Make your content team contented through content strategy

When you don’t have a useful content strategy you can get problems with your content team morale.

A good content strategy has positive outcomes for your organisation. It should always start with purpose – what your organisation needs to achieve through content.

Decide on goals to avoid content ‘firefighting’

You need a clear goal and plan for your content. Otherwise it’s easy for your content team to get into constant problems.

For example, without clear goals, your website, social media and emails can end up:

• missing out information essential to users
• causing confusion for users by duplicating or overlapping
• not working together to create an effective user experience

Poor quality content work and content team frustration can go hand-in-hand. 

Content teams can end up reactively ‘firefighting’. Firefighting is where a content team battles against an endless tide of content requests with no clear vision of the goal.

A good content strategy will help improve morale and performance by:

• establishing clear objectives
• clearly defining objectives
• providing useful resources
• encouraging collaboration
• providing regular feedback

Establish clear objectives

Your team can feel directionless if they don’t have clear goals and objectives to concentrate on.

Make decisions about key performance indicators (KPIs). Indicators of performance might include page views or conversion rates.

Include these in your content strategy so that you can measure content performance to see if it’s meeting goals.

Define roles clearly

Confusion and frustration can arise when it’s not clear to people what they have to do.

Team members need to know what their responsibilities are when they create and manage content.

Give your team roles and responsibilities that reflect how you plan to achieve your strategic goals. 

For example, this can include:

• who’s responsible for the facts
• who’s responsible for editorial quality
• when content is ready for publication

You should also provide training opportunities to help your team’s skills and roles grow.

Give your team useful resources

Using the right tools, software and know-how are vital for producing high-quality content.

Make sure you start with identifying needs before you buy any new technology or systems.

Measuring content performance will be key to decisions about improving or changing your strategy.

Find out more about choosing great tools for measuring content performance.

Get everyone collaborating

Content creators can feel isolated and disconnected from the rest of your organisation.

Usually, this happens because your organisation may have departments that operate in silos.

You can foster a more collaborative environment by encouraging regular meetings and workshops with people across your organisation.

For example, you might have 15-minute daily ‘stand-ups’ with your content team to see what people are working on and surface any problems.

You might also use a ‘retrospective’ every week or two weeks to see how content work is going and improve ways of working.

Provide regular feedback

Regular feedback from editors and subject matter experts can avoid help you avoid confusion and low morale in your team.

Creating a conversation through regular feedback builds working relationships. For example, talking about whether content is working for users can create common understandings and agreement on next steps.

You can use your content management system (CMS) to make feedback and effective conversations easier. For example, by using Gathercontent or Drupal, you can create a clear structure for where, when, and how people discuss content.

Always remember to provide constructive feedback and use regular team updates. This will stimulate conversation about how to keep your content effective.

Be agile with your content strategy

An ineffective content strategy can lead to wasted efforts and poor results.

Review and adapt your content strategy in line with your organisation’s goals. Being agile enough to evolve your strategy in an everchanging world allows you to make best use of time and effort.

You’ll also need to continually balance workloads and prioritise tasks.

Consider outsourcing or automating certain processes such as performance analysis.

This will help you:

• reduce your team’s workload
• ensure a healthier work-life balance

Give your staff opportunities to grow

Help team members grow in their roles and feel a sense of progress with:

• training
• mentorship
• opportunities for skill development

Use internal feedback about how your content team is working to identify where people can improve their skills to keep meeting needs.

Get in touch to get a content strategy that works for your team and organisation.