We previously looked at using Organimi to structure your sales teams. Now, let’s look at using Organimi to design your content marketing team structure. Content marketing is more complicated than most people realize. There’s a lot that goes into building an audience. To an outsider, it may seem like great content just requires a solid writer with a WordPress account, but the truth is that there are many cogs turning at once in an effective content marketing machine. Your content marketing team structure should depend on your company’s resources and workflows that you plan on following with each.
Most companies struggle to get their content marketing off of the ground. They often hire a writer or have someone handle the articles internally, post them on their blog, then sit back and wait for the traffic to start rolling in. Most never see more than a few visitors and end up putting their publishing on the back-burner. It’s too bad, because neglecting content marketing is a huge mistake that negatively impacts any business in the long-term.
Content marketing is only becoming more popular with each passing year. Just take a look at this chart of the largest digital marketing priorities in 2017:
Marketers are prioritizing content marketing and social media marketing above all other digital marketing channels. Why? Because it has shown to be an effective way to build relationships with your customers and prospects while expanding your audience.
A lack of published content means that your company is missing out on the chance to have a wealth of content to use in the process of nurturing prospects, rank for highly sought after keywords in the long-term, and grow their standing within their industry.
But, with great benefits comes a tough road with lots of competition. Publishing great content is easy. Publishing great content that actually gets noticed is hard. Before you start publishing content, it’s imperative that you put together a plan, get organized, and map out who will be handling all of the different aspects of publishing great content.
Here’s one example of how a company can use Organimi to map out their internal content marketing team structure, using the “Assembly Line” method:
In this example, we break down the team into different steps, using the “Department” option when adding a new step along your content marketing workflow:
Each “Department” represents a different step in the content production process. The steps in our example include:
- Strategy, Brainstorming, and Idea Generation
- Scheduling and Assigning
- Writing & Content Creation
- Editing & Polishing
- Approval, Scheduling, and Publishing
By breaking your team down into a task-based structure, it’s easy to create a visualization of the team and the process that you use to produce your content. A content marketing team can be quite large, with as many as 10 people having input on each article in some organizations. It’s important that you have a well-planned content marketing team structure to make adding new team members as easy as possible.
Let’s examine our example content marketing workflow:
Strategy, and Idea Generation
Great content comes from great strategy. Having a plan and direction for your blog and related content helps to bring the entire team together around a singular focus. However, it is important to remember that strategy is not the same as idea generation. Idea generation begins once you have your larger strategy in place.
Ultimately, your content marketing strategy should draw its inspiration from your customer personas. Those are the people that you want to make content for. The more narrowly focused your audience is, the easier it will be for you to draw in new readers. However, a narrowly focused content strategy also limits your ceiling, so it is best to find a balance between the two.
Scheduling and Assigning
Once you have your direction set in stone and some topic ideas laid out, you then have to decide when you want to publish each piece of content, as well as who within your team will be handling the writing. Often, the same people that handle your strategy will be overseeing the scheduling and assigning of each piece.
A great content strategy isn’t just about finding great topics. The best content marketers focus on building a larger narrative through each piece. You want each piece of content that you publish to be one small part of a larger story that you are trying to tell. Even unrelated subjects should feed this larger narrative, even if it is in a small way.
Writing & Content Creation
The most important roles in any content production team is the writers, designers, and editors. Ultimately, they are the ones responsible for creating the content, even if it goes through significant editing before it is published on your blog. Small writing teams usually consist of at least 2-3 writers, while big teams may consist of dozens.
Here’s the “Writing and Content Creation” task on our Organimi chart:
Having a list of all of your available content creators — whether they are writers, graphic designers, video editors, etc. — is very helpful for the people that are leading your content team. Having the options spelled out in front of them can make assigning and scheduling much easier. Additionally, Organimi is an excellent choice for companies that plan on growing their content marketing efforts, due to the fact that each chart can be edited as you add new team members.
Editing & Publishing
All content must go through an editing process before it is ready to be published. In fact, some companies put each piece through several editors to ensure that they are getting the best possible result. It’s the last step in the process before you schedule the piece of content to go live.
Great editing can mean the difference between a forgettable article and one that gets thousands of social shares. Editors aren’t just there to proofread — they are responsible for examining the structure of the article and making changes that help to drive the main points home to the reader.
Ideally, you should have your writer’s work directly with the editor so that you can bring them more in line with your house style over time. A great editor will help writers to reach their potential.
Designing Content Marketing Team Structure with Organimi
Organimi is an high-value tool for content marketing teams. Because of the nature of content marketing — with writers, editors, and designers often working off-site on a freelance basis — content marketing teams are often growing or shrinking. It is important that you are not only able to visually map out the structure of your internal content team, but also have a chart that is easy to understand for each team member.
If you are interested in using Organimi to chart your content marketing team structure, sign up for the new Organimi Version 5 today!