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Steps to Manage Content Marketing Effectively

A person takes notes on a desk; view from above

Managing content marketing effectively means mastering logistics. You need clearly defined goals, a streamlined workflow, the ability to communicate with a team, and the drive to create unique content for your customers. To help your team manage content marketing, follow these steps and heed this advice: 

  1. Developing a content marketing strategy 

A content marketing strategy is a roadmap that helps your brand plan, create, publish, distribute, and measure content. Your strategy should be written and shareable, to ensure each member of the team can review it before each campaign. 

Your strategy should include: 

  • Goals and KPIs to measure the goals
  • Defined target audience
  • Audit your current content
  • Identify the types of content you plan to create
  • Content creation plan
  • Content distribution plan
  • Content measurement plan
  1. Create a content calendar and assign roles

Content production is a process of its own. You may have multiple people involved in each piece, including a writer, designer, and editor, and you’ll likely have more than one piece of content in production at a time. You need to keep track of specific dates and be able to track where each piece of content is in the process. 

As a result, you need a content calendar to stay as organized as possible. Consider using project management software with a calendar to help your team complete content efficiently. (More on effective tools in a bit).

  1. Implementing a content creation process

Using project management software can help you implement a content creation process. When you start, host a group meeting, explain the workflow, and introduce everyone to the software. 

Your process won’t be perfect initially, but you’ll work out the kinks as you go. 

  1. Establishing a content distribution plan

Once content is approved, how do you plan to get it into the hands of customers? Identify a workflow for finished content. For example, it could be shared on social channels and included in your monthly newsletter. Special content, like an e-book, could be used in social ads.  

Tools for Managing Content Marketing 

Since content marketing involves a lot of components and people, it’s best to use content marketing tools. While it may take some time to implement them, the benefits of using these tools include: 

  • Streamlining your process
  • Coordinating content with multiple people
  • Identifying problems quickly 
  • Spotting gaps in your content 
  • Staying on budget
  • Creating a calendar of content
  • Helping to optimize content
  • Aiding in ideation 

Popular content marketing management tools

Consider these tools to aid in your content marketing efforts:

SEMRUSH

Best known for: SEO optimization

Semrush has many tools to help you brainstorm topic ideas, identify keywords, build content briefs for writers, and provide in-depth reports on your content and its search engine rankings. 

Hubspot Blog Generator

Best known for: Providing content ideas

It’s not easy to come up with content ideas for your brand, so turn to Hubspot’s Blog 

Generator. You enter a product description, keyword, or industry, and it provides ideas that you can use or refine. 

Monday.com

Best known for: Project management

If you plan to create content regularly with a team of creators, you need a way to track each piece. Project management software like Monday.com can help. You can create individualized dashboards for creators, send messages, set deadlines, change the status of each piece of content, and use a content calendar.

Monitoring and measuring content marketing success 

As with any marketing effort, you must measure your efforts to ensure success. Each campaign should have its own set of goals and KPIs listed before it’s launched, which means you already know which metrics to watch for after a campaign is completed. 

The importance of monitoring and measuring campaigns can’t be understated. Content marketing is a big investment, so you must ensure you’re spending time – and money – wisely. Track your stats, compare campaigns, and make adjustments based on the data. 

KPIs to measure content marketing success

Wondering which KPIs are typically tracked? Content marketers often focus on three goals: increasing sales, driving engagement, and boosting visibility. Each of these goals has a set of KPIs to watch. 

Sales and conversions

If you’re trying to measure how much profit stemmed from a content marketing campaign, you can monitor the following KPIs:

  • Conversion rates
  • ROI
  • Sales

Engagement 

To quantify how well your content engages with your audience, consider watching these stats:

  • Follower count growth
  • Engagement rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Likes, shares, comments
  • @mentions

Visibility 

How many customers saw your content? If you’d like to review visibility statistics, check on these numbers:

  • Organic website traffic
  • Impressions
  • Views

How to use data to improve content marketing efforts

You can mine your data for valuable insights. While there’s an infinite number of ways to use data to refine your content, here are several common efforts among content marketers:

Use your most popular posts to inform additional content and format

Take a look at your most popular pieces of content and explore two things: Keywords and format. Are there specific keywords or topics that your audience seems more interested in? If so, use that to guide your next brainstorming session. 

Pay attention to how the content is structured, too. Are listicles most popular? Infographics? Use your metrics to inform new topics and formats. 

Use traffic sources or referrals to lean into preferred channels

Using analytics, you can see how website visitors get to your content. Where are yours coming from? Metics show followers coming from links shared on X. If you see this as a consistent theme, you can amplify your content distribution on that channel. 

Look at bounce rates and low-performing content to eliminate poor ROI

If visitors bounce or aren’t showing interest in content, it’s helpful to know. While you might not be pleased to see these dreary scores, they can tell you what not to do. 

Tips for effective content marketing management 

Once your workflow is up and running, your priorities shift to management. How do you keep your content marketing train on its tracks? Here are a few content marketing management tips:

  • Maintain consistency in content creation and distribution 
  • Regularly review and update the content strategy 
  • Encourage collaboration and communication within the team 
  • Look for ways to improve your workflow
  • Spend time investigating the best ways to identify and utilize keywords
  • Stay updated on content marketing trends and best practices

Case studies of successful content marketing management 

Interested in seeing successful content marketing in the real world? Take a look at these examples:

Salesforce: Informs its customers

Salesforce, a popular CRM, has a blog full of relatable topics for its audience, but an article meant to draw new customers is pinned to the top. The post “What is Salesforce?” offers an in-depth look at what the software can do, its benefits, and how companies use the platform. 

You Suck at Cooking Videos: Educates while entertains

You Suck at Cooking is a popular cooking channel on YouTube. Subscribers follow along with the recipes and get a solid dose of humor as they watch. This Chicken Tinga Taco recipe, for example, shows people how to make the dish while the presenter makes jokes about expired spices and the number of peppers that can fit in a can. 

GoPro: Embraces adventure

GoPro sells lightweight, easy-to-use cameras, but if you look at its social channel, you’ll see the brand focuses more on the adventures its customers take than it does on its physical product. This clip of the world’s first triple base jump, for example, is a great example of the brand highlighting the lifestyle that its product can capture.  

Common challenges in managing content marketing and how to overcome them 

Every marketer faces hurdles. Here are the most shared content marketing challenges and potential solutions:

Dealing with limited resources 

If your brand needs more staff or skills to manage content marketing, consider bringing in external help. Contentmarketing.com, for example, provides fully managed content production services and can help your team scale its content efforts easily.  

Managing content overload 

Customers often feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of content they come in contact with every day. As a result, it might take a lot of work to get your content in front of them. To combat content overload, meet your customers where they are. Using metrics, identify where your customers hang out online and push your content through those channels. 

Break your content down into smaller “teaser” pieces, too. Share a 15-second snippet of a video, for example, that draws customers in and leads those interested to a full-length version. 

Ensuring content quality and relevance 

Over time, it’s easy to let quality or relevance slip a bit. To make sure you stay on task, review your content strategy as a team once a quarter, work with new creators to hone their skills, and ensure the approval process is rigorous. 

Measuring content marketing ROI

Many marketers find it difficult to quantify ROI. Some platforms may help you crunch the numbers, but if you want to do it old school, here’s the formula: 

(Return – cost/cost) x 100

If, for example, your return is $20,000 and your cost is $10,000, you plug it into the formula to see that for every $1 spent, you earned $1.  

Content marketing takes time, effort, and money, but if you invest in this long-term strategy and manage it properly, it can provide a worthy ROI.