6 Easy Steps to Setting Up a Content Marketing Studio
Have you been wondering how some brands are so prudent and proactive with their content creation & marketing strategies while others are not? You may even think how something that’s happening on live TV causes brands to tweet about it minutes later and is it possible for you too to have a Content Marketing Studio like that?
One of the most effective ways to create, deliver, and distribute quality content across all the target channels is through a content workplace. People are consuming content at an incredible rate. During such times, a content workplace is among one of the most favourite hacks of marketers to keep their creative assets organized. With a content workplace, brands can be a step ahead with their content marketing and deliverance strategies and can also assure that their designing team is working effectively and efficiently. The content distribution team can then promote the well-articulated pieces of content through email marketing software and other syndication methods.
What Are Content Workplaces?
Content workplaces, simply put, are a collection of assets that a brand always has on hand to boost its digital marketing endeavours. Having the content workplaces is a useful strategy for ready-to-go content strategists. The workplaces often have logos, colour cheat sheets, pre-graphics with changeable text, landing page templates, and much more. There can just never be a wrong asset to manage in the content workplaces as long as it fits your brand and can easily be edited for quick publishing. Such a digital marketing agency with a workplace can then easily distribute their best content organically through search engine marketing services and can also run paid promotions through email marketing and through search engines as well. Such a workplace can thus contribute to developing the full-service spectrum of content for brand awareness. This digital strategy helps boost organic traffic and can be used by an SEO agency to reap the long-term rewards by adopting a data-driven approach.
Telling the creative story of your brand through several forms of content such as videos, blog articles, photos, galleries, etc. is among one of the best ways for content marketing agencies and brands in general to capture the attention of the audiences. Executing such marketing campaigns takes strategic planning, with easy access to marketing assets created by a content marketing agency or by anyone with a workplace.
All these assets should be easily accessible to anyone who is a part of your agile marketing team. Many of your marketing team members might be working remotely now; however, with the content workplaces created thanks to software like Adobe Creative Cloud, your in-house content repository will be accessible to all the marketing team members of your agile team, at all the times. The privacy policy of the end users though must be taken care of while storing data on the cloud, this can be done by ensuring proper encryption, authorization, and accessibility of the personal data.
Why Set Up a Content Workplace?
If you need to be proactive with your content marketing & creation strategy, you need to pump out a lot of content. This will be much like walking on a treadmill that is constantly speeding. During such a situation, it’s effortless to go off-track, and that’s where the role of the workplaces for content marketing gets critical. With these, the marketers can pull pictures, snippets of text, or video clicks together instantly. All these assets have already been approved by the brand.
The modern content marketing strategy needs to take both the quality and quantity in stride. Gone are the days when the marketers used to toggle between either quality or bulk content creation. Modern customers require both quality content and surplus content around their pain points. During such a situation, brands need to be at their toes for content creation, publishing, distribution, and promotions. Creating polished, elevated, and SEO-optimized content is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity in modern times. With an agile content strategy backed up by the content workplaces, the content marketers can perfectly go on to the sprints over the treadmills without being much bothered about whether things will fall in place or not.
What the Content Workplaces Can Create?
The content workplaces have all the building blocks that are needed to aid your content writing endeavours and for creating content assets that are SEO optimized. These basic building blocks can be mixed and matched and put together in several arrangements, proportions, and configurations for creating content including all major types of high-quality content assets such as the following:
- Programmatic Display Ads
- Paid Video Content for Social Media Marketing
- Organic Video Content for Social Media
- Audio Content / Podcast
- SEO Blog Posts
- Search engine optimization
- Video Production
- Case Studies
- Web Graphics or Web Design graphics
- “Snackable” organic social content
- Blog or Email Graphics
- Banner Ads
- Landing Pages
- Infographics
- Blog/email graphics
Depending on the purpose of their content creation, a business can create either one or multiple types of content from the ones listed above. The business must also decide what will make their brand stand out with design work and will allow them to go the extra mile.
Steps to Creating the Content Workplaces
Marketers must follow the six easy steps to get started with their own in-house content workplace to boost their business strategies:
1. Discovery
Marketers must jolt down to plan before springing the same into action for their business to prosper. They need to introspect what their brands need more of and what assets do they already have on hand that they need to store.
They must be observant of the types of assets that they have at their hands based on what the brands need more of, less of, and what assets the marketers already have hands-on. The marketers also need to be mindful of where the data should be stored. The content strategy should always be aligned to the specific areas of interest of the target audience groups. The actual way to content creation beings with cluster analysis followed by placing the target audience groups into specific clusters, based on their likes, dislikes, orientations, and inclinations.
Those with gaps in the content may start filling them up with a feasible content strategy. Marketers must leverage items they already have or that they may discover to speak effectively to their target audience groups.
The most important thing that the marketers need to do at this step is identifying the key assets that must be created or gathered into the communal space. This step needs to consider the process of video creation and distribution. Video in particular can take a long time to be produced. Having the ingredients from the content workplace at their disposal also helps marketers to go a long way towards producing an effective and engaging video clip. Creating a solid video with an effective conversion line is much easier with a standard set form repositories from the content workplaces.
Yet another advantage that comes with a content repository is the creation and editing of certain graphics like logo applications, type styles, or product images. Marketers must be creating photo and video templates that can be easily edited and reused. The focus of agile content marketers must always be on creating things that are easy to be created and must be easily dropped into Adobe Premiere Pro or Rush to quickly change out text or imagery. The most important thing one should do at this stage is to identify the key assets that one needs to create or gather into one communal space.
2. Production
At this step, the list generated in step 1 is taken into action. Marketers may have to go out of their way to go as far as shooting a large piece of video content that can mitigate their needs for future content requirements. Producing a video from the scratch may take a long time. Having standard branded videos and outros for videos is a way for marketers to stay consistent and pull together a video content strategy with a solid message.
After the video, if one hasn’t already created or edited certain graphics like logo applications, type styles, or product images, one can do this at this stage. Then the videos and photo templates can be easily edited and reused. Marketers need to prepare something that they can drop into Rush or Adobe Premiere Pro and can quickly change out text or imagery.
3. Asset Gathering
Marketers must invite all the assets that they want in their content workplace over a soirée (they may ask the assets they already produced in step 2 to handle food and decorations). The goal of this stage is to get everything in one place, i.e., a shared Adobe Library or other cloud storage platform.
Marketers can also use Canva to store certain photo-based templates. One of the most important tips to remember here is naming conventions. Everyone’s brain works differently, and therefore the content marketers need to establish a folder structure and file naming system in advance to avoid confusion later on.
4. Empower Everyone in Your Team with the Sharing Capabilities
Marketers must share the asset gallery they created with everyone within their team. Nobody should get left behind here. Marketers, therefore, recommend sending out a follow-up announcement or email to ensure that people who wanted an invitation to the cloud got one.
5. Document Your Usage
Marketers must create a usage style guide detailing how to properly use the assets that they’ve tucked away. This is a brand style guide as it provides the marketers with the dos and don’ts of their content. For example, marketers can specify that the font size on certain templates should always remain the same. Marketers also must have a certain amount of flexibility with their organic social graphics and can mix and match to innovate. This is basically a rulebook for your content workplace.Content can also be stored in the content workplace cloud for easy access.
6. Iteration and Reiteration
Content workplace, much like every other marketing platform can’t be like a ‘set-it and forget it’ strategy. Marketers must pre-define a set interval of time before they can revisit their content workplace library and should give it a fresh kick-start. The marketing assets should be updated and relevant and anything missing should be added continuously to the cloud.
This process of iteration & reiteration must be done at least on a quarterly basis. The check-in frequency of your content workplace depends primarily on the shelf life of your campaigns. The marketers who switch campaigns every month should be updating their content workplace more often. Marketers must always take a stock of their workplace after a huge rebranding or big campaign change.
How Long It Typically Takes to Set Up a Content Workplace?
Companies normally build their content workplace either all at once or over a while. Each of the approaches has its pros and cons.
Going all-in ensures that a significant amount of the content marketing effort of marketers is aimed at developing a robust, all-inclusive content library. A digital marketing agency must identify all the pieces they need and should decide when to invest time and funds into creating everything aligned with their marketing strategy immediately. Marketers can then have it for the rest of the calendar year and into the future.
On the downside, it literally takes a lot of effort to right upfront to generate everything, and this can be an expensive affair for your marketing team. Furthermore, some mid-market companies might be lacking the internal resources or budget required to conduct these marketing endeavours, especially along with their day-to-day activities. All these things piled up may cause the sales representatives to miss out on their chances to expedite the conversions as they can fail to engage with the right buyers with the right content marketing strategies at the right time.
According to Salesforce, 76% of sales representatives say that having the skill to engage a prospect at just the right time has a significant impact on the chance of a conversion.
The alternative approach is more of a slow and steady approach. It allows the marketers to organize all their assets, identify gaps and then as time allows, start to generate more content. By using the past product photography and imagery used in previous campaigns, marketers can create some templates that they can reuse, and they must continue to generate it all as the year goes on. The pro side of that is there’s less effort and expenses involved right upfront. That’s spread out across the whole year and therefore nobody continues to break their budget on Q1. The downside is that marketers might not have enough content to meet their needs straight way.
There also is often a hybrid approach where the marketers can bring a third party to generate the beginnings of their content workplace and then can give you the keys and all the assets that you leverage throughout the year. Together, marketers can build on the inventory on a continuous basis.
Wrap Up
A content strategy is much more than just a “nice-to-have” option; it’s a “must-have” option for marketers. A marketing agency must be thinking of this strategy as something that can be established to help their marketers get started with something they might be thinking of now if they haven’t already.
As Lori Wizdo of Forrester puts it, “It’s no longer about attracting and persuading, it’s really about engaging buyers and helping them throughout their journey;” and with a content workplace, the marketers can do just that.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales report the lack of knowledge of a buyer’s needs is a “deal killer;” and as such it gets quite handy for content marketers when all of their content stacks are present on a single repository, i.e., content workplace.
Demand for content is exponentially accelerating in a post-pandemic era and the marketers want both quality and quantity to be delivered. Smart companies must start steaming their assets for more efficient production.
With Valasys Media, you can boost your content engagement and conversions. Being among the top-notch B2B Media Publishers in the B2B space, we ensure that your content gets the visibility that it deserves. We also have an array of other B2B services to suffice your diverse marketing & sales needs. You just name a problem, and we will give you the latest solution hacks to optimize your bottom line endeavours. For more details, feel free to get in touch, and we would love to help.
