Within your company, there are individuals with a wide array of skills. There are accountants and financiers, there are managers and project leads, and there are marketers and content creators.
In this article, we’ll be concentrating on that latter group – the individuals behind the amazing, engaging content that you share across your digital channels each and every week. In order to give them a huge boost, enhance productivity and improve morale, you’ll learn some of the most important tips to get your content creators firing on all cylinders in 2020.
Sensitive Management
Those who create content are most often ‘creative’ people – and their jobs are less about consistent, dogged work that they are about harnessing flair and enjoying the blue-sky thinking that can make the remarkable happen. As such, when managing such talent, you need to be aware and sensitive of the fact that they’re not going to work in the same way as other departments.
They need time to develop ideas, and they need to be inspired in order to work at their best. As such, the first tip in this guide is simply to be patient: good things come from content creators who are given the flexibility to create on their own schedules.
Cross-Pollination
All too often, you’ll find creative teams working within companies in a desk structure that leaves all of the graphic designers in one silo, the writers in another, and the editors and social media experts across the room. This is no way to run a marketing and content creation team, as it hinders the communication that enables cross-pollination and ideas-sharing.
If possible, give your creative team a large area to work within, including presentation space and round tables for discussions, in order to boost their productivity through communication and feedback.
Digital Systems
Workers cannot create the content they’re excited to create unless they have access to the programs and materials that’ll enable them to do so. If they have to chase around the houses for a PNG image of your brand logo, for instance, they’ll simply be wasting time chasing which could be spent creating.
That’s where digital asset management systems come in. You can read online about the benefits of digital asset management for your creative team, or you can simply start a trial with a software company in order to see how it works, and how it’ll connect your workers with the content they need in no time at all – enabling faster, more efficient workflows.
Mission and Tasks
To motivate a team, they need to have in the front of their mind their daily, weekly and monthly tasks, and the back of their mind should be focused on the overall mission that your business is pursuing. It’s in this way that you’ll motivate your staff to work harder to tight deadlines, while at the same time keeping all the content you produce on-brand, striking the right tone time after time.
Often, this is simple to do with your existing workers. New workers in your content creation team should be given a lengthy onboarding period in which they learn all about your brand and its mission in order to arrive on the same page as your creative team – allowing you all to pull together in the same direction.
Using Data
Creative teams may smirk at the use of data to improve their work, but it’s a vital way in which they can learn about what’s working visually and informationally, and what’s failing to meet the mark. All creative managers should be open to this feedback loop in order to really make their marketing output as effective as possible, and frequent presentations about what the data is telling you will help show your workers how and what is working in the online space.
You can also use data for A/B testing, which will allow you to hone certain pieces of content over time to meet the expectations of your target demographics.
Optimizing Content
Finally, the sign of a well-rounded content creation team is that they’re all cognizant of the different requirements of social media, mobile media, and digital media. Optimizing content may feel like a difficult part of your creative process – and something that goes beyond what it is to create, for instance, a promotional animation – but it really matters.
In fact, it matters the most, and should be the first thing you think about when composing a new strategy. Ask yourself: who will see this piece of content, and where will it be viewed? That’ll help guarantee your content is optimized with the viewer in mind.
These tips will help you to improve your content creation and marketing teams, ensuring they’re productive and inspired for the months ahead.
