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Instruments to Monitor and Enhance Your Content material Advertising and marketing Workforce Productiveness

Working on improving productivity is at the heart of many businesses these days.

With most digital marketing teams working from home (and many companies intend to continue working that way), improving and tracking the productivity of their remote teams is critical.

This is especially challenging for content marketing teams, as they have so many micro-tasks to do on a daily basis that coordination is nearly impossible.

Content marketing is incredibly diverse, which makes it incredibly difficult to stay in control.

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/Source: inboundjunction.com

It can get worse with your content marketing team members working in isolation from home, trying to deal with dozens of destruction.

How do you monitor and improve the productivity of your content marketing team?

Here are some ideas:

Content brainstorming

Personally, I find myself a lot less inspired working from home because of all the constant distractions. If you have children and are trying to write something with them around you, you probably know what I am talking about.

Brainstorming interesting content topics and adding them to my editorial schedule is something I struggle with, especially when there is no weekly quota to meet.

I've found that working together is very helpful here. It's easy to feel stuck working in isolation. Therefore, the daily cooperation with employees helps on both fronts:

  • Overcoming feelings of isolation (which helps with motivation)
  • Exchange ideas (which encourages brainstorming new content)

To achieve both, we maintain a daily schedule of 15 minute meetings where we meet every morning to discuss our editorial calendar and share new ideas for content and upcoming projects based on upcoming holidays or identified opportunities.

Google Meet is a great free way to arrange this, especially if you're using other Google services like Google Calendar. You can create a recurring (daily) event on your Google Calendar that is hard to miss.

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Quality content creation

Whether you outsource content creation or do everything in-house, content creation has always been a challenge to scale and evaluate.

Indeed, how do you ensure high quality content creation when "content quality" is such a short-lived concept?

How do you translate “content quality” into measurable terms?

There are few clear guidelines that can be measured and monitored:

  • number of words
  • Readability
  • Use and distribution of sub-headings
  • List usage

The Yoast plugin for WordPress will help you keep track of all of this so that you (or your authors) can be held accountable:

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/While I wouldn't pay too much attention to the transitional words metric, all of the other points here are pretty much applicable

But are they enough to judge the quality of the content?

How can you encourage your remote writers to dig deeper into each topic, create highly relevant content, and use different vocabulary?

I've found Text Optimizer is a great way to encourage your content team and remote writers to go one step further as they work on any content asset.

The whole tool needs to know if your target keyword is and from there:

  • It will use semantic analysis to develop related concepts and topics (to get your author to research and include more of them in the copy).
  • When the content is written, the tool analyzes it, rates its wording and completeness, and gives guidelines for improving your score:

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/TextOptimizer's minimum score of 70 or more significantly improves the quality and depth of your company's content

The creation of multimedia and interactive content has become an essential part of the creation of content. So it's also a good idea to support your team with image and video content tools that don't require additional skills or training.

Renderforest is my latest discovery and it does the job well. It is web-based and is therefore perfect for cross-team collaboration and sharing:

  • No need to download any software
  • All assets are stored under a practical dashboard

What's more, it's versatile, giving you simple yet effective tools for creating videos, branding images, and even mockups.

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/Simply select a template that suits your needs, edit and label it, and you've created your asset and saved it for further use

Content editing

Editing of content is essential to maintaining consistent quality in terms of branded channels. To better organize this process, I'll try to keep the following routine:

  • In a company there is always one person who can publish content. This is the editor that does the final review before hitting the publish button. The editor never writes content. He / she is our content manager who oversees the calendar, makes sure everything is done on time, proofreads the final copy and evaluates the author's work.
  • Content authors submit articles for review in Google Docs, which provide free workflow tools that the publisher / manager can use to provide feedback, request changes, and more.

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You can keep the whole process in WordPress too. There are some powerful proofreading plugins available for both writers and editors to get a well-revised copy before going live.

Share content

I've seen this too often: every other company or digital publication produces more content than they can afford the time to advertise.

Most of the time it happens like this:

  • A company's decision maker knows / has heard that every website needs to publish content on a regular basis
  • This is what everyone in the company is focused on: the mere fact that a new article is published on the website is enough to keep everyone happy.

In fact, I always tend to go to the "Promotion over Publish" strategy, where you don't publish anything new until you do your best to promote the latest article.

At the very least, these steps should be taken before the team moves on to the new asset:

  • Share on branded social media channels, including social media bookmark platforms like Flipboard and Tumblr
  • Add the URL to Viral Content Bee to generate more approvals
  • Schedule some recurring tweets for these URLs so they'll keep showing up in your feed. MavSocial's MavRepeater is a great way to achieve this quickly and easily
  • Make some basic email contacts to get bloggers and journalists to see your article. Don't use the same list again, however: encourage your team to find new contacts every time.

As you spy on your competitors and how they broadcast their content, you may get many more ideas to add to the checklist.

Content outreach

Speaking of email reach, it's often a neglected step in content marketing, which is a shame.

In fact, the vast majority of blog posts (94%) have no external links. As a result, around 90% of the content receives 0 hits from Google.

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Do you know what this means?

Approximately 90% of that work that you (or your team) put into brainstorming, researching, and writing articles for your website has been to no avail.

Most of this content is stored in your blog archive to avoid getting clicks in the future.

In my experience, the most effective way to ensure that most of the content on your website has at least some organic visibility is to have at least some external links pointing to most of your pages.

And the best way to get natural links is to reach out to those who are interested in the topic and can actually create links.

That's why I always add outreach to my content marketing to-do list.

You don't have to email hundreds of bloggers, but it's a good habit to spend at least an hour or two contacting them.

If you outsource this task, you will use tools to monitor the activities of your outreach team. EmailAnalytics is probably the easiest, most affordable option, provided your team is using Gmail or G Suite.

The tool generates daily reports that you can use to determine if your team is actively reaching niche bloggers and journalists, including the number of emails sent and received, the most active and slowest days, average response time, and more.

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Content monitoring

Finally, it makes sense to keep your writing team updated on how the content works. Not only does this help increase an author's motivation (see the real impact of their articles), it also enables your team to make more informed decisions about content planning for the future.

Finteza is the perfect platform that anyone in a company can use to monitor website traffic and conversions without the need for special training. It is easy to use and yet offers detailed insight, especially when it comes to monitoring events and actions.

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/Example: With Finteza you can see how your website users interact with your newly created copy of About-us. Looks like it used a lot of clicks!

With a little tweaking, you might be able to use Google Analytics as well.

If you prefer to keep as much as possible on your website rather than having to manage a lot of tools and logins, there are a number of ways to create custom dashboards right in WordPress that include web analytics.

Takeaways

Content marketing is not easy to organize, especially if your team is away from home and works from home. Use the following tips to keep everyone motivated and productive:

  • Set up 15-minute meetings every day using Google Meet and recurring events in Google Calendar. Use these quick meetings to discuss upcoming projects and develop new ideas for content.
  • Use the Text Optimizer to ensure consistent content quality and encourage your team to rate the copy at least a 70
  • Establish a two-step process for editing content, always with an editor review before anything goes live. Google Docs is great for this as they offer free tools for the writing workflow
  • Create a content sharing checklist to ensure that each article is well shared. At a minimum, make sure that every content asset is shared on all branded social media channels (including smaller ones) and sent to Viral Content Bee for further approval
  • Add email reach to your content marketing checklist. Keep an eye on how actively (and regularly) your team is reaching bloggers and industry influencers with EmailAnalytics
  • Consider engaging your team in monitoring your website analytics so they can identify the most popular / least popular and engaging campaigns and plan additional resources accordingly. It's very easy with Finteza