Content is one of the pillars of modern digital marketing. Among many benefits, it helps businesses get to the top of search results, build organic traffic, and increase brand awareness.
Besides, content marketing has a great ROI. Recently, Optinmonster referenced a case study by Tiger Fitness. The company managed to get a 60% returning customer rate after implementing its video marketing strategy.
There’s no wonder why content marketing has so many success stories like this. But these stories are not just about making creative content that blows the minds of your customers. It’s also about smart project management that lays the foundation of every successful content marketing strategy.
Today, we will take a look at how to strengthen this foundation and make your content marketing efforts more effective and coherent. Here are a few essential steps to improve your content marketing project management.
Create a Project Outline
The process of creating and developing content will quickly turn into chaos is you don’t have a proper project plan set out.
A project plan is a formal document that includes all the steps and helps you execute and control all the objectives to reach the final goal.
The idea here is to make the content development chaos a bit more organized and to give your project management team a sense of direction.
With this goal in mind, you need to consider the following essential elements of a good project plan outline:
Set goals based on your stakeholder’s needs.
Whether it’s your followers, clients, sponsors, or partners, make sure their opinion is the foundation of your content marketing project plan. If you have too many opinions, and it’s hard to prioritize, you can use Eisenhower’s Decision Metrics to select project goals based on urgency and importance:
Define clear and fair deadlines
Use evidence when setting the project timeline. For instance, it would be unreasonable to try to boost organic traffic through SEO within a week. Employ data from your sources and your competitors to make sure your deadlines are realistic.
Assign responsibilities and create a schedule for everyone involved
A good project plan outline should contain a detailed section, in which you describe and distribute roles responsible for different tasks. It should also contain a personal schedule for every employee involved in a project that holds them accountable for reporting on time.
One more important element of a project plan is a breakdown of costs. If you don’t have an outline for all the expenses, your content marketing strategy will quickly get out of hand.
Make sure the outline for your project plan includes the means for monitoring all the expenses and cases when your project might need additional investments.
Use Project Management Software
Tracking all the processes that your project management plan involves will be much easier if you use respective software solutions.
Project management software can help you plan, organize, manage, and control your progress. It collects data in real-time, which you can share with your project management team and make the necessary adjustments.
This software also comes in handy if you outsource content development to paper writing services or collaborate with influencers. Through it, they can also receive immediate updates on what needs to be changed to make sure that content meets your needs.
How to find good project management software?
Here are a few characteristics you need to keep in mind:
● Real-time reports. For a content strategy, it is important to have a regularly updated visualization of data. It helps understand the performance of your content better and see all the gaps that you need to fix.
● Scope management tool. A good project management tool should make it easy for you to assign and monitor tasks as well as track the overall progress.
● Scheduling and time-tracking. You already know that to make your content marketing project management more organized, you and your team need to follow the deadlines strictly. A good project management software should allow you to set reminders for your team to make sure all the tasks are ready on time.
The best part about employing project management software is that it lets you keep all the data in one place and access it easily at any time. With a system of integrations, you will be able to collect and analyze data from any platform to which you upload your content.
See our preferred list of Project Management Tools
Put an Emphasis on Data
Let’s talk a bit more about the role of data in content marketing project management.
Data-driven marketing is nothing new to the business world. Thanks to big data analysis, companies today can run more targeted marketing campaigns that cater to the needs of their target audience.
Recommended Reading: The Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
Besides, many companies already confirm that data has changed the way they implement their marketing strategies. Diana Adjadj, a writer and researcher at TrustMyPaper says:
“According to our recent poll, as much as 30% of brands confirm that data has influenced all business processes, including marketing. “
Content marketing is not an exception. Data can play a defining role in which vector your content strategy will take, and data-based content marketing campaigns have more opportunities to succeed because they are more audience-oriented.
Let’s consider the following example of how data can impact content marketing project management.
If your company has a decent number of followers on social media, they have already shared some feedback with you. This feedback comes in the form of social data, which, among many other benefits, can give you a hint, which content your audience likes to see from you.
Here’s how the report on audience feedback looks like on Facebook:
Using this data, you can create an entire content strategy based on the likes and preferences of your audience. Social data also can help you define the demographics of your target audience, and study its behaviors, improving your overall content marketing project management.
Recommended Reading: 8 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Online Presence
Over to You
Content is kind. It can bring your company so many benefits, from organic traffic to brand exposure. However, if you don’t keep your content marketing project management organized, your entire content strategy will fall apart.
If you don’t want to let that happen, make sure your content marketing project management strategy follows a detailed plan, with strict deadlines and assigned responsibilities.
Apart from that, you need to continuously track the progress to see if your content strategy is underperforming in any way.
Lastly, when managing your content strategy, rely on data. It will help you objectively assess your strategy and focus your content on your audience and its needs.
Using a project management tool will make sure you keep on track 🛤