Alexandre Gravel

Past performance and data are key low hanging fruits when evaluating how to boost and improve a content marketing program. Look at past content, how it performed, but also look at the overall landscape of your industry and what seems to work. Another point often forgotten is to look at your content operations: how is content being produced and are there contexts that would not allow your team to produce the best content possible? Some teams see a great boost in performance when looking at the processes, tools and talent involved in content production.

A misalignment between content and the established brand voice is an important problem to solve. The first step is to evaluate the content that has triggered the red flag and evaluate the reason it didn't follow tone and voice. In some cases, it can be due to the creative brief, but sometimes it can also be due to the creator who worked on the project. In the first case, it has to be evaluated if adjusting the brief to match the content strategy (thus following high level guidelines that will allow the respect of the tone and voice) can do the trick. In the other case, it might be a case of making sure that the tone and voice documentation has been relayed to the creator and that they understand how to use it.

Testing content is one of the best ways to learn, that is a given. What people sometimes forget is that being able to learn ensures that budgets are well utilized and are optimized in function of expected results. In some ways, testing allows the content team to work towards getting renewed budgets in the next budget season!

Building a good address book of resources that can lend a hand when things come under pressure is a key asset in every content team's toolbox. There are times when demand can go beyond the team's bandwidth and this is when being able to call outside help can do wonders. It can be a content agency, a production studio, or simply a freelancer or two. Your situation will dictate what is appropriate to take some weight off the team.

Communication is of course a given, but one thing that is often overlooked is communication with other stakeholders outside the content team. What we often see is content teams crumble under deadlines and pressure from demands coming from outside stakeholder in the organization. Communicating clearly (and often) on expectations, capacity, available bandwidth to other departments can do wonder in deflecting some demands, or seeing demands being adjusted per the actual possibility of the work being done right and on time by the content team. By making known the current state of the content team's planning can help create better relationships internally.

Being able to plan ahead is key to alleviate being under pressure when the time comes to managing deadlines. Of course, any content program needs to leave space for ad-hoc and last-minute content, but planning ahead will go a long way. Usually, we recommend leaving 20% of capacity to potential last minute demands and events, but this can vary a lot from one team's context to another (industry, competitor lanscape, platforms, etc.).