Getting your content team to execute your content strategy and achieve your marketing goals is not a stroll in the park. Especially if your content team is remote or if your company is small.
Sometimes you feel your team is going in the wrong direction. However, putting them on the right track looks daunting. Other times you feel your team is not executing your ideas the way they should. You may also feel your content velocity is not where you want it to be.
After reading the 10 tips in this guide, you’d know exactly how to steer your team in the right direction, get them to bring your ideas to life, consistently, and add some nitro boost to your content velocity.
Let’s dive in.
1. Become a Librarian
Document like your business depends on it. Because it does.
Here are five things you should document:
- Your content marketing goals and strategy
- Your writing style, tone and brand voice
- Your content writing process (researching, writing, editing, SEO, and publishing)
Here are five ways documentation will help steer your team in the right direction and help you move faster:
Documentation,
- Helps you onboard new hires faster and get them writing the way you want them to
- Helps your team write uniformly so your readers will have a consistent experience
- Ensures your team is working towards the same goals
- Reduce the guesswork and boilerplates and helps your team focus on what matters most
So document. Document. Document.
Organize your documents in folders, or use software tools like Notion, Slite, and Airtable to organize and share them with your team.
2. Talk Like Winston Churchill
Master how to share new ideas and get buy-in from your team.
Especially if your team is small and remote, you may be changing work processes consistently. This kind of consistent change can affect your team’s morale. But you need them in their best state of mind to spit out valuable content consistently.
To do this successfully, you need to master how to get your team to understand what you want and agree to work with you.
Here are five tips to help you persuade like Winston Churchill:
- Do not force new ideas on your team
- Discuss new ideas with your team and get buy-in before rolling it out
- Build your charisma and communication skills
- Understand your team’s psychology and the best way to get a yes from them
With this, you’d build a team that is consistently pumped to work.
3. Avoid Hostage Situations
Eliminate people-centric systems.
When a team member is sick or leaves the company a people-centric system holds you, hostage, till the person returns or you get the perfect replacement. For a small company, this can mean lots of hours of useful work lost because one person left the team or is indisposed.
Instead of building your work system around people, build it around processes and steps. Steps and processes that anyone can follow. This way, you can easily replace anybody who leaves the team with another person and ensures continuity of work.
4. Become a Content Gatekeeper
Consistently review your team’s work and provide feedback.
Reviewing your team’s work and providing feedback will enable your team to produce in both quality and quantity. Also, it will help you ensure your team’s output is in line with your content goals and style.
Work reviews can be video reviews, consistently commenting on content and getting your team to make changes before rolling them out.
This is where most team leads get it wrong. They get discouraged by how long reviews will take and prefer to ship content without reviews. This shouldn’t be you. Prioritize consistent reviews and documentation of best practices.
The time you spend reviewing today is the time saved in putting out fires tomorrow.
5. Think Like a General
Master the art of planning.
Especially for a small team with limited resources. You need to plan your months and weeks so you can prioritize the stuff that matters.
Without laying out plans on how to achieve your goals, you may spread your team too thin across activities that do not contribute to your bottom line.
Planning every step you take helps you to know where your team is headed, and how you’re faring towards achieving your goals.
6. Avoid This Hiring Mistake
Don’t hire just based on work philosophy. Also, hire for professional skills.
Most team leads hire based on just good work philosophies. Then they spend an enormous amount of time training the new hire. While there is nothing wrong with training new employees, it may begin to slow your team down if you have to train every employee your hire from scratch.
If your company is small, this can affect how fast you start making an impact with content.
In addition to that, who you hire should be based on your marketing plan and who you need to achieve your marketing goals. Not gut feeling, or the next big role in the market.
Put your candidate through tests to understand what they’re made of. This will enable you to hire team members that will onboard fast and stay for a long time.
Also read: The 5 Simple Steps to Build a Remote Content Team That Rocks
7. Take Double Looks at Shiny Objects
Don’t be too eager to jump on the next flashy content marketing idea you see. Always, put shiny ideas and tactics on the back-burner.
If you use LinkedIn actively, you’d agree there is no shortage of new ideas and the best new tactics in the market. But be wary of shiny new ideas. That may just be all they are. Shiny.
When you find a new tactic in the market, instead of asking your team to start executing it immediately, run it through some checks. Is the tactic a fit for your unique business needs, audience, goals, and budget? If not, you can put it on the back-burner.
It’s always tempting to execute or try every new tactic you find out there. If you do this, you may just be running a lab, not a content team.
8. Build Your Content Funnel in the Opposite Direction
Start from the bottom of the funnel and build up.
Traditionally, you’d start from the top of the funnel where you have lots of traffic and lots of high volume keywords (if you do SEO). But what your business needs is not traffic, it’s customers and revenue.
Starting from the bottom enables you to pluck low hanging fruits. In addition to that, it helps you to build a content engine that smoothly moves traffic from the top of the funnel to the bottom.
Also read: How to Optimize Your Customer Acquisition Funnel
9. Put Round Pegs in Round Holes
Use the right and easy to understand tools.
Using complicated tools and processes can waste your team’s time in trying to understand it — time that could rather be spent working on content.
Use simple project management and collaboration tools to work with your team. Build simple and easy to understand processes. This enables your team to carve out more time to work faster and better on content projects.
Also read: 10+ Free Content Marketing Tools For Small Businesses
10. Avoid This Rookie Mistake
Learn like your business depends on it. Because it does.
While you should be wary of shiny objects, you should be warier about working with worn-out and expired tactics and ideas.
Learning consistently helps you to refine your work process and strategy to help you achieve your goals.
Also read: 9 Blogs Every Content Marketer Needs to Know
Learn more
There you have it. 10 powerful tips to help you manage a content team.
Getting your team to consistently produce valuable content is not easy. But with the tips shared in this guide and consistent effort, you’d be on your way to building a content team that rocks.
If you’re putting a new team together, check out my article on how to build a remote content team that rocks. Also, check out my blog for more cool and useful free tools and resources to up your content game.
