Two challenges small and medium business face with content marketing are managing workflow and creating content to publish. Here are two resources discussed in the TDS Twitter Chat on July 23, 2014.
Content creation worksheet
Using a worksheet like this one will help you focus your efforts on creating content that delivers value to your audience and keeps you on strategy.
Topic: This is the name of the project/piece of content to be created
Audience: Identify who your target audience is for the piece of content. You may have between 2-5 key audiences you need to reach. Map each piece of content to the primary concerns and functional responsibilities of this audience segment.
Objectives: What action do you need the customer to do to achieve your goal? What channel and message to you need to communicate for them to take that action?
Theme: Identify how this piece of content will support your brand message or unique selling proposition. Answer the question: “Only we …”
Type: Identify the format this piece of content will be created for. For example, will it be:
- A blog post
- A video
- A social media post
- An image or infographic
- A SlideShare presentation
Use this worksheet to reimagine pieces of content for different target audiences/needs and for different types/formats of delivering the content.
A simple editorial calendar for content planning
One client is using Google Drive as the central location for members of the marketing team to access content elements like photos, images, videos and strategy documents. We set up a simple system to use the calendar feature for assigning content creation projects and scheduling publish dates.
The month-at-a-glance view of the calendar enables you to manage workflow. Google Calendar has a color coding feature we use to identify which platform the content will be for (i.e. blog or Facebook).
You can open any calendar item to get more detail for individual projects. This tells you who is responsible for creating and publishing the content. It also describes key elements for that piece of content, such as:
- The main idea/message for the post
- The brand theme
- The target audience
- The primary audience concern it speaks to
- The call-to-action
- Other details
Keeping it simple is a key to success. You only need to have someone manage the calendar and make sure the team has access and checks it daily.
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