medical journals to marketing arena.