How to improve the efficiency of your Content Marketing campaigns

Marketing companies worldwide are now embracing content strategies as cornerstones of communication strategy. Their aim is to impact target audiences through the generation of content. And they are not misguided – studies are proving that good content is more effective than traditional advertising.

The picture gets murkier when we start measuring efficiency in terms of cost vs return on investment. At this point, many brands harbor doubts in the face of a stark reality – making content is not cheap. This is especially true when striving for quality content. Good content is labor-intensive.

Beyond the cost of generating the content itself are the associated costs. Agencies need managers, strategists, creative people, writers, designers, and others to get all their bases covered.

While it might seem that the cost of content output in a given company is low and the process can be kept simple, once we start factoring in a larger number of channels and the amount of content entailed for each, things get complicated. In many cases, the process becomes chaotic and cost/time ineffective.

What can be done?

To streamline processes you need a methodology with tools that enable efficient management while also reducing the work-time for team members.

Simple, right? Well, not quite. Defining a truly agile process is not always easy. Besides the actual process, you need the right tools to accomplish it. And, after choosing the right tools, you need to make sure they are set up to map the whole process.

So, if you want to improve the efficiency of your content generation, you need to first address the Process and, secondly, the Tools. Let’s dig deeper into both.

The Process

On the subject of content generation, there are as many processes as companies working on just that. This said, there are some basic principles applicable to all.

• Roles: Before defining a content generation process, you should have a clear picture of what each team member is going to do. In other words, specific roles, and tasks. Usually, working with “Full stacks” that oversee everything – Management, Strategy, Creativity, Writing, Measurement Technology, etc. – is inefficient.
• Assets: The two main assets are the briefings and the content itself: texts, images, videos, etc. Take a step back and think about how you manage those briefings and corresponding content in your company. If we asked managers, most of them would probably mention emails, shared folders or, at best, spreadsheets to keep track. Again, as the content volume increases, defining this process precisely will prevent many pitfalls.
• Workflow: The assets of a content process (Briefings and Content) usually move along a process of definition, creation, review, and approval. We call this the “Content Workflow.” Defining a content workflow that is both agile and robust is one of fundamental aspects to ensure the success of content campaigns.

The Tools

It is increasingly common for brands and marketing agencies to use project management tools. Some, like MS Project, are more “traditional”, while others, like Asana or Trello, are more “next-gen.”

What most platforms have in common is a functional gap regarding content generation – they are simply not designed to approach it from the ground up –  which explains why marketing professionals find their proposals baffling and/or, at best,  irrelevant for their needs.

As content marketers ourselves, we were unable to find a platform that addressed and met needs: How to manage hundreds of tasks within dozens of projects while also delivering quality content?

And that is how the story of Contegy began.

We designed a tailor-made platform that handles the specifics of our needs, such as Buyer Persona, Customer Journey, Briefing, Channels, Content, and others, natively.

A platform that enables us to implement all the processes mentioned earlier, and move on to achieve the much-sought efficacy in content generation campaigns.

If you feel the need for a better tool to handle your content marketing processes, you can arrange a personal online demo. 30-day free trial is also available to test Contegy using your own content. Click on this link to get started. And let us know what you think!