How to manage a high-performing content marketing team

30-second summary:

• What’s the difference between a regular content marketing team and a high-performing content marketing team?
• A high-performing content marketing team creates, promotes, and distributes content that helps not only their team but their business to scale. 
• Kevin Payne shows you the exact steps to build and manage your own high-performing marketing team.

There’s a difference between a regular content marketing team and a high-performing content marketing team. 

The former creates, promotes, and distributes content. The latter creates, promotes, and distributes content that helps not only their team but their business to scale. 

In this post, we’ll show you some of the exact steps you should take to manage your own high-performing marketing team. 

Eight great tips to manage a high-performing content marketing team 

1. Align your content marketing team’s goals to your business goals 

Take time to highlight the goals that your entire company has and emphasizing these with your team members. When you’re first onboarding new members when you’re meeting for new campaigns and strategies, constantly reiterate your business goals so that everyone has these at the top of their minds all the time. 

So you don’t forget to always align new campaign goals to your company’s goals, consider putting these goals somewhere you’ll always see them, like as a section in a new campaign brief or written down on a whiteboard during a strategy meeting. 

2. Equip your content marketing team with excellent collaboration tools

It’s no secret that you can’t run an effective content marketing team if you don’t equip them with the tools they need to succeed. Here’s a rundown of some of the tools your team will need: 

• Robust project management software to track campaigns, tasks, and deadlines 
• A suite of content creation tools for writing, graphic design, video editing, and the like 
• Social media scheduling and analytics software 
• Website performance and analytics tools 
• Team-centric communication tools for sending messages and doing video conferencing 

Investing in the right software services may seem like you end up shelling out a lot of money from the get-go. But statistics show that investing in software can help enhance collaboration between teams scattered across multiple locations, streamline work processes, and even offload tasks like maintaining and protecting data from your own team. 

3. Review your buyer journey

High-performing content marketing teams are able to create highly relevant content that meets their customers where they’re at so that customers are moved through the marketing funnel or flywheel effectively. 

Make it a habit to review your buyer journey as you create new content and promotions, and always ask the question, “How does this [content piece] serve my customer in this particular stage?” 

If your team doesn’t have a buyer journey yet, you can start by creating buyer personas that help you understand your customers’ goals and pain points. 

Then, you can start to create customer journey maps that highlight what your customers might be thinking or looking for when they’re in certain stages, such as

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration 

Source: Content Marketing Institute 

4. Clarify everyone’s roles 

Your content marketing team members need to have clear roles with set boundaries. While it’s not absurd to expect that everyone knows a little about each role, it’s important to make sure every person has a role to play. 

This is important for two reasons: the first reason being that by clarifying roles in your team, you can identify if there are roles with too much overlap or roles that haven’t been filled; and the second reason is you’re giving your team the space to focus on one particular goal or outcome and doing that well, instead of spreading themselves out too thinly. 

5. Invest in diverse creators with unique skill sets 

If you can afford it, you can outsource some specialized tasks to talented contractors who have a specific skill set that you’re looking for. After all, it’s more costly to work with cheap amateurs than it is to hire experienced professionals. 

For example, if you need a parody video that’s humorous, look for video teams that specialize in just that. If you need graphics delivered in a particular art style, search for illustrators with an impressive portfolio with the style you’re looking for. 

Let your team focus on tasks they work on best as well. You may have writers who are excellent in long-form content, but other writers might be more adept at writing email campaigns or social media captions. 

6. Encourage experimenting with new creative strategies

As a content marketing team, it’s important to keep on top of new creative strategies and test new ideas regularly.  

For example, can your business benefit from creating microsites – or hyper-focused sites and landing pages designed to help customers in specific stages of your buyer journey?  

This strategy in particular means buying multiple domain names and then creating dedicated sites, blogs, and content just for this purpose. As a practical example, imagine an athleisure brand launching microsites for targeted content in mountain climbing, in snowboarding, and in city cycling.  

OfficeMax launched an entertainment microsite that lets customers create fun images from their photos.

Source: ElfYourself  

7. Develop and keep a style guide

A style guide will help organize and streamline your processes from the beginning, letting your teamwork more productively and spend less time creating micro-changes to content pieces. 

In your style guide, you’ll want to include guides, templates, and styles for the following things: 

• Tone: What is the tone you use in your blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters? What words and phrases do you avoid?  
• Visual branding: What colors and fonts do you frequently use? How should logos and colors be used together? What is the hierarchy of your brand assets? What is the general style of your graphics and images? 
• Content styling: What headings and formats do you use when publishing new content? How do you cite sources within articles? How do you present images and visual data? How do you use certain words or phrases?  

Your style guide may evolve as time goes on, and that’s normal. But by creating one now, you’re able to help your team structure and create content that’s as close to publishing quality from the get-go. 

8. Regularly review campaign performance and analytics

The best content marketing teams aren’t those who can churn out new content every single day – the best teams, instead, are the ones who can churn out the right kind of content regularly. 

And there is no better way to accomplish just that when you make it a habit to review your content’s performance.  

Check how your campaigns are performing, evaluate top-performing, and low-performing content pieces. What do you think made these pieces get the results that they did? 

Encourage everyone on the team to constantly review the performance of their own work without judgment. You want to give your content marketing team the space to see where they can always do better, so treat everything – even posts and campaigns that performed poorly – as feedback. 

Key takeaways

Are you ready to take your content marketing team further? With a little time and effort, you can scale your team to help scale your content strategies and campaigns – just be sure to follow these eight essential tips to help you get there. 

Kevin Payne is a Growth & Content Marketer, Kevintpayne.com.

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