At Black Sun, many of our clients struggle to create consistent, high-quality content that captivates the right audience and engages them over time. There could be several reasons for this:
Whatever the obstacles to producing and publishing valuable, timely content, effective planning and governance can help. Not only can it help you strengthen your brand and market position by exposing your audience to unique brand messaging, but it can also help increase your domain authority, and ultimately, attract attention and enhance engagement.
It’s all about ensuring internal alignment and consistency across the organisation. We see it as a four-step process that starts with gathering insights on your audience’s interests and aligning your team on your content goals and objectives. We then recommend a peer review and gap analysis to help identify opportunities to differentiate from your peers.
From there it’s about determining the right mix of themes, topics, formats and channels that caters to your audience needs and business objectives. Once you’ve homed in on all of this, create a publishing calendar that everyone can work to. The calendar ensures the right content goes to the right channel at the right time.
Content governance, on the other hand, is all about creating tools and processes that support consistency and efficiency – from editorial guidelines and workflows to roles and responsibilities.
Setting your team is the first and most important step of content governance. Your team could include content creators and publishers, content managers, geographical or functional contributors and subject matter experts – to help you ensure truly unique, value-driven content. Maybe it also includes salespeople, or those with intimate knowledge of your target audiences.
Ensure everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities – and engage them in a way that excites them. Content development should be a fun and creative process. Encourage your team to bring the skills and knowledge they are most passionate about. That will keep them engaged and productive over the long haul.
A great place to start is with a content planning workshop. Gather the team and align everyone on audience interests, content opportunities and business objectives. You can brainstorm on themes and topics and define the format and channel mix together. You can even collaborate on creating governance guidelines. It’s a great way to kick off a fun, effective content planning process.
Get in touch with Toni McKee, Stakeholder Engagement Director [email protected]
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