One thing we often see marketing teams struggle with is integrating their content team into the rest of their marketing efforts. While it’s great to produce amazing, high-quality content that brings value to your readers you’ll see most of these campaigns fall flat if you don’t take the time to make sure they are truly integrated.
Why is this so important? Content is a channel that cannot thrive in a silo, operating separately from all other channels. Beyond that, in the age of value-first marketing many channels are beginning to feel the effects of poor integration and lack of coordination between teams.
At Power Digital, we work with companies across all industries to create content that drives engagement and results. How do we do it? By making sure our content team is constantly in communication with all other channels.
Here are some tips for creating more integrated and impactful content marketing campaigns.
Turn Your Content Team Into Cross-Channel Strategists
Investing in cross-channel training for your content team is pivotal to the success of your campaigns. At the end of the day, someone has to be responsible for making sure your content is 100% integrated with each channel. If everyone is working in their own silos you’ll find tons of things are slipping through the cracks and opportunities are being missed at every corner.
Related: The Importance of Content Marketing – How to Create an Integrated Campaign
At Power Digital, our content team is packed with cross-channel strategists who understand where their content comes into play across each channel. Sure, you want them to work directly with channel specialist but they need to truly understand how their work can complement the channel in order to deliver the correct details and tweak their own strategy. I’ve seen plenty of situations where team members assume the other knows why they are doing something. The key takeaway here is that strategy is not always obvious and you can’t assume team members know what to do with the article or infographic you just sent them.
If the idea of training each member of your content team to be cross-channel beasts scares you, remember this: it’s not that content marketers need to completely lead the strategy from A-to-Z. They just need do need to know the right questions to ask to make sure they are creating high-quality content that is truly effective.
Take The Time To Communicate
With content being at the core of integrated campaigns your content team should be communicating with their team to make sure everything in production has a strong promotion plan. If content isn’t being promoted properly, then you will have little luck in determining what is most effective, driving the most traffic, conversions, etc. So, when should you be soliciting opinions on which content you should produce? The answer, before you even begin brainstorming ideas.
This may sound backwards but one of the biggest pitfalls of marketing campaigns are a lack of open and clear communication. While we’ve all been in meetings that could have been emails, it’s important to take the time and connect your content team with key players on other teams. There is nothing worse than churning out content that has little impact due to it’s lack of true integration. Invest the time now and it will pay off in dividends later.
Consult The (Channel) Experts
While I’ve mentioned that being cross-channel savvy is an excellent quality of a content marketer there is nothing more important than leveraging the knowledge of those around you. The last thing you want to do is fail to get the opinions of people who live and breathe email, SEO, or Facebook advertising. Moral of the story here is, use your resources!
Related: Building an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy
For example, when working on content to support SEO, the first thing we do when starting a content calendar is consult the SEO Strategist working on the account to determine what content would provide the most value to them. Same thing with content we promote via social advertising or email. We meet with the strategist and make sure each piece of content we produce is serving a purpose.
Key Tips
- Work in the drive – live Google docs are easier to share and maintain.
- Keep people in the loop – we use Asana to manage tasks and will add key team members as followers.
- Don’t be afraid to meet – efficiency is great but you never want your campaigns to suffer because your team is too busy to sync up in person.
- Invest in cross-channel training – whether it’s trainings from channel experts at your company or online resources such as Digital Marketer. Good training doesn’t have to break the bank.
The biggest takeaway here is that your content team is the perfect group to lead the charge when it comes to integration. When they open the communication floodgates and leverage their resources the magic happens!