When it comes to getting business information out to the public, content is king. The primary impression a person has of a company’s services is its content. This is why it’s crucial to strengthen your organization’s content marketing efforts by adding a strategic content operations framework to the mix.
A content operations framework will give you a vantage point of everything content-related within your business and brand. With the evolving expectations in digital marketing, marketers of all stripes (inbound, outbound, social, digital, and content) are adding content operations to the list of things they need to take on. Today, a marketer’s standard to-do list now includes creating, constructing, implementing, and managing a content operations framework within their organizations – factors that content operations will stay on top of.
A content operations framework or strategy framework is an organizational roadmap primarily focused on defining, organizing, and refining a company’s existing content strategies. It is particular with the people in charge of content creation, the best techniques and processes available, measuring it, and how to showcase it.
When done right, content operations will help with the efficacy and efficiency of the processes, people, technologies, and cost in an organization’s content strategy. When a content operation framework is appropriately documented and enforced, a brand is empowered to deliver the best client experience.
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The content framework will vary for each company depending on the target audience, current maturity level, and needs. However, the most common components of the framework include:
To craft a content operations framework, begin analyzing your organization’s content maturity. Find out where you are and where your organization is going with content. Get insights from interviewing members of various groups within the organization like marketing, UX, design, and any other departments that work with content. The information gathered will help clarify your content strategies or goals and put everyone in the organization on the same page regarding the term “content.”
Once the groundwork is done, these steps will help streamline the process:
Assess what the content is and why it is necessary for your business. It is possible to see why a firm requires content through repeated experiences. Year after year, the answer becomes clearer, and organizations can confidently respond each time you are asked the “why” of content.
A creative team’s output will be the definition of a goal. What could it possibly be? Is it to attract customers, build a lifetime relationship with them, or build a quality team for your organization? Answering these questions will aid in the definition of the content goal.
Once your goal is in place, set out how your team will determine success. Remember, content assets are called assets because they possess value and contribute to business profitability. This is why you need to measure the efficacy of these assets. One way to set and track outcomes is to decide on OKRs: objectives and key results. OKRs are great for goal-setting, and they identify the overall business objective that content seeks to achieve.
With OKRs set up, you can now organize your content operations team to know how the structure looks and see who reports to whom. There are different ways to manage the structure: a centralized command-and-control approach, a decentralized-but-supported structure, or something in between. Whatever structure you choose, work within the culture of the organization.
To ensure that your content operations adhere to the goals and standards agreed upon, ensure a governance model. Ideally, someone from the C-suite presides over setting up the governance structure to get the recognition and budget it needs. Aside from this, it is recommended to have an editorial board, content committee, or editorial advisory group. This group should be comprised of representatives from the organization’s functional groups that use the content, especially those involved in creating and delivering content.
Once an organization has a governance model, it becomes imperative to streamline content processes and workflows. Streamlining involves doing the work in evaluating the ways content is created and published and who is involved in those two processes. Find out how progress is tracked and data analysis on analytics and insights. Once documented, you can now align these processes and workflows. This way, organizations can create standard operating procedures like an approval process for social content, a process for content generation, or any other workflows needed in content operations.
Finally, organizations should decide on which tools to use because tools are significant in automating the redundant processes in content operations. Decide on the best CRM tool to help the right leads for the organization. You don’t need to invest in fancy or expensive technology to support your content operations architecture. The idea is to make the process of creating content simpler.
A robust operational structure is required to support and govern the people and processes involved in developing and managing content. Since content development needs a dedicated strategy to gain the attention it needs from the audience. Choosing the right content operations framework will bring endless possibilities.